eCommerce marketing has changed forever.
There are 4 huge shifts at play:
- Customers expect a Personalized Experience. Your product and messaging must be tailored to their needs, hopes, and goals.
- Competition is more fierce than ever. Your customers have never had more alternatives. Any less-than-stellar interaction could mean losing a customer forever.
- Customer Acquisition is more expensive than ever. What worked with paid ads and customer acquisition just a few years ago is not as cost-effective now. This eats into profits.
- Data-driven marketing is becoming more powerful. Segmenting your audience into tightly knit groups allows your to market more effectively, improving relevancy, timing, and targeting.
The best eCommerce brands all use one marketing tool in light of these shifts: the interactive quiz.
Quizzes capture the future of marketing for ecommerce brands: interactive, educational, and fun–they instill trust with customers, gather critical data that customers willingly share, and ultimately guide shoppers to the perfect product that they actually want to purchase.
The result:
Higher conversion rate.
More leads.
Higher average order value.
All corroborated by data, like this Salesforce study of 150 million shoppers.
Below is are some examples of how the most powerful Direct-To-Consumer brands leverage quizzes.
Additionally, there is a list of how 50+ ecommerce brands use quizzes, along with analysis and commentary.
Use Case #1: Product Recommendation
What’s the best way to convert a visitor?
By providing exactly what they want?
And how do you find out what they want?
Ask.
But in an engaging and fun way that identifies their needs.
The quiz is therefore your best salesperson–ask relevant questions to better understand your shopper’s needs, and guide them to the perfect product.
Warby Parker sells prescription eyeglasses and sunglasses. Finding the right pair of glasses is notoriously difficult, even when done in person and you can try the glasses in front of a mirror. Buying them online? Infinitely more difficult.
Warby Parker does a masterful job guiding users through 8 simple questions, and providing a set of recommended products based on the quiz answers:
Care/of is a subscription supplement company. There are a wide range of products that offered, but shoppers must complete the quiz in order to receive a recommended product. In a short and fun interaction, I had personalized recommendation based on my needs and the clinical data that Care/of has collected:
Gainful sells protein powder tailored to an individual’s body. The quiz is a necessary step in order to create a protein blend for customers. The questions get progressively more detailed, and result in a personalized product for myself:
Use Case #2: Product Education
Nothing builds trust, and a relationship, faster than education. And not even just education about your specific product, but the problem that your customers are facing.
Interactive quizzes are a unique opportunity to educate shoppers as they engage and answer questions.
You can educate about the problem at large, and how your product addresses these problems. Noom does a good job of doing this, while also instilling credibility that they have helped 33,000 people like me–men in their 30s:
Or specific to the problem that your product solves. Third Love does this, sharing where people go wrong in purchasing bras. However, instead of only stating the problem, ThirdLove makes a subtle pitch by stating that they have the solution to the problem:
Trade Coffee, a subscription coffee brand, includes educational notes with every question. This educates shoppers, as well as instills trust, because they are positioned to see Trade as experts in the thing that they sell: coffee.
Use Case #3: Lead Qualification
A quiz is an effective tool to qualify a shopper. This can apply in the traditional sense of evaluating the purchase intent of a customer. However, health-related products have a different threshold, and more variables, to consider when qualifying a lead.
For example, Smile Direct Club has a 30-second Smile Assessment. As an orthodontics company, Smile Direct Club needs to confirm via quiz that there is in fact a fit with the shopper’s goals and orthodontic history:
Audicus–which sells hearing aids–is only helpful for customers with a certain background. Audicus uses the quiz to identify whether their product is a fit:
And erectile dysfunction company Giddy funnels visitors to identify their specific needs and assesses fit based on the answers:
Use Case #4: Fit Finder
Closely related to a product recommendation, “Fit Finder” quizzes help shoppers identify the perfect product and size. Narrowing down to match the shopper with the right product is a critical step to ensuring customer satisfaction.
Lululemon has quizzes for helping visitors narrow down the search for the perfect bra size:
Titleist helps users find the perfect golf ball based on skill, playing style, and personal preference:
Andie sells luxury swimwear for women. Finding the ideal fit is a delicate balance between body dimensions, comfort, preference, and style. Andie offers a free phone call consultation with a Fit Expert. However, the more scalable and cost-effective option is ushering shoppers to the self-guided quiz to identify their perfect suit:
Use Case #5: Lead Generation
You can place the email opt in form anywhere in the quiz–beginning, middle, or end. Ideally the company creates a compelling value proposition, so that quiz takers are excited to add an email address.
In addition to building an email list by capturing contact information, leads provide user preferences, interests, and goals that can inform future marketing communication.
Scentbird, a subscription fragrance company, captures contact information before users begin the quiz:
Native deodorants takes a unique approach by personalizing the product and shopping experience. Upon entering a name and email, the quiz taker then sees their own name on the product, which is a subtle yet powerful way to build an emotional connection between the product and shopper:
Similarly, hair care company Prose uses the quiz to capture leads, while simultaneously guiding users to build their own customized haircare products based on their needs and routine:
The Future Of Ecommerce
eCommerce is going to continue to boom, a trend that has accelerated even more in light of COVID-19.
However, online shoppers are more discerning than ever. Thu, ecommerce brands must provide significant value in exchange for the right to market to consumers.
The reason for this is the Law of Shitty Click Throughs: Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates. Email open rates have declined over the years. Click through rates on ads have plummeted. The novelty of a new marketing tactic fades, and performance erodes.
However, what will never go out of style is solving your customers needs.
And quizzes create a platform for brands to have a dialogue. An interactive conversation, an exchange of value, and the basis of a relationship.
Interested in driving up conversion rates, Average Order Value, and your audience with a quiz?
We are currently building an interactive quiz builder for Shopify stores, enter your email to be notified of when we launch:
Here are a bunch of other top Direct-To-Consumer brands that use quizzes as a cornerstone of their marketing strategy: