Here’s how to establish expertise: If you can explain someone’s problems better than they can explain it themselves, you are an expert.
You have authority.
You have trust.
You have influence.
Here’s an example: Imagine that you’ve been feeling tired, weak, achy joints.
You can explain the general feeling to the doctor…but you’re unsure of what exactly the ailment is.
This may just be an unpleasant side effect of aging, you think.
The doctor listens intently.
Then tells you the problem: it’s inflammation.
Doc offers more specifics to the pain you’re feeling: weakened joints. Pressure on the body. General discomfort.
Yes!
All of a sudden, the doctor has established their expertise–they have explained the problem in such detail to capture the visceral pain better than you could.
You will buy whatever they offer to address the problem.
This is exactly the approach that Kettle & Fire take:
Learn what the problems are.
Explain the root cause to customers.
Establish trust and expertise.
Sell the solution.
Here’s how they do it with a quiz….
The Background
Kettle & Fire launched in 2015, as the first shelf stable 100% grass-fed beef bone broth. It’s grown into a category leader–selling both online direct-to-consumer, and available in Whole Foods, Target, and others.
(Here’s an interesting story of how Co-Founder Justin Mares tested, and validated, the product idea for $100 in paid ads. He needed to confirm two things to validate it: How many people want the product, and will they spend enough to sustain a meaningful business?).
Revenues are not disclosed, but the last confirmed numbers are that Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto (both co-founded by Mares) did a combined $100M in revenue in 2019. Super impressive.
The Quiz Strategy
The quiz is the first step that visitors to Kettle & Fire are guided to, at the top of the homepage:
And for those learning about the brand, and bone broth in general, the quiz is the first step:
It’s the start of the customer journey for visitors to the Kettle & Fire site.
Though bone broth is perhaps a meal as old as humankind, it’s a relatively new food category to the modern consumer.
So the quiz helps K&F learn about the customer’s experience with bone broth, with Kettle & Fire, and with their health goals and challenges.
Let’s start with the opportunities for improvement with the quiz.
The Bad
Follow up with Email: There is no follow up email after the quiz, even though they have just captured our email, our attention, and our purchase intent. Not sending an email immediately after the quiz is a large missed opportunity. It’s like a salesperson getting invited to pitch, but turning down meeting after meeting.
This is an opportune time to tell me more about how inflammation is so detrimental…..and what my solution should be–buy Kettle & Fire!
This could be at least $15k in monthly revenue lost!
Here’s the quick back-of-the-napkin math:
154k monthly visitors (per Similar Web):
And assume 10% of visitors take the quiz, and opt in…that’s 15k new leads per month.
How many of these leads would convert in a Welcome Flow after the quiz?
Klaviyo has industry benchmarks, based on the type of flow, and industry. Super interesting data. For Kettle & Fire’s niche of Food & Beverage, it’d be a 2.41% conversion rate:
And if we assume an Average Order Value of $50 per order (that’s a 4 pack of 32 oz broths)….
That would be $15,000 in email revenue per month.
But that’s just the value of the first order.
How many orders do they make over their lifetime?
Whatever the assumption, this is a big opportunity for K&F.
The takeaway: it can take just one Klaviyo welcome flow, and change them dynamically on their challenges and goals.
But to make things simple, there are already landing pages for the three types of problems that K&F addresses: Immunity Support, Anti-inflammation, and Weight Management.
Fully Own the Brand Experience: The brand experience is a key differentiator for consumers today. Kettle & Fire works hard, and spends a lot of ad money, to get customers to the site and the quiz. So why let Typeform insert itself into the conversation?!
The best tools are those that take a backseat in the conversation. The customer, and brand experience is so important. Don’t allow for other brands to take up mind space (or worse yet, take your customer).
See that “Powered by Typeform”? Click it, and you are no longer in the Kettle & Fire quiz. That’s a leaky web page.
Ask for a phone number — brands are driving a significant amount of revenue with SMS messages. Kettle & Fire use Klaviyo — use SMS for replenishment emails. New flavor drops. Abandoned cart texts. Why not ask for a phone number in the quiz? (Note: in the checkout process, there is a phone number field).
The Good
Understand the Customer Intent: How important is health and wellness? This question helps inform what their positioning should be — the keto-friendly aspect? Convenience? Taste? No caffeine crash? Their facebook ads communicate each benefit. And with the quiz data, K&F can position accordingly to website visitors.
Design A Product Page to ConvertThe Product Page — The page highlights the problems that you have — joint pain, sore muscles, inflammation. It twists the knife a bit — “discomfort can hit anyone – at any time”. And offers a solution. This is classic PAS Framework — Problem, Agitation, Solution.
Product Hierarchy to improve AOV – When it comes to merchandising the products, the goal is to get the customer to purchase more expensive products, and thus increase average order value.
And as a customer, it makes more financial sense as well — if I buy one product, it’s basically a 100% shipping fee. That just doesn’t make sense, may as well buy enough to get free shipping.
Understand What’s Driving Brand Awareness
Sure, you can look at Google Analytics and learn about your traffic sources. But sometimes it helps to cross-reference that with feedback directly from visitors.
After they capture an email (important that it’s after the email opt in, in case visitors bounce), they ask the classic “how did you hear about us”:
The Kettle & Fire quiz follows a simple framework that I am just thinking through: Capture, Categorize, Convert.
Capture — capture the contact info (email) and customer data (goals, preferences, interests)
Categorize – categorize the customer into the type of problems they experience. And categorize the solution.
Convert — Get the sale. On site, with the optimized check out page. And via email and SMS.
Kettle & Fire is a great product, and brand.
The quiz helps them understand the problems that their customers experience.
And armed with information about the customer, they become the authority when they lay out the problems, and solutions, that customers experience.