Personalization is crucial in connecting with leads and turning them into customers, helping you improve conversion rate optimization (CRO).
The personalized experience extends to ecommerce product recommendations, which is where a product recommendation quiz can help.
In this blog post, Justin Kevalaitis, CRO Specialist, will jump into product quizzes and how you can use them to provide highly personalized recommendations that your customers will love.
What You’ll Learn
- What is a Product Quiz?
- Benefits of Product Quizzes
- How to Make a Product Recommendation Quiz
- 5 Product Recommendation Best Practices
- Product Recommendation Quiz Examples
My Expert Opinion on Product Quizzes
In the ecommerce space, you must guide your customers to the right products for them, and you must do it efficiently.
Enter the product recommendation quiz, which can be the key to engaging leads and directing them to the products they’ll love. Ultimately, a product quiz is potentially one of the most effective tools to personalize the customer experience and boost your CRO.
They are especially helpful for complex products and services where the differences between the products aren’t generally intuitive to the average consumer. One example I see often is with electric vehicle charging devices. These charging devices aren’t something your average consumer has an understanding of since there is low exposure to them before owning an EV.
Action Item: If you sell a variety of products or features that might appeal to different audiences with different wants and needs, use product recommendation quizzes to ensure your customers find the offerings they want from the start of their interaction with your brand.
What is a Product Quiz?
Generally, most ecommerce brands can benefit from offering a product quiz to their customers. However, certain brands benefit more than others if they offer a variety of products that connect with different audience segments.
In short, if you have many products or a range of customizable features, or if you have similar products that can be challenging to differentiate because of their similarities, product quizzes are worth implementing.
Why Do You Need Product Quizzes?
I can’t stress enough the importance of using a product quiz when the product is generally not something the average consumer has experience with. Any product with a somewhat difficult learning curve for understanding will benefit from using a product quiz.
You should also use product quizzes to simplify education. Teaching consumers about what your product is and telling them about what problem it solves is time-consuming.
By using product quizzes you can tell the consumer exactly what product is right for them based on their personal answers. This helps decrease the time consumers take to educate themselves.
Product quizzes can collect zero-party data that you can use to further personalize your marketing materials to continue engaging with leads and customers.
By asking about personal information and interests, you’ll be able to more effectively segment your audiences and tailor the customer experience to each segment.
The following are some examples of industries that are better off using product quizzes to personalize recommendations:
- Personal Care: Do you sell personal care products like hygiene or skincare solutions? Different customers may have very different needs based on everything from their skin type to their daily routine. Product quizzes can help connect customers with the right personal care products and even detail the proper order to use them.
- Cosmetics: Brands in this space can use product quizzes to ask about color preferences, skin tones and sensitivity, and the overall look that customers are going for to ensure they find the best cosmetics products and combinations.
- Pet Foods: Pet owners want to be sure that they get the products best suited to their pets’ preferences and needs. They might need food for different types of pets, have pets with specific health issues that demand a certain diet, or need certain supplements that are right for their pets, all of which can factor into a product recommendation quiz.
- Furniture and Decor: Customers in this industry may want different styles, be it contemporary, rustic, or another look. They may also have certain space restrictions that require them to find furniture with the right dimensions. We can all bond over the fact that we need sleep – so a product quiz for a mattress will help you select the right one based on your sleep preferences: hot vs cold, firm vs. hot, etc.
7 Benefits of Product Quizzes
There are many advantages of using product quizzes to personalize recommendations for your customers.
Some specific benefits include:
1. Increased Conversions
One of the main arguments for implementing product recommendation quizzes is the ability to boost conversions through highly personalized recommendations. You won’t leave your customers to browse your catalog on their own when you can lead them right to the perfect product at the start of their journey.
2. More Repeat Sales
Not only will you be able to boost conversions, but you can also encourage more customers to come back. If customers are happy with their initial recommendation, they’ll be more inclined to return and make more purchases, increasing the average customer lifetime value (LTV).
3. Better Engagement
Product quizzes can also increase overall engagement among your customers. Just consider the fact that gamification can increase user engagement by as much as 100-150%, and gamification is primarily how product quizzes work.
4. Build Your Contact Lists
Grow your email and SMS lists by asking for an email or phone number when gatekeeping your product quizzes. Once people submit this information, they can proceed with the quiz.
5. Segment Your Audience More Effectively
Collecting information from your customers through zero-party data and actionable insights allows you to segment your audiences into different groups. Based on these segments and their unique personas, you can tailor your marketing to reach more effectively through personalization.
6. Automate Sales
Product quizzes also function to some degree as live representatives that guide new customers in the right direction. As such, you won’t need to rely as much on live chat and sales teams as you simplify the sales process.
7. Sell Complex Products More Easily
Product recommendation quizzes are particularly helpful when selling complex products comprising multiple variable components and features. They’re also ideal for products with many potential use cases and audiences or products that customers will want to research before buying.
How to Make a Product Recommendation Quiz
Want to create a product quiz of your own? The process entails the following basic steps:
1. Choose a Product and Target Audience for Promotion
Begin by selecting a specific product you want to push along with a target audience for that product.
In some cases, you might choose a single product within a single category or select several categories to promote. For example, a skincare brand might promote various toners and lotions.
However, product quizzes shouldn’t always be focused on promoting a single product. They are focused on finding the right product/service based on the criteria/needs the user expresses in the quiz.
You can frame this as creating a quiz for just one of your many product categories, but let’s not state that you’re using this to promote a specific product.
2. Build the Quiz Structure
The next step is to structure your quiz to get results. Here, you’ll want to develop different sentences or questions that bring people closer to the right product.
You might first ask the customer to submit a name and basic contact info, add them to your contact list, and then ask questions that pertain to their taste and requirements.
You can ask questions about:
- Issues they are currently experiencing
- Goals they’re trying to achieve through the use of one of your products/services
- How they intend to use your products/services
- Their budget
- What features are most important to them
You can then provide customers with specific product recommendations based on their selections. Ensure you have a sentence or two that summarizes the results, followed by a sentence that introduces the customer to the recommended products.
3. Launch the Quiz
With your products and audience chosen and your quiz optimally structured, it’s time to publicize it.
Like any other type of marketing effort, you can run an A/B test with different audiences to see which quizzes perform better, testing a single variable element. For instance, you might use different visuals, questions, or result messaging in two different quizzes and gauge the results.
By measuring the results of your quiz and gleaning meaningful insights, you can continually improve your quizzes. Eventually, you can develop the perfect product quizzes that maximize sales.
Product Recommendation Quiz Best Practices
To get the best results from your product quizzes, here are some best practices to follow:
1. Ensure the Quiz is Easy to Use and Understand
Simplicity is the key to a successful product recommendation quiz. Making your questions simple and easy to answer will prevent confusion and keep people moving.
Also, the quiz should have compelling yet simple visuals that keep the customer engaged.
2. Hyper-Tarter Your Quizzes and Keep Them Relevant
Your questions should ask the right questions to bring customers to the most appropriate product. Think of the most relevant questions to keep the quiz short and effective.
In the process, think about your products from your audience’s perspective. What would different types of customers want based on their demographics?
3. Update Your Quizzes and Align Them With Your Branding
Another step is to regularly update your quizzes with the most relevant information and products. Include relevant imagery and icons to keep users engaged, but also help the choose which answer works best for them.
If your inventory changes or your branding changes in any way, your quiz should reflect these changes.
You could also find that your audience’s demands and needs change, which could further warrant alterations to your quizzes.
4. Keep Quizzes Short and Succinct
Your quizzes shouldn’t take too long to complete. Only ask the most important questions and shorten the distance between the customer and the promoted product.
Add a step/question counter progress bar. This way users know how long the quiz is and how close they are to finishing it.
Also state at the beginning how long the quiz should take (if it’s under 3 minutes, potentially 5 minutes if it’s inherently understandable that what you’re selling is complex by users and 5 minutes is actually a good time saver – Think how GEICO 15 minute call to get a quote was their marketing slogan).
5. Promote Your Quiz
When launching your quiz, promote it on your website, such as in a blog, and let your audiences know about it via social media marketing. One way to do this is to direct more people to your website, where they can take the quiz from the home page.
Product Recommendation Quiz Examples
To give you a better idea of what a good quiz looks like, here are some successful product recommendation quiz examples:
Electric Vehicle Chargers
One example comes from one of our clients. This particular client saw a 42% increase in conversion rates thanks to a product quiz appearing as a product tile on product category pages.
Based on the successful variant in an A/B test, the client specifically saw:
- A 41.55% increase in purchases
- A $4.41 increase in the expected value per visitor
- An increase of Buyer’s Guide pageviews by $185.01%
- An 8.39% increase in PDP pageviews
Overall, the client saw significant success with product quizzes, with the goal of permanent implementation based on the results.
Death Wish Coffee
Coffee brand Death Wish Coffee Co. also gets right to it when it comes to product quizzes. To customize your subscription, the company website guides you through the process of recommending the best coffee products based on preferred brewing methods, flavors, and more.
Improve Your CRO With Ignite Visibility’s Product Quizzes
Want to get the most from your product quizzes and other marketing methods through good CRO? Ignite Visibility is ready to help you fully optimize your efforts.
With the experts at Ignite Visibility by your side, you can:
- Identify the ideal audiences and products around which to develop quizzes
- Develop the perfect quizzes to personalize product recommendations
- Launch your quizzes on your website and attract new customers
- Monitor your quizzes to measure their results and continually improve them
If this appeals to you, get in touch with the experts at Ignite Visibility today to get started on your next CRO strategy.
