For eCommerce sites, product recommendation quizzes are an effective way to engage customers, help with product discovery, grow your email list, and drive sales.
We’ve covered the benefits of eCommerce product quizzes in a previous post. Now, we’ll discuss the steps required to build an engaging product quiz that helps you convert more customers.
What’s a product recommendation quiz?
A product recommendation quiz is a short quiz that asks questions about you or the person you are shopping for, then uses your answers to return the ideal product for your needs. Just as an in-store associate would help shoppers find the right product, quizzes allow you to offer a similarly personalized experience online.
Examples of Product Recommendation Quizzes
We’ll dive into some more advanced quiz tactics below. But first, here are some simple sample quizzes to get you thinking about how to create your quiz.
In this basic jacket quiz example, visitors choose their style and size. Then, the quiz recommends the perfect jacket based on their tastes.
While the quiz invites users to sign up for email updates, providing the email is optional. Users can click the link to skip to their results.
Here’s an example of a product quiz template for a beauty brand.
Unlike the single recommendation jacket quiz, this quiz recommends several products based on quiz responses.
Want to see additional quizzes? Get inspired with these product recommendation quiz examples.
Product Quizzes vs. Product Recommendation Engines
eCommerce quizzes typically recommend products based on predetermined logic, making them different from AI-powered product finders or recommendation engines. Often costly to implement, recommendation engines use complex algorithms to suggest products for your users based on browsing behavior.
Meanwhile, quizzes collect preference data directly from shoppers to make recommendations. This allows you to suggest products, collect data, and drive sales without the overhead of AI. In fact, you can typically implement product quizzes quickly using an online form or quiz builder.
Many of the available quiz apps integrate with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or whatever eCommerce platform you use, allowing you to seamlessly offer product recommendations to your site visitors.
How to Build the Perfect Product Recommendation Quiz
Whether you develop your quiz in-house, build quizzes with Digioh, or use another solution, creating a quiz comes down to the same basic steps: writing, design, data capture, integration, launching, and promotion.
1) How to Write an Effective Product Quiz
Because quizzes rely on predefined logic to make recommendations, it’s important to think through your quiz before writing it. Consider:
- What is the purpose of your quiz? Identify what customers can expect from your quiz, whether that’s their ideal skincare product, gift, health supplement, etc.
- What products will you feature? If you don’t offer many products, this may be simple. However, if you have an endless catalog of SKUs, you may need to pare it down for your quiz. Also, if you want to highlight new products or move older inventory, you can strategically promote them in your quiz.
- How many questions will you ask? Ask too few, and your recommendations may miss the mark; ask too many, and you reduce the chances of completion.
- What questions will you ask to arrive at your recommendations? Review questions and feedback from current customers, and use this data to inform your quiz.
- What data should your quiz capture? Remember, product quizzes are a great opportunity to capture zero-party data for segmentation. Balance informing your audience with informing your marketing efforts.
- How will you align your quiz with your brand’s voice? Quizzes tend to be fun and engaging. This is an opportunity to let your brand voice shine through. If you have a particularly lively brand, you may want to throw in some quirky personality questions.
- How will you capture your audience’s attention? For visitors to complete your quiz, you have to convince them to take it first. Write a strong CTA that draws your audience in and gets them excited to take your quiz.
Here, it’s important to decide whether your quiz will show a single recommendation or recommend multiple products.
Quizzes should help shoppers make a decision, so don’t overwhelm them with too many recommendations. Still, you may want to provide quiz takers with several options or a product bundle. In that case, make sure your quiz solution supports multiple recommendations.
As you finish writing your quiz, think through how questions and answers will map to the products your quiz recommends:
- Some answers may map to a single product, while other answers may fit multiple products.
- Use branching logic to show different questions based on answers to previous questions. This helps ensure you only ask visitors as many questions as is necessary, making it more likely that they complete your quiz.
- If your quiz builder allows you to create weighted questions, you may choose to apply more weight to more important questions. For instance, if you ask for the shopper’s price range, weigh this question more heavily to fit the recommendation in their budget.
Once you finalize the question branching logic, weighting, and mapping, you can start designing your quiz.
2) Designing a Product Quiz That Engages Your Visitors
Digioh provides a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design product quizzes with ease. However, these guidelines apply whether you go with a website form solution or use in-house development resources.
First, think about the form factor of your quiz. A product quiz is a type of multi-step form, so you have the same options available to you for a typical form with multiple pages. You can design a quiz that shows up in a lightbox, slides out from the side of the screen, or lives on its own page in an embedded form.
Regardless, you need a strong visual CTA to draw visitors into your quiz. Quiz funnels can quickly convert new site users into subscribers, so make sure these visitors know about your quiz! Show a pop-up, lightbox, or sliding widget that combines your CTA copy with eye-catching images and a button. This CTA should match your branding, but stand out in a way that ensures visitors see it.
With Digioh, you can even target these boxes to certain types of visitors, allowing you to put your quiz in front of the right people. For instance, if a visitor comes from Facebook, you may want to capture their email address as soon as possible with a quiz. Once visitors complete the quiz, you can prevent them from seeing it again.
Whatever type of quiz you create, you should make sure it works well on mobile devices. Follow mobile design best practices:
- Use responsively-designed quiz CTAs and pages. If your audience is primarily mobile, you may even consider mobile-first quizzes.
- Make sure all buttons and selection options are large enough to be comfortably pressed on a mobile screen.
- Avoid selectors that don’t work well on mobile. As cool as sliders are, they work better on desktop than mobile. Keep this in mind if you have a large mobile audience.
- Provide enough spacing between elements so that users do not accidentally press the wrong choice.
- If you promote your quiz with a mobile pop-up, make sure it follows Google’s guidelines on mobile interstitials and does not harm the user experience for mobile visitors.
- Test your quizzes across devices to ensure the best experience for all respondents.
If your quiz builder provides built-in templates for pop-up quizzes, you can start there, or build your own design from scratch.
As you design each page, incorporate visual elements to keep visitors engaged. Show pictures that go along with your answer choices, such as product images.
The answer choices in your quiz may be only images, without accompanying text. This example product quiz for wedding dresses balances text and images perfectly, providing illustrated examples of each choice:
The quiz above also includes a progress bar at the bottom. This bar helpfully shows shoppers how long they have until they finish the quiz. The psychology of progress bars can also nudge visitors towards conversion: the visual representation of their progress may lead users to seek a sense of completion by finishing the quiz.
Of course, the most important part of the quiz is the end. While these quizzes provide recommendations for your users, ultimately, a marketer’s goal is to collect email addresses and other preference data in exchange for providing these recommendations.
3) Using Product Quizzes to Capture New Email Addresses
Quizzes allow brands to capture email addresses and other data from users who complete the quizzes. To collect the email address from your quizzes, you can:
- Allow users to save their results to their email address.
- Require users to enter their email to see their quiz results.
- Offer a discount for that product in exchange for their email.
The quiz below follows the second approach, requiring users to enter their email before seeing their final recommendation.
Alternately, you can make it optional for shoppers to provide their email address. In the example below, the quiz asks visitors for their email address (or mobile number), but shoppers can skip this by clicking the link to view their quiz results immediately.
Each approach can collect emails and other data effectively, but how do you put this data to use?
4) Integrating Your Product Recommendation Quiz with Your eCommerce Platform and Email Marketing Technology
Before going live, it’s important to connect your quizzes with your tech. This will help you get the most from your quiz investment.
For instance, if your quiz integrates with your eCommerce platform, you can include a one-click “add to cart” button on your quiz results screen.
When making a purchase is that easy, shoppers may be more likely to convert.
By integrating your quiz with your email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform, you can trigger emails that engage visitors beyond the quiz by:
- Sending their product recommendation results to their email.
- Reminding visitors to purchase their recommended product with follow-up emails.
- Delivering additional recommendations based on items they browse.
- Preventing browse and cart abandonment with triggered, personalized emails.
- Incentivizing shoppers to purchase items with a one-time-use, unique coupon code.
For instance, the email below is personalized with the user’s recommended products, as well as a unique coupon code.
If you have a bit of development knowledge (or developer resources on-hand), you can map your quiz fields to your marketing technology and integrate things yourself.
Many quiz builders have built-in integrations with the most popular martech providers. Digioh’s quiz builder integrates with hundreds of technology providers, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Segment, Iterable, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and many more. If you use an in-house solution or need a more complex integration, Digioh can also create custom integrations.
5) Launching Your eCommerce Quiz
Once your integration is set up, you’re ready to launch your quiz. If you use a quiz builder solution, it likely has a place where you can access the required code. Paste this code into your CMS using the instructions they provide.
If you use Digioh to create your quiz, just install our JavaScript snippet on your site. Then, your quizzes and other pop-ups will appear based on your targeting options. There’s no need to edit this code or install additional code if you want to launch additional forms or quizzes. Once the code is on your site, you can launch and edit forms directly from the Digioh platform.
6) Promoting Your Product Quiz with Email, Social Media, and Paid Advertising
If you promote your quiz with a pop-up CTA on your site, your site visitors are sure to see your quiz. But how do you draw everyone else to your quiz?
That’s where other marketing channels will come in handy.
Once your quiz is live, spread the news by promoting it on social media or paid channels. In a quiz funnel marketing strategy, quizzes provide a great way to drive new visitors to your site, grow your email list, and convert social followers into direct email subscribers.
You can also promote your new quiz to your existing email audience. While you won’t get a new email subscriber out of it, you can 1) nudge subscribers who haven’t converted into customers yet, or 2) create repeat customers by pointing them towards new products they haven’t purchased yet.
Of course, if you promote your quiz in marketing emails, there’s no need to collect their email address again. Provide a better user experience for your existing subscribers by pre-populating their email in your quiz fields. You can also target them with a different version of your quiz that doesn’t require the email address.
Digioh can help you set up this targeting, allowing you to win new customers while keeping your current customers happy.
Ready to start making your product recommendation quiz?
Hopefully, these steps provide the foundation you need to build a high-converting product recommendation quiz.
If you need more information or want to try Digioh’s quiz solution, reach out to us!