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.
Why product quizzes?
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.
Here’s an example of a product quiz template for a beauty brand. 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.
In this quiz example, visitors choose the flavors and foods that most appeal to them, and the quiz immediately recommends the right wine for their tastes, without requiring an email address.
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 in a cost-effective way, without the overhead of AI. In fact, you can typically implement product quizzes quickly using online form or quiz builders.
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.
For more information about product quizzes, watch our video overview, or keep scrolling to learn how to build your perfect quiz.
How to Build the Perfect Product Recommendation Quiz
Whether you develop your own quizzes, 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 skin care 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 data for more effective segmentation. Think about how you will 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 results will show a single product or recommend multiple products.
One purpose of quizzes is to help shoppers make a decision, so you shouldn’t overwhelm them with too many recommendations. Still, if you feature many products in your quiz, you may want to provide quiz takers with an assortment of products to choose from. Make sure the quiz solution you select can support multiple product 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.
- Depending on how users answer one question, they may be presented with a different question on the next step.
- 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 ensure their recommendation fits 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 can apply no matter what you use to create your quiz, whether you go with a website form solution or use in-house development resources.
First, think about the form factor of your quiz. When it comes down to it, a product quiz is basically a 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. Quizzes are an effective way to quickly convert new site users into subscribers, so be sure to promote your quiz with a pop-up, lightbox, or sliding widget that combines your CTA copy with eye-catching images and a CTA 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. If a visitor has previously completed the quiz, you can prevent them from seeing it again.
Whatever type of quiz you create, quizzes will likely engage visitors across devices, so 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 designed quizzes.
- Make sure all buttons and selection options are large enough to be comfortably pressed on a mobile screen.
- 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 of your quiz, think about ways to incorporate visual elements to keep visitors engaged. Show pictures that go along with your answer choices, such as product images.
In fact, 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 help 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 be effective at collecting emails and other data, but how do you put this data to use? For this, it’s important that your quizzes integrate with the rest of your stack.
4) Integrating Your Product Recommendation Quiz with Your eCommerce Marketing Technology
You’ve created your quiz, but before you go live, it’s important that you connect your quizzes with your marketing technology.
By integrating your quiz with your email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform, you can trigger emails that keep your visitors engaged beyond the quiz:
- Send their product recommendation results to their email.
- Trigger reminder emails that invite them to purchase their recommended product.
- Deliver additional recommendations based on items they browse.
- Prevent browse and cart abandonment with triggered, personalized emails.
- Incentivize 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 a less-popular marketing platform or need a more complex integration, Digioh can also create custom integrations.
5) Launching a New 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 Quiz with Email, Social Media, and Paid Advertising
If you created a pop-up CTA to promote your quiz on your website, your site visitors are sure to see your quiz. But how do you draw everyone else to your quiz?
That’s where your other marketing channels will come in handy.
Once your quiz is live, spread the news by promoting it on social media or paid channels. This is 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 address 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 product recommendation quiz that converts more customers. If you need more information, or want to try Digioh’s product recommendation quiz builder, reach out to us!