With online shopping, people have easy access to more products in more varieties than ever before. In theory, your perfect product is always a few clicks away.
But what if you’re not exactly sure what your perfect product is?
That’s where product recommendation quizzes can help.
What is a product recommendation quiz, and what makes them so great?
A product recommendation quiz is a short series of questions that asks visitors about their preferences, traits, or interests before recommending a product based on their answers. You've probably encountered a few of them, especially if you've shopped on D2C health, wellness, or skincare sites.
For instance, the quiz below provides recommendations for the right wine based on a site visitor's tastes. In this quiz, visitors choose which flavors and foods appeal most to them, and the quiz's branching logic shows a wine that best fits their palate according to their responses.
And this example dress quiz helps brides find the perfect wedding dress by asking for their budget and dress preferences.
Another variant of a product recommendation quiz is a gift finder quiz or interactive gift guide. Instead of recommending a product for the quiz taker, these quizzes help quiz takers buy gifts for others during holidays or other gift-giving occasions. See the example quiz below.
With just a few questions, you can guide your online shoppers to the perfect gift, no matter who they are shopping for.
Want to try a quiz? Check out the product recommendation quiz examples launched by our clients.
6 Reasons Your eCommerce Site Needs a Product Quiz
Quizzes don’t just benefit shoppers; they’re great for brands as well. Here are a few ways these quizzes can help your eCommerce site.
1) A product recommendation quiz personalizes the shopper experience.
According to Epsilon, 80% of customers expect personalized experiences. It’s up to brands to deliver on these expectations, but many personalization avenues require significant investment.
Fortunately for brands, Salesforce reports that 57% of shoppers are also willing to share data in exchange for personalized offers. With a product quiz, you can ask for preference data, and use that data to deliver the personalized experiences your shoppers expect.
While you may not have the resources for live chat or complex recommendation algorithms, a product quiz enables you to offer similar experiences in less time and with less overhead. With a drag-and-drop product quiz builder, you can quickly create a quiz that provides tailored product recommendations with ease.
2) eCommerce product quizzes grow your email & SMS marketing lists.
When you collect a visitor’s email address, you get a direct line of communication to them. This powerful link allows you to identify, learn about, and market indefinitely to them.
But to grow your list effectively, visitors must feel that they will gain value from giving up their email address or mobile number. After all, this is pretty personal information!
That's why personalized product recommendations are a great way to grow your list: they offer value in exchange for their email.
Demand Metric has found that interactive content achieves 2x higher conversion rates than static content. When you combine the interactivity of quizzes with the high value provided by product recommendations, you get a recipe for list growth success.
There are several ways to collect emails or mobile numbers with quizzes, including:
- Giving users the option to save their results to their email address.
- Requiring users to enter their email to see their quiz results.
- Offering a discount for their recommended product in exchange for their email.
- If a recommended item is out-of-stock, you can invite them to sign up for back-in-stock email notifications.
The highest-converting option will vary from brand to brand. For maximum conversions, A/B test your quiz forms to see which tactic performs best.
3) Product recommendation quizzes collect zero-party data.
With the depreciation of third-party data weighing on marketers everywhere, brands need first-party data to guide their marketing efforts.
But preference quizzes go one step further.
eCommerce quizzes allow brands to collect valuable zero-party data, or data that customers share with brands proactively.
Take this toy recommendation quiz, for example.
After visitors complete the quiz, they get recommendations tailored to their needs, and you learn about what those needs are. This allows you to provide more tailored messaging over time.
Two-thirds of marketers say gathering sufficient data is their biggest obstacle to providing personalized experiences. When over half of customers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers or discounts, product preference quizzes are a good way to start collecting the data you need for enhanced personalization.
4) Quiz data can help prevent abandoned carts.
The enhanced personalization data you get from quizzes can help you build more effective abandonment campaigns.
Say a shopper adds their recommended product to their cart but doesn't complete their purchase. If you collect their email address from their quiz, you can send personalized abandoned cart emails incentivizing them to come back, maybe with a unique coupon code.
The mattress quiz above includes a dynamic content placeholder for a one-time-use coupon code tied to the email address quiz takers provide. To increase your chances of conversion, you can pass this coupon code to your email service provider to include in your cart abandonment messages.
But what happens if a quiz taker doesn't add their recommended item to their cart? In that case, you can still trigger browse abandonment emails that invite users to return and browse the products recommended by your quiz.
5) Quizzes can improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).
When done right, paid acquisition pays off. But to ensure your ad campaigns are profitable, you need to direct people to content that gets them to convert.
By promoting your product recommendation quizzes in paid search or social campaigns, you can earn higher returns from both your ad spend and your quiz investment.
For instance, here's a sample ad for a home furnishings store. The quiz CTA encourages users to click...
...and when they arrive on your site, they can take this quiz:
Because these quizzes earn higher engagement than typical forms, they make it more likely that an ad click will lead to a conversion. Plus, even if shoppers don't purchase immediately, you can capture the lead and nudge them towards a sale later.
6) Shoppable quizzes drive sales.
Not everyone who visits your site will complete a purchase. In fact, about 92% of all eCommerce site traffic visits a site without purchasing.
But why don’t these shoppers convert?
Maybe they couldn’t find the right product or were overwhelmed by choice. In that case, quizzes are a great tool for product discovery. Your quiz can point shoppers in the right direction.
Perhaps they got distracted. Now that you’ve collected their email address, you can trigger a timely personalized email to invite them back.
Or maybe they’re just not convinced yet. If that’s the reason, you know their preferences; you can deliver personalized discounts and other targeted messaging that may change their mind.
There are many reasons a customer might not convert. While product quizzes can’t solve for customers who are simply not interested, they can go a long way to increase sales among customers who are on the fence.
To increase your chances of converting a shopper, you can add targeted promotions to your quiz, such as unique coupon codes for a discount on their recommended product. That way, shoppers may be more tempted to take advantage of the good deal and make a purchase.
Even better, if your quiz solution allows you to pass quiz recommendations and other data to your ESP (like Digioh does), you can follow-up with visitors who complete your quiz by sending them their recommended products and unique coupon code via email, then remind them of their recommendations with a series of personalized follow-up emails.
Andie Swim personalized their post-quiz email campaigns with their quiz data, leading to a 55% jump in YoY flow revenue!
Now that you've seen the benefits of a quiz, let's talk about how you can add one to your site.
Creating a Product Recommendation Quiz That Converts
A great product quiz can engage first-time visitors and win new customers.
As you start to create your quiz, here are a few things to keep in mind at each step of the quiz building process.
Of course, this is just a basic checklist. For an in-depth overview, read our How to Build a Product Recommendation Quiz post here.
Writing Your Product Quiz
To write the questions for your quiz, you need to ask yourself a few questions first.
- What are the most popular product questions your customers ask?
- What preference data can help personalize your campaigns?
- If you have a strong brand voice, what questions can inject some fun into your quizzes while remaining helpful to customers?
- Also, if your quiz builder allows you to create weighted questions, which questions should affect the final recommendation most?
Not sure what to ask? Take our question recommendation quiz to get a list of suggested questions personalized to your business.
After identifying the questions to ask, it's time to polish up the copy. Here's an example of a luggage recommendation quiz that pairs basic questions with conversational copy.
Note that this quiz is short, arriving at its recommendation after just a few questions. If a quiz is too long, visitors might abandon it before converting, so don't cram too many questions into your quiz flow. Try to collect only the data necessary to guide visitors to the right product.
Of course, your quiz’s questions are important, but don’t neglect the rest of your copy! Create an eye-catching title or CTA to alert visitors to your quiz and guide them to completion. For instance, this makeup quiz starts with a pop-up CTA that invites new site visitors to find their perfect foundation.
Building the Quiz Logic
Think of this part as the brain behind your quiz. This is where things can start to get complicated, but with a solid plan and a quiz builder tool that meets your needs, you'll end up with an effective product quiz. Here are a few things to think about:
- How will your questions and answer choices map to each recommended product?
- Will your quiz recommend a single product, or will you show multiple product recommendations?
- Do you need to use question branching to show different questions based on answers to previous questions?
- Should certain questions be "weighted" to influence the final result more heavily?
- Most importantly, does your quiz builder support the logic capabilities you need?
Designing Your Product Quiz
With the brains behind your quiz solidified, you can focus on the beauty. Time to design your quiz!
First, choose your form factor: will you use a pop-up quiz, an embedded quiz, or a full-page quiz? Then comes the creative. For the best customer experience, your quiz should match your site’s branding while showing your products in their best light.
Take this quiz, for example.
This clothing store has bold, modern branding, and their product recommendation quiz follows suit, using a simple color scheme that allows the recommended products to shine.
With a combination of solid-color buttons and buttons that feature product images, the quiz's auto-progress buttons allows to quickly click through the quiz to find the perfect jacket.
Drag-and-drop editors like Digioh make it easy to build on-brand quizzes from a selection of pop-up templates. Just select a template, then customize it with your custom fonts, images, colors, and even your own HTML/CSS for total control of your quizzes.
For more tips on designing your quiz for conversion, check out "How to Make a Product Recommendation Quiz That Converts."
Promoting Your Product Recommendation Quiz
Of course, the best product recommendation quiz won't convert customers if people don't see it! Guide traffic to your quiz and increase quiz completions by:
- Linking to your quiz in an easy-to-find part of your menu.
- Showing a visual CTA on your key collection pages.
- Adding a pop-up teaser that opens your quiz in a larger pop-up.
- Capturing abandoning visitors with an exit-intent pop-up.
- Announcing your quiz on social media.
- Sending your quiz to your email or SMS subscribers.
- Creating a paid campaign that shows off your quiz.
- Linking to your quiz with a QR code.
Quizzes can engage shoppers on any channel, no matter where you communicate with your customers. Make sure those shoppers know about your quiz!
Ready to launch a product recommendation quiz on your online store?
Digioh makes it easy to launch on-brand product quizzes with branching logic, weighted questions, precise targeting, A/B testing, and seamless integrations with your entire marketing stack. Plus, you don't have to be a quiz expert; our team will help you design, build, and integrate your quiz.
To see how you can convert more shoppers with product quizzes, browse & cart abandonment tools, post-purchase surveys, and the rest of our eCommerce conversion suite, request a tour of Digioh today!
