Quizzes aren’t the first thing you might consider when you’re trying to tackle serious topics like conversions and engagement. However, for eCommerce stores looking to improve the customer experience, a quick quiz can provide a wealth of useful information, as well as encouraging visitors to make a purchase.
The usefulness of these quizzes primarily comes from basic psychology. Humans are hard-wired to pursue knowledge and information. If this is packaged into a rewards system – i.e. complete the quiz and be rewarded with an insight into your personality or preferences – then it can be hugely appealing to customers.
That doesn’t mean that you can put anything vaguely quiz-like on your website and expect results. In this context, quizzes should be brief and entertaining. For maximum utility, they should also be heavily based on the product or service you’re offering.
As a template, think of the personality and lifestyle quizzes you see in magazines. What you’re hoping to develop is essentially an online version of those.
These are just the basics, however. To really get results from using quizzes as an eCommerce tool, take a look at the tips we’ve listed below.
How to Create Your Quiz
Running an eCommerce business can be complicated. Maybe you’re juggling a multichannel inventory system while trying to optimize SEO and calculate profit margins. A person in this situation doesn’t have a ton of time to think up entertaining quiz questions. Luckily, we have a few simple tips that should expedite the design process.
To make sure you’re getting the right kind of customer engagement, select an aim for your quiz. If customer engagement is your priority, make it the aim to educate or entertain. If you’re instead looking to increase conversions, maybe the goal should be to recommend products or showcase the variety in your store.
Remember to focus your quiz around the product or service you’re selling. A quiz based around remote software development wouldn’t be at home on a vintage clothing website but would generate a lot of engagement if you were selling services related to software.
Focusing on your products will also help you to decide on the type of quiz you’re making. As a clothing shop, a good idea would be a product recommendation quiz that acts as a personal shopper. Customers pick answers that align with their tastes and the quiz recommends an outfit at the end.
Or, if your website sells vintage records, your quiz could focus more on entertainment. Have a music quiz that plays short song clips and get customers to guess the artist. Then the quiz could display the records you sell from that artist’s discography.
Although we’ve discussed selecting an aim, this isn’t to say you need to pick engagement over conversions or vice versa. Having a primary goal makes quiz creation easier, but there’s plenty of things you can incorporate to improve engagement and conversion rates at the same time.
The Customer Engagement and Conversion Benefits of Quizzes
Since the whole point of the quiz is for customers to give answers, this can be used as a tool for data collection. If a customer provides their email address to get their results, make sure you give an option for them to receive offers and discounts to that email address too.
Being able to send offers and discounts is a good way of improving customer engagement and increasing conversions at the same time. However, make sure customers don’t need to provide contact information.
People can be sensitive about giving out their info – especially to eCommerce sites – for fear of receiving spam. Requiring that they give contact details might lead to more visitors exiting the quiz than finishing it.
Quizzes are great for predicting customer interest in a particular product. If your quiz is a tool for product recommendation (one of the aims discussed in the previous section) you might notice the recommendation results skew toward one product in particular.
If so, factor this information into your demand forecasting. This product will likely be in high demand as it meets the needs and/or preferences of a large number of your customers.
At the conclusion of your quiz, have some sort of link that takes customers to your products. To make this more attractive, offer a discount exclusive to visitors who finish the quiz.
This is a great move if your quiz results display particular products depending on the customers’ answers. If the product is both recommended by your quiz and discounted, this significantly increases your chance of conversions.
Analysis and Implementation
We’ve provided lots of useful advice on how to create quizzes and the potential benefits they can bring, but knowledge is only the first step. What you’ll need to do next is look into how you can implement a quiz from a technical standpoint.
If you’ve used a website builder to create your eCommerce site, they may have a simple tool you can use to add a quiz. If you’ve coded your website manually, this might be slightly tougher to implement. Speak to a website developer if you’re experiencing any particular difficulties.
Also, make sure you perform some analysis on your current level of customer engagement and conversions before adding quizzes. Performing analysis before and after will allow you to see if the quiz has made any difference.
The ideas we’ve suggested are only one way of increasing conversions, and you’ll need to research a variety of methods if you really want to optimize your conversion rate. However, quizzes are a handy and relatively simple place to start and a great way to increase conversions and improve engagement simultaneously.
