Online brands are always looking for the next big step in advancing their marketing. Sometimes your average ad campaign won’t be enough to push your products past a certain level of audience engagement. If you’re looking to drive online sales, it’s time to consider a form of content that has the potential to boost your ecommerce marketing.
Quizzes have an astounding amount of reach, and when paired with any marketing strategy, can bring along the same amount of pull that it does on social media. Now think about implementing quizzes to drive ecommerce sales. The concept seems simplistic, but not many might know how to execute it. That’s what we’re going to show you today.
At Interact, we’re responsible for having taken part in the creation of over 25,000 quizzes from over 10,000 brands, so we know a thing or two about making quizzes. That being said, we’ll show you how to create your own quiz to drive ecommerce sales, and we’ll tie that in with an example of a brand that’s done it successfully, just to give you an idea.
Here’s your to-do list for today:
- Learn why you should uses quizzes for your brand.
- Start creating your quiz, beginning with the title.
- Find out about the best practices for question crafting.
- Implement a lead capture to grow your subscriber list.
- Create results that get shared to help drive online sales.
Why You Should Implement Quizzes In Your Strategy?
Quizzes aren’t just fun interactive pieces of content that engage audiences. They’re capable of so much more than that. Many online brands today are in search of content that can further expose their products to audiences beyond that of an ad campaign. When you tie in quizzes to your marketing strategy, you’re able to use it as a way to provide a call-to-action to anything related to your brand.
Quizzes in a marketing strategy not only attracts and engages audiences, but they’re also capable of boosting social traffic, driving online revenue, and generating leads.
Take BioLite for instance. They’re an online retail brand that focuses on the sale of energy efficient and environmentally conscious products. They used a quiz as a dual giveaway and product recommendation tool that drove in over 4,800 new email leads along with over tens of thousands in sales. That’s amazing! Who knew a quiz was capable of doing that?
So how exactly do you drive ecommerce sales with a quiz? By tying in your products at the results screen. We’ll go over this in detail later on. First, let’s get started on creating that quiz.
The Title To Your Quiz Is Everything
As important as your brand’s name is to you, so is the title to your quiz. For instance, a product with a boring name won’t sell, so you have to give it something that’ll grab people’s attention. That’s the same concept that you’re going to have to stick with when it comes to picking out your title.
You’re more than welcome to come up with your own title, but in case you’re having trouble with that, here are a couple of templates for you to work with:
- The “Are You Up For A Challenge?” Template – This one’s a fun one and it all starts with the addition of one little word to ANY question; “actually.” For example, notice the difference between “How much do you know about the music industry?” with “How much do you actually know about the music industry?” The inclusion of the word “actually” can convert a boring old question to a challenge, and you won’t come across a lot of people that’ll back down from one.
- The “Curious What You Are?” Template – This is one of the more common titles you’ll come across on social media, like “Which Disney character are you?” It’s fun and it can often lead to virality when it comes to comparing results with others. It’s straight-forward and incredibly easy to work with. You can also tie it into your products depending on what you’re selling, like “Which generation Apple iPod are you?”
BioLite’s title to their quiz is “What would you do with 10 watts?” Notice their slight deviation from the templates we’ve provided? It’s a good idea to make your title your own, and that’s exactly what BioLite did. Their quiz asked audiences a series of questions on how prepared they were during various situations in contrast to how much they actually knew about a given subject or what kind of person they were. Their title demands attention, and in a sense, almost challenges audiences to see what they’d do with little to no power.
Make Sure You Use The Right Quiz For Your Brand
What is the right quiz? There are several types of quizzes available and you want to be able to get the most out of the correct one for your brand and what you’re marketing. In the world of ecommerce, how you approach customers online will depend solely on what you’re selling. Here are the two types of quizzes that you can use, and how you can use them:
- The Personality Quiz – This is your typical “answer a handful of questions and we’ll tell you what you are” kind of quiz. The personality quiz categorizes individuals into personality types based on their answers. If you were a retail brand, you could use this type of quiz to place your audience into categories based on how they answered your questions, and then recommend products tailored specifically to them based on their preferences. This is how you personalize the shopping experience for your customers. This allows you to get your products out there, and to suggest the perfect ones for each individual.
- The Knowledge Test – This type of quiz allows you to gauge how much someone knows about a certain subject. It’s the perfect way to qualify customers to see how much they know about your brand or its products. This in turn allows you to focus more closely on those who are more interested.
BioLite used a personality quiz. Their questions determined how prepared someone was. The results also offered product recommendations based on the personality obtained along with several other call-to-actions in the form of links.
This is how you drive ecommerce sales. Use a quiz with results that recommends or showcases your products and you’ll be able to create a more personalized shopping experience for your customers. This kind of engagement drives revenue with how personal you connect with your customer base.
Connecting With Customers Through Questions
If you want to establish an authentic connection with your customers that will increase the rate of ecommerces sales, the questions to your quiz is where you’ll do it. As a retail brand, you’re not some mindless robot with the sole purpose of generating sales. You want to create a connection with people so that they’ll become recurring customers.
Here are some things to keep in mind when creating your questions:
- Make Things Personal – As we mentioned, we aren’t robots, so be as human as possible by injecting your personality into the quiz. Talk to your audience as if you were casually hanging out with them. This not only sets a more relaxed tone, but it increases your chances of your audience opting in or converting into customers.
- Be Sure To Use Visuals – Text-based quizzes are fine, but there’s no harm with adding a bit of a visual flare to them either. If anything, we encourage you to use images. The inclusion of pictures to a quiz adds a certain level of fun, and it makes the quiz feel more like a trivia game if anything, so try it out.
- Keep Things Short And Simple – There’s nothing more annoying than someone trying to keep your attention for longer than they’re allotted, so don’t be that person. Try to land between having 6 to 8 questions in your quiz. On average, we’re looking at about a 2-3 minute completion time. That’s perfect anyone that’s on-the-go.
So how did BioLite do with their questions? Well for starters, their approach was very relaxed. Because they’re presenting their audience with various scenarios, they treated their questions delicately. They didn’t use any images, but for this kind of a quiz, they didn’t need to. They did a great job by only having 5 questions, so getting through their quiz was a breeze.
Incorporating A Lead Capture To Your Quiz
Marketers! This is your time to shine! In the world of online retail, marketers are still in charge of growing email lists and setting up that purchase funnel for businesses. Without them, driving ecommerce sales might be a little rough.
At this point of the quiz, before you direct your audience to their results, you’re going to make a trade with them. What better way to obtain a customer’s contact information than by exchanging that for their results? (with their consent of course)
For some brands that aren’t too interested in leads, they add an option to skip this step, but for those that are interested, here are a couple of ways to optimize your lead capture form:
- Consider The Use Of Incentives – If you can sweeten things for your audience, then by all means. You could give virtually anything away as long as your brand has the room to do so. If you have an ebook that you’re trying to promote, consider offering it for free, or maybe even an entry into a free giveaway. You could even offer personalized emails in the form of marketing advice.
- Be Honest About Your Marketing – This is where a privacy policy comes into play. Some individuals get a little touchy when it comes to giving up their personal information, so use this to let them know what you’ll be doing with that information to give them some peace of mind.
- Try Not To Go Overboard – What we mean by this is, don’t go asking for more than what you need. Sometimes it isn’t necessary to ask for certain pieces of information like a zip code unless you’re interested in where your customers are coming from.
BioLite’s lead capture included a free entry to win a Power Prep Pack or 1 of 3 BioLite KettleCharges, all for the exchange of an email address! Now that’s how you do it. Using incentives to your advantage like that is definitely a step in the right direction to optimizing your opt-in rate. You’re also able to showcase some of your products in doing so.
Creating Quiz Results That Are More Effective Than Ad Campaigns
Your aim with quizzes is to improve your brand’s rate of driving ecommerce sales, and if you want them to be more effective than your typical ad campaigns, you’re going to have to make a fairly explosive impact with the results of your quiz.
You’re not creating these results just for your audience, but for everyone else that they’re sharing these results to. That being said, here’s what you have to do in order create results that get shared across social media:
- Have A Captivating Headline – Most result headlines are along the lines of “You’ve got rocky road ice cream! Which flavor are you?” When these show up on social media, not only are they displaying someone’s results, but they’re asking others to see what they’ll get. Come up with a headline that’s sure to grab that kind of a attention.
- Use An Attention-Grabbing Image – All quiz results should come with an image. There’s no exception to this. When your quiz results are shared on social media, an image accompanies it and it’s a good idea to pair that up with your title. The more chances you have of attracting attention, the better it is for your brand and its products.
- Truthfully Compliment Your Audience – What better way to end a quiz than by complimenting your audience. Compliments are capable of evoking positive emotions, which in turn improve share rates. Aim to compliment your audience, but be truthful about it too. You don’t want to spread false hope.
- Include A Call-To-Action – Include links to personalized product recommendations, or other products/services your brand has to offer. You can even include links to articles on your blog or other forms of content. This is where you can showcase what your brand is all about.
BioLite’s results tells their audience what kind of person they are with a simple image. They also made sure to compliment their audience along with a link to some recommended products. I’d say they created the perfect kind of results for their audience.
Let’s Go Over What We’ve Learned Today
We’ve covered quite a bit today. Just to make sure most (if not all) of that information stuck with you, let’s quickly go over what we learned when it comes to creating your own quiz to drive ecommerce sales. Hopefully BioLite’s example was enough to give you an idea.
Today you learned:
- Why you should consider using quizzes for your brand.
- Coming up with a title that attracts audiences.
- Using the right type of quiz for your brand’s marketing.
- Creating questions that connect you with your audience.
- Designing a lead capture form to build that email list.
- Delivering results that are worth sharing on social media.
With all of that in mind, along with every instance on how BioLite used a quiz in their strategy, you should be able to implement a quiz into your own. Make sure you align your quiz with your brand’s strategy and you’ll soon start to see what they’re capable of when used to drive ecommerce sales.
[Main Photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels]
JP Misenas is the Content Marketing Director & Audio/Visual Technician/Engineer of Interact, a place for creating entertaining and engaging quizzes that generate email leads. He writes about innovative ways to connect with customers and to build professional long-lasting relationships with them.