Product recommendation quizzes are the hottest trend in ecommerce — but if you’re just using them for lead capture, you’re missing out.
Depending on the items you sell, shopping online can be daunting for customers. In many cases it’s easy to find the right products. But deeply assorted categories or products with many technical specs can create analysis paralysis.
In a store, customers can approach a sales associate for help. But without a way to ask customers questions (and make intelligent suggestions) online, that complexity can lead to abandoned browses, abandoned carts, and buyer’s remorse.
A product quiz can help each customer find the right product now and build a more personal shopping experience every time they come back.
In this article, we’ll share three main ways that you can use quizzes to improve your conversion rates and RPV:
- Helping customers find the right products in a specific category
- Empowering customers to bundle products for a specific situation
- Building long-lasting relationships with customers through personalized experiences
These product recommendation quiz examples are all from a specialty grocer, but shoppable quizzes are useful in a lot of cases. Think of any situation where online customers can get overwhelmed, from skincare and swimsuits to kitchen appliances and health supplements.
Let’s get started.
How Product Recommendation Quizzes Help Customers Purchase with Confidence
Imagine that one of the products that your specialty grocery store sells is gourmet coffee. As any coffee enthusiast will tell you, not all coffee is the same. It varies widely based on region, processing, brewing method, and tasting notes.
If customers can’t ask their trusted barista for a personal recommendation, how can they know if they’ll like the product? This might mean that conversions and revenue are lower than you’d like, especially compared to in-store sales.
It’s here where a product recommendation quiz can help.
A quiz on the coffee product page can help combat some of the indecision involved in the buying process. If you ask your customers a series of questions about their preferences or lifestyle needs (like brewing methods or roasts), you can give them immediate suggestions.
The quiz is designed to help the customer find the right product so they can convert right away. It’s a win-win. The customer hopefully has enough information to purchase a product, and you’ll gain a conversion.
Tips for driving revenue with a product finder
Use quiz questions for zero-party data collection.
Zero-party data that customers openly share with you is some of the best quality data you can find. Use quizzes to (reasonably) collect as much as you can! Take a question like “How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?”. Answers may not affect quiz results directly, but they can still inform your marketing campaigns later on. You could use that data in your content marketing strategy, use it to send relevant promotions to heavy coffee drinkers, or even use it to predict when customers need to make their next order.
Make quiz results transparent.
To increase trust in the quiz results and help your buyers feel heard, your results page should explain why the quiz taker sees the recommended products.
Use quizzes as vendor-funded engagement and conversion points.
Have a vendor with a wide range of products? Allow them to sponsor a product quiz. For example, a cereal brand could sponsor a “cereal finder” that gives customers a new way to discover their products.
Pair related product recommendations with quiz results.
Each product recommendation quiz is an opportunity to suggest complementary items. For coffee, these items might be coffee grinders or filters, pastries or breakfast items, or cream and sugar. (All of these upsell recommendations can and should be customized based on each user’s data.)
Create Quiz-Based Experiences for Specific Situations
Product recommendation quizzes for ecommerce also give you the opportunity to curate certain experiences end to end. Build brand loyalty by giving your customers everything they need to start a new anti-aging regimen or take up snowboarding.
Imagine a customer plans to host a large holiday dinner. They’re not sure what to make, especially as a few members of the party have dietary restrictions. The customer is also not used to cooking for 12 people, so they may not know how much food to buy.
It’s an overwhelming experience.
A “Holiday Meal Planner” quiz could help your customer accomplish this complicated task. First, it would ask questions about party size, dietary preferences, number of courses, and kitchen equipment available. Then it could provide not just product recommendations, but an entire meal plan complete with recipes and quantities to purchase.
An API-first product quiz template gives you the flexibility to create truly personalized experiences that combine content and product suggestions to drive brand loyalty and conversion.
How? By keeping customers on your site.
Quiz-based experiences mean that everything a customer might need can be found in one location:
- An electronics retailer can create personalized home theater buyer’s guides based on quiz results.
- A vitamin store can explain why chromium supplements are a top choice for diabetes management.
- A customer with a new pet can learn what supplies they’ll need and use your online store to buy them.
- An online grocer can create meal plans and recipes with items guaranteed to be in stock and an easy way to add them all to a shopping cart.
When you are able to impact the customer journey, you build loyalty over time. Eventually, you develop a reputation as a trusted resource when it comes to meeting your customers’ needs.
A quiz, then, becomes a unique opportunity for brand building. It allows you to create unique experiences that bring customers back and add additional value that they can’t get elsewhere.
Build Long-Lasting Relationships through Personalization
Many companies use personalized product quizzes at specific moments in their customers’ buying journey. That’s great, but it’s only scratching the surface of what quizzes can do. A product quiz is also a valuable tool to personalize a shopper’s experience each time they visit your site. This can happen in two ways (or both at once):
The “nuclear” option: personalization through segmentation
If you ask your customers about their preferences on their first visit, you can exclude products they don’t want to see every time.
The right product quiz allows you to personalize your customer experiences to a greater extent than ever before. Using the zero-party data that your customers share in exchange for better personalization, you can create custom segments based on common patterns.
For example, a clothing retailer might ask questions about personal values like sustainability or affinities for certain types of styles. A customer who doesn’t like crop tops should be able to say so and never have to see them again.
In grocery, this comes into play with certain diets or food allergies. A customer with a gluten allergy likely has to search for “gluten free pasta” or “gluten free bread.” Even then, search results aren’t always accurate.
Segmentation — based on customer data you can trust — gives your customers a reliably personalized experience time after time. But it’s not a move to be taken lightly. It’s better to ask customers explicitly for their preferences instead of venturing a guess, which is where quizzes come in.
The holistic option: personalization through AI and machine learning
Even if you’re using segmentation to personalize your site, a product discovery platform can optimize your shopping experience even more. Because zero-party and first-party data is cleaner and more reliable, applying it can have sizable effects on ROI.
Translation: your product quiz software needs to integrate with your product discovery tech stack.
Knowing what coffee a customer likes, an AI product discovery platform can apply that knowledge throughout the entire shopping experience. Combine quizzes data with clickstream data, and you’ll have even more opportunity to optimize your results, rankings, and recommendations. Often, these optimizations come from inputs and patterns that humans can’t even notice.
In other words, a quiz isn’t just a quiz. It’s another set of data points that support your product discovery strategy and drive the metrics that matter.
Think Outside the Product Grid
Constructor Quizzes empowers your customers to overcome analysis paralysis and purchase with confidence.
Using zero-party data, Quizzes allows you to ask your customers questions and make intelligent product suggestions that they’ll love. And as part of the holistic Constructor platform, Quizzes makes your customers’ entire site experience more personalized and attractive.
The result: more conversions, more revenue, and more lifetime value. Learn more about Quizzes here.