Your Ecom Store Should Use A Quiz transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] ER Ferris podcast thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the show today I want to talk about quizzes I want to talk about using a quiz for a landing page for a main way that you are funneling customers through your site I think this is an underrated tool even though I've seen more and more of them an underrated tool in e-commerce that is really useful for you and for your customer which of course is that combination useful for you and your customer is like the pathway to profit into growth Etc let me defend that for you let me let me tell you why I think you should be using a quiz on your site let's jump in you've seen plenty of quizzes especially if you've been around the sort of cosmetics and Skin Care industry if you've heard me talk about bamboo Earth having a skin quiz pretty much every skincare brand at this point has a skin quiz it's part of the process and there's a really natural reason for that which is that skin care is the kind of product that it makes a lot of sense to you use a quiz to get customers the right recommendation for the right product it's problem solution oriented people want to make sure that they're getting the right product for their face and therefore a quiz allows you as a brand to ask your customer a series of questions about what they're looking for and then recommend the right product for them and if you break that down and you think about why that's effective it's because the alternative to that is just having a customer like browse through the site to try to find an answer and instead what you're saying is I can give you an answer I just need to know a few things from you and it'll be a lot better of an experience for you to do that I'll also give you a special offer somewhere in there and of course the thing you're the character dangling for somebody to take the quiz to get that special offer or to get a starter kit or something like that but but what it does is it brings together the customer's needs it surfaces their needs and services those needs in a way that allows you to get the right product into their hands and in that respect it solves this very fundamental thing about e-commerce which is that you have the digital Gap this is what I call the digital Gap I did an episode a while back called Bridging the digital Gap thinking about that from the perspective of creative but what the digital Gap is what I call the the problem of not being able to pick up and look at a product in a store and even to talk to a sales rep or like a customer service person in a store where you know if you're shopping at a store in the mall you can take a product to to somebody to an employee at the store and you can say hey what is this product tell me about it this is what I'm looking for or you can even go to them and even before you take a product with them you could say this is the kind of thing where is the problem I'm having can you help me sort through your product selection to find a solution the problem is that in e-commerce you can't do that because the experience is digitally mediated and so you know there's AI tools and things like that that are probably starting to solve that in some other ways and certainly you know some of the main quizzes especially octane AI which I'm going to reference more in a little bit is positioning itself as an AI company and trying to use that as part of the solution here to bridge the digital Gap when it comes to a quiz and to getting the right product in somebody's hands but I think even aside from AI like this is a really really good solution to that problem a quiz the benefit that it has is that it solves that problem for you it solves that digital Gap problem for you because it filters the customer to the right thing so so here's the way I want you to think about whether or not a quiz is right for your brand here's the here's the diagnostic question you can ask the question is is browsing a mostly positive customer experience or negative customer experience like is it creating maybe another way of putting that is is it creating friction or is it actually part of the pleasure of shopping and the difference between those two is most easy to see in apparel and you think about an apparel brand actually browsing is part of the fun of shopping for for apparel for certainly for some people now this may change depending on what kind of apparel you're selling I could imagine for example I've referenced that like a lot of times that I'm wearing a fresh clean threads shirt right now in this video I'm wearing a Dodgers hat here if I was going to new era's website there's a new air daughters hat if I was going to newer's website and buying a new era daughter's hat I would be just as helped by a quiz that would tell me okay here's what kind of hat what's your hat size you could ask me that question in advance because because that what teams hats are you looking for and you can sort of filter a bunch of things are you looking for you know a snapback or a pro fit this is a profit ha like are what are you what are you looking for and I know in my hat preferences some things that are non-negotiables to me and therefore I can filter that way now of course plenty of sites have filtering systems alongside a bunch of products and that works pretty well for apparel as well because you just put all those filters in okay I'm looking for profit I'm looking for daughters I'm looking for whatever and that's the way that a lot of apparel works and then I can browse a bunch of different options and so that's sort of a quiz experience in apparel where you do that filtering but I can imagine again like I said for fresh clean threads where I'm shopping for something that's like totally functional for me I know I want short sleeve t-shirt media whatever you know all of those things solid color and I just want to kind of get the right thing and have it work and be done and simple but there's another kind of apparel shopping of course where like I think if you're looking for a bunch of options or if you're more fashion oriented or something there's going to be a and part of the experience is looking and seeing all the options and thinking about things you weren't thinking about you're not just trying to get your question answered you want to go through a bunch of stuff in that case a quiz is not the right solution very likely you may have a quiz on your site for that customer who is looking for something more specific but it's much less necessary and it's also harder to package products into kits and to have a really strong product recommendation engine in that kind of a category so in that category actually browsing is a good part of the experience but if you have ever tried to design a menu on a website especially on mobile you know you think through the logical flow of what menu items you put at the top nav and like the main menu navigation versus what just goes in the footer versus like your subcategories and your menu you realize that you start thinking about all these different customer Journeys and they're all tricky they're all over the place and and wait a minute if I you know if I break it up by gender then okay is that gonna not show people what about for the kind of person who wants to shop for both genders or you know like there's just like a million little edge cases that you start to think about that make this really difficult and and so for a lot of products for a lot of Brands it would be a significant friction reduction if you could just have a quiz that helps somebody sort through all of their stuff figure it out and then give a few recommendations and you can get those recommendations you can create tiered recommendations you can add information to those you can add videos to those all those things get them to these sort of customized quiz pvps or even just drop them on a yeah typically it'll be like a customized quiz landing page at the end of all of it with all the information they need in a way that is is really helpful to the customer and so if you think about your brand right now any brand you are working on or any brand it's a brand that you own think to yourself would it be helpful if I grab the customer by the hand and took them to the exact product that they were looking for or are they going to want to look around ask that question if the answer is yes it would be helpful to take them by the hand you should be considering a quiz for your product I'm going to give you a few other reasons in defense of what I like about this and why I like it more than other solutions for this kind of customer scenario okay the first is really that whole point if it really works very well to ask the customer series of questions and take them by the hand to do that so that's probably the first defense the second defense and the second the second point in defense of this is it's probably simply say to this it's pretty fun this is like an underrated thing I think but I think people just like taking these quizzes they're sort of like pleasurable to work through and they're kind of fun and you can put some cute Spice in them go check out the bamboo Earth quiz I'll try and I'll try and put a link to the to that in the in the show notes but if you think about like the bamboo Earth quiz or if you think about a lot of quizzes like they'll they'll have some like fun cute little language and it allows you to reinforce the brand and people just like pressing the buttons and and you kind of work through it quickly and it's it's active right it's an active engagement with the customer they're they're clicking things and typing things and going through and it's fun uh as long as it's not absurdly long although I don't know I've never tested it maybe a 10 minute long quiz work or maybe people would have fun with it would be a really different shopping experience than others but that's the second reason people like it it's a positive brand experience and it's fun don't underestimate that it's really useful okay number three I love the way a quiz substitutes for landing page building now this is sort of true but landing pages are a lot of guesswork and I have found people are pretty bad at figuring out what landing page will work for their products and so they build a bunch of information on a pay on a landing page and they try and connect it to their ads and the idea is we'll get all the right stuff we'll do five reasons we'll do listicles we'll do you know these long form things like what I you know fine those can work very very well don't get me wrong but the beauty of a quiz is that you can actually use it as your ad landing page really really nicely and smoothly you can even reference it in your ad and talk about you know take our quiz and get 20 off that kind of thing can be the can be part of the CTA in your ad or even if you're not using an ad right just like have have the quiz accessible on the site it's for people who are not coming through through an ad but I really like it and you can actually customize this really easily if you just put in separate URLs different very simple landing pages you can just put things like I'll show you one well you can just put things there in a way that makes it so that it's very very easy like a couple lines of copy that you know connect directly to an ad you know yourbrandname.com Pages slash quiz that can be the URL and or slash quiz one or slash quiz you know still ad or whatever name the ad you can really easily put a simple simple page on an ad it will load very fast there's a little bit of text and it says thanks for checking out our site you know find the perfect product for you take our two minute quiz there's the CTA and that button that takes people into the quiz can be embedded on a very simple landing page and then you can start tweaking that landing page as the entryway as the gateway to the quiz really simply really quickly really easily depending on which ad you have run and there's just a lot of customizability with a very low volume of work by embedding a CTA onto a very simple landing page instead of you know killing yourself over getting this landing page exactly right in all these other ways okay so I really like that it makes it really easy to do that just add specific content out of you at a at a simple URL button link to a quiz on a page and jump into the quiz the more that I think about it the more convinced I am that it makes no sense for most businesses who are growing their teams at all to not at least explore adding talent in the Philippines I have recently been doing this myself in my business with my friends at more Staffing and I had at least one person in my selection process that came through who was an absolute killer like as good as any employee doing the kind of work that I was before that I have seen in the US doing comparable jobs except that person was drastically cheaper than what I would be paying for that same position in the U.S and it was a great salary for them in the Philippines which is a win-win I just don't know why at this point you wouldn't be considering expanding your team in the Philippines you will find incredible employees in the beauty of working with more Staffing to do that that they will hold your hand through the entire process they will help you find that initial Talent they will help you interview and create assessments for what that Talent is a fit they did that with me for the person that I was looking for they actually helped me form the assessment for whether this person would be a fit they did not push me very hard to the most expensive of the people that they recommended they recognized that that was maybe not the best fit for my business which I appreciated so much because they're people of Integrity who are really trying to help which is great and on top of that they will uh train and recruit and give you a one year guarantee on any employee that they help you find in the Philippines so if that person does not work out they will replace them at no additional cost that will help you replace them just an incredible organization helping you do something that is so core to creating a great eCommerce business which is keeping your Opex small as a percentage of your total revenue to generate profit in your business consider working with more Staffing to hire out an incredible team in your eCommerce business in the Philippines by going to more now dot Co today the other thing is going to be argument number four it is a great home page hero place to send people forget this but your main spot on your home page the great value or that that spot can really be used I think for two things especially one of them is to promote new products if you know it's to new customers or returning customers or whatever but like for customers who if you have a product launch coming and you want to make sure to tell everybody who comes to your website about this product launch or limited time sale then the homepage hero is great for that but throughout the rest of your time if you're not doing sort of a limited time promotion like that your homepage hero is really for new customers and the reason for that is that returning customers can go use your site navigation to go find the thing that they're already looking for they're already familiar with your brand if you're not promoting something specific in a limited time way they can go find the thing they're looking for they'll just click the shop menu and go the homepage hero is really for like new customers to know okay my friend told me about this brand I don't know where to start though and so I love using the quiz as a CTA in your homepage hero section because for that new customer who's showing up to your brand for the first time it gives them a very clear starting point and similar to that would be using it on a pop-up the pop-up sends people to the quiz and you go from there so I love that because it creates a simple entryway on your home page hero as an evergreen way to tell people start here start new customers here number five very high email and SMS capture rates this is I think the thing people know about quizzes a lot of times is that of course the last thing that you are going to do last question you're going to ask is for an email address or an SMS number you could test this whether or not SMS creates too much of a drop off by asking people for their SMS opt-in or not so you can test this but basically the last question you're going to ask on your quiz before you give people their recommendation is where can I send the results and when people enter their email address you will get a very very high email capture rate typically better than if you just had a regular pop-up email capture I mean that's regularly see over 10 email capture rates if not higher sometimes 20 in quizzes Which is it's just very very good for for email Capture Plus you will immediately Auto fire somebody in email off of that directly connected to their results which means that the email that's sitting in their inbox or maybe the text that's sitting on their phone is going to reinforce all of the information they just sent you so you get high opt-in rates and you basically have a little quick remarketing email sent right away and the combination those two things is really powerful especially compared to again like an email capture pop-up where those two things where those same things happen but after that person submits their email capture information after that happens what's gonna happen they're just gonna go right on browsing right they haven't given you all the information to do this at the end of a quiz they're gonna go from there straight to the product that you're recommending you've now taken them by the hand like I said and recommended all these things so so it really puts people next to and towards the product that they are looking for in this really really powerful way in a few different spots while doing that at a very high rate okay so you'll get a very good email on SMS capture rate without having to sit there and Tinker all the time with your pop-up on your site so it reduces the tinkering of the pop-up and instead gives you the high email SMS capture which I love okay number six you get a ton of data collection for future follow-up this is another thing people know about quizzes but you are going to get a profile of a person that is going to allow you to segment your emails significantly if you want to now I'm not an over email segmenter and I actually think this is a theoretical benefit for most brands most brands just don't have the Firepower to really go segment lots and lots of emails but there is some good stuff you could do just imagine asking somebody are you buying a gift or are you buying for yourself if you get that answer right away you can drastically change how you interact with that Customer because those customers are doing something very very different in terms of what I would promote to a gift buyer versus not it would make a real difference to me which way I wanted to go so there's a lot of different questions you can ask and get a lot of information I've seen one version of this where there are some products that very specifically won't work because they'll cause an irritation on somebody's skin like in the sort of Cosmetic Skin Care deodorant those kinds of spaces and so making sure that you know okay this person is going to have an irritation on their skin if they get proud day well then we've got to make sure we keep product a out of their inbox instead push them towards product B Etc and those kinds of things can also really really help so there are six reasons for it the point is all of those things together are giving people clear access to your product in a way that is great for them they like the experience it reduces work in some other ways it's a bunch of work up front quizzes are a bunch of work up front you have to build these flows of things but after that I actually think managing the work afterwards is pretty easy and at the end of all of it at the end of all of it even if you don't Tinker much you will put somebody on a page with a highly specific custom product recommendation that meets their needs exactly and that will get them there which means you will convert very well test offers all products all those kinds of things from there all right so those are all the things my last recommendation here on this episode is that you just start with octane AI it's the one that I've used the most I've done Jerry Riggs type form quizzes as well at full disclosure I am on the octane eye Advisory Board thing that they did with a bunch of e-commerce types of people a while back so I have this like very tiny little interest in octane AI I just want you to know that interest is Tiny enough that I can't imagine that this has meaningful finding that this episode of meaningful Financial impact for me so I'm not telling you that because of that it is just the one that I've used the most it integrates really cleanly with Shopify the analytics are strong you can see where people are dropping off all those kinds of things that you would look for in a quiz very easy to set up and they're introducing a bunch of other tools that are cool too so so I haven't even used all those all the way I just really like it it's very easy to use and very easy to set up so if you don't know where to start go start with octane Ai and that's the way I do that show notes [Music] okay uh like I said one of the most tactical episodes I've done in a long time I hope that's helpful and useful to you it's one of those things that I was thinking about going like wait a minute I have never talked about this and I actually really like this strategy and I'm thinking more and more about how to push more Brands towards it and see if there's anything that's going to stop us from doing that so there you go hey next week on the show I have Ezra Firestone finally I have promoted and mentioned this a few times we had a really interesting conversation really getting at the heart of what goals in business are like what success is like what joy in business is like I think we explore some really cool spaces together and I also got a great little bit of tactical input in the end if you know as a firestone you know he's pretty much just worth listening to one of the most trusted voices in e-commerce for a long time now and as I mentioned in that episode as you will hear then he was one of the first people I really trusted in e-commerce and learned a lot from in the early part of my journey so I was really grateful to have him felt like a bit of a full circle moment for me in my time in e-commerce because I've just been really helped by him along the way and he's a great dude so uh make sure to subscribe if you have not already so that you don't miss that episode thanks as always to my sponsor more Staffing virtual assistants can be helpful virtual professionals can be transformative for your business go work with more Staffing to hire out great team members in the Philippines at more now dot CO as always I always really appreciate when you like I said subscribe on whatever platform listening to like and share with anybody with whom this would be useful or for whom this would be useful as well and you can always email me at podcasts.agfgrowth.com if you have thoughts questions anything like that and what else can you do you can reach out to me on Twitter at Andrew J Ferris you know that though you know that you know you can reach out to me on Twitter that's it that's everything I have to say for this week on the show thanks so much for watching and for listening I will see you next time [Music] songs