How to drive e-commerce sales with quizzes

Using quizzes to drive e-commerce sales

Social media is a tricky too to apply. You can use social networks to engage your fans, conduct discussions or ask for the opinions, but at the same time it may be really hard to get a real profit out of your audience.

Very often marketers are getting excited with ideas that are highly interactive, unfortunately, they lack it terms business sense. In this article I will show you how to create quizzes for social networks that will not only engage your users but also improve your sales.

Why quizzes?

Take a look at this infographic with 6 interesting quiz statistics to discover the potential of the quizzes:

First advantage: Personalization

Personalization is one of the most important triggers that can help to increase your sales. Consider an e-commerce site where the content that is shown to you is based on your location, historical product views, or based on what your friends bought or were reading about.

Very often it's really hard to introduce any degree of the personalization to your website, due to different factors like the lack of the engineers (not everyone is packed with programmers like the Google is) or funds to build sophisticated systems.

With quizzes you can make it easily. Take a look at the example below.

Target: sent people to four pre-prepared landing pages for each of the outcomes. Solution:

• Questions about the preferences of the users

• Engaging, funny content

• Informative endscreens

• Exit links to the landing pages at the e-store linked with the answers given by the user

Second advantage: Customization

Not only you can personalize your quiz, but also customize every detail. You can add appealing headline, description and take advantage of the possible branding opportunities. Take a look at the quiz below.   Target: Engage users, build brand awareness and brand sentiment Solution:

• Interesting content build around the show

• Photos branded with logos of the TV network

• Exit links to the video-player with all of the episodes

Third advantage: Easy creation

Normally quizzes require a lot of technical knowledge and coding to make it work. Fortunately new solutions that appeared on the market like Engageform, Interact or Qzzr are really easy in usage. How to create an interactive quiz in just a couple of minutes? Take o look at this video tutorial:

To make it even more engaging check out my 5 tips in creating Viral Quizzes:

• Use a lot of pictures (for ex. Picture Choice) to engage users much stronger.

• Carefully craft the main title and all of the questions to drive more traffic to your website. Tell a story.

• Use the outcomes to tell people something interesting about their personality.

• Stay positive with your questions and answers, but some controversy may work awesome as well.

• Go back to your quiz whenever you want (even after it was published)

 There are more tips on quiz creation here.

Fourth advantage: Lead Generation

When your content is engaging for potential buyers they are much more likely to share their personal information with you. Therefore the best strategy is put your form between the questions and revealing the answer. You can ask for an e-mail address, telephone number or website link. How to do it correctly? 

Target: Generate leads to send personalized message

Solution:

• Share the outcomes only after the form has been filled with the user data
• Add bonus (like 20 % discount) for sharing information or consider other sweepstakes
• Be honest about what you're going to do with the data (for ex. Inform about sending newsletter)

How to leverage that data?

• Use automation to send direct thank-you-message to quiz-takers
• Introduce yourself and tell about your product (your sending this message to those who took your quiz so they obviously are interested)
• Start promotional mailing with personalized offer

Fifth advantage: Mobile-friendly

Not every type of content works great on mobile devices. As we can see from the graph below mobile users are facing many problems with site-optimization. When user experience is frustrating customers are less likely to spend their money.

eMarketer estimates that US retail mobile commerce sales will approach $77 billion in 2015, up 32.2% from 2014. This growth will push mcommerce's share of e-commerce up to 22.0%.

The great news here is that the quizzes are mobile friendly. They work great on every device, but don't take my words for granted and let's compare traditional, desktop way of surveying customers to mobile-ready solutions:

It's crucial to be mobile ready because the world is switching to mobile or multiscreening. Not only we're using our devices simultaneously but we're switching between them quick like a bunny. Let's say that we're receiving an e-mail while sitting on a toilet (according to a study IT in the Toilet 3 out of 4 Americans admits using smartphones in the bathroom). It's a message about an online survey so you're planning to check it again later on. Then you're switching to the tablet but after a few seconds someone is calling you on the phone, so you're finishing the survey off on your PC. That is just the new normal and you can read more on that topic in my article here.

In conclusion

Now you have a knowledge on how to boost sales with quizzes. Remember that this article is only an introduction to the sea of possibilities that you can enrich with your creativity. Don't be afraid to experiment with flexibility of quizzes to adjust them to your needs.

Happy quizzing!

Thanks to Karol Kopańko for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Karol Kopańko is a Marketing Manager of 4SCREENS You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.