Using the power of quizzes to enhance your e-commerce store

How to sell more products using quizzes and the power of personalization

What if you could be more like Amazon and offer just the right products at the right time to personalize your product recommendations in an almost creepy way? If you could do that, you'd experience an immediate 7.8% increase in sales, you'd also have a much better understanding of your customers, and your boss would definitely give you a thumbs-up.

This all sounds amazing, except for one problem - you are not Amazon, you don't have thousands of engineers to work on perfecting every single aspect of your personalization program. Most likely you also don't have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to build personalization into your product CMS, and you are a marketer, so doing any coding yourself is incredibly daunting.

Trust me, I've been there. Which is why what I'm going to show you today is so incredible. We're going to look at the exact method used to turn a personality quiz into a powerful personalization tool. What we're about to go through together is the ultimate growth hack for E-Commerce marketers. Let's look at the precise way a quiz makes your site personal to every visitor.

The exact method for creating a product personalization quiz.

Part 1: Identify personalities (products) for your quiz

Before you start formulating the innards of your quiz, you have to figure out what the results will be. These results are always related to your products. The personalities of your personalization quiz can be formed in one of two ways.

1. Your actual products. If you are a specialty shop and only have a handful of products, you can just make individual products the results of your quiz. This tactic can also be used for larger brands by making category-specific quizzes. For example "Which Facemask is Right for You?" from a makeup brand.

2. A "style" related to categories of products. If you have a wide variety of products and they fall into general categories (such as Chic, Rugged, or Modern for clothing), then you can give people a personality based on the categories and then recommend products to the personality.

Part 2: Write a title to attract attention

The title of your quiz is incredibly important, and fortunately equally as simple to come up with for retail quizzes. It's either "Which (product) are you?" or "What's Your (blank) Style?" depending on which of the categories you chose in the previous section.

Part 3: Create Questions

The quiz questions are where some of the trickiness comes in. You have to walk a fine line between delivering an accurate quiz result and entertaining your audience. There are a few ways to do this well.

1. Use lots of pictures. Products are highly visual, all of your marketing is visual, don't drop the ball on your quiz and ask questions with text answers! I did a study and found that all 100 of the top 100 quizzes created at my company have at least one image question.

2. Inject personality into the text. Remember that your quiz is a one-to-medium, an opportunity to speak directly with customers and ask them preferences. Since you are only talking to one person at a time, keep it very personal.

3. 6-8 questions per quiz. This number of questions will take approximately two minutes to complete on web and mobile devices. That's the sweet-spot for timing to maximize completions and leads generated.

Part 4: Set up Lead Capture

Something to consider when making a quiz is whether you want to collect new leads inside the content. Since you'll know the quiz takers' personality or recommended product, you can send follow-up drip campaigns based on their type, but first you have to get the contact information, here's how to convince people to give you their information.

1. Incentivize subscription. There is the obvious draw of being able to see your quiz results (they are "gated" by the lead capture form), but you also want to give people an added bonus for subscribing. For example, the quiz below promises to send out "Personalized messages designed with your style in mind," which is pretty cool.

2. Be honest about what you are going to send. Tell people exactly how often you will send marketing communications and what you'll be sending. It's much better to say "We send one email each week" than "We'll send you our newsletter."

Part 5: Follow up with personalized recommendations

Whether or not someone chooses to opt in, you get an opportunity to make a sale in the results of your quiz by recommending personal products. There are a couple of tips that will help you get a higher conversion rate.

1. Connect the personality type to the product. Tie in the person's personality traits (based on what they just told you), to the products you are recommending. This will seem like magic to the quiz taker, but it's really simple.

2. Be positive. No one likes a downer, your results descriptions should be encouraging, not off-putting. It turns out that positivity is the most shared emotion, so being encouraging in your quiz results can actually increase the effectiveness of the quiz.

3. Include links. This might seem obvious, but make sure to include links or buttons to purchase the products that you recommend. Not everyone will purchase right away, but you can still pique their interest.

Part 6: Close more deals with pointed automation

Most people won't buy immediately after taking your quiz. That's not unexpected, it would be ridiculous to assume that everyone is immediately ready to buy. However, if someone takes your quiz and chooses to opt-in, there is at least a glimmering of interest in making a purchase down the line. There is a method for closing sales down the line using what you've learned about people from the quiz.

The first part of this method is to immediately send an auto-response email thanking people for taking your quiz and sending their result via email. You have to do this to introduce yourself and remind people why you have their email address. Otherwise they'll forget and you'll be accused os spamming.

After that you should continue to reference the person's personality type when sending product recommendations and content. Don't be overly pushy, remember that these people are interested, but they found your products through a personality quiz - don't go for the hard close.

We can't all be Amazon and constantly push the envelope of what's possible with personalization, but we all can use simple personality quiz logic to provide a more tailored experience to web visitors and cash in on the benefits of recommending products to people based on their interests.

Hopefully this guide has sparked some ideas for you, and I encourage you to give a product personality quiz a try today!

Hi, I'm Josh. I started a company called Interact that makes interactive quizzes. I write for Yahoo, Salesforce, and Oracle among others, usually about what I've learned from creating thousands of quizzes. I love chatting about how we can make the web a more conversationally friendly place, hit me up on twitter @jhaynam