How to Get Your Product Recommendation Quiz Strategy Right

TL;DR:

• Product recommendation quizzes are interactive experiences designed to guide your customers to the right products for them.
• This type of quiz has lots of benefits — from making it easy for customers to get personalized recommendations to helping brands build loyalty, increase engagement, boost sales, and collect zero-party and first-party data.
• There are some pitfalls to avoid when making a quiz: Don’t overspend, make sure you can easily edit and adapt your quiz, and don’t overthink your quiz design.
• To achieve success with quizzes, you’ll need to do a few things: Choose the right quiz-building platform (we’re a little biased, but Jebbit’s 4.6 rating on G2 should tell you who’s the #1 Quiz Platform), prioritize data handling, make your quiz accessible, keep it on brand, and make smart use of conditional logic to help your customers arrive at the right results.
• Centrum, Vegamour, and NuLeaf Naturals are examples of brands who leveraged Jebbit to produce great product recommendation quizzes that engage customers and help them find products — all while gathering data and driving sales.

You may have noticed that more and more ecommerce sites are giving consumers the option to engage with branded product recommendation quizzes. There’s a good reason for that. Quizzes add an engaging element of gamification to your marketing strategy — and they do it while simplifying the shopping experience through curated product recommendations. They are becoming an industry standard for ecommerce marketing, just like the lead capture and exit-intent pop-ups that adorn websites today.

Want to create some great product recommendation quizzes? We’re here to walk you through it.

What Is a Product Recommendation Quiz?

Product recommendation quizzes exist to help potential customers navigate a brand’s offerings to discover the right product for them. It’s kind of like having a personal shopper built into your online store. Customers just need to answer a series of questions to find the perfect product.

This type of ecommerce quiz comes in a couple of different flavors. The one that most are familiar with is the basic product recommendation quiz, which asks questions in order to determine the best product for a customer’s needs.

However, there is also the leveled-up version of the product recommendation quiz — and this one is designed to help customers find a suite of recommended products all designed to work together. 

While this type of product recommendation quiz can be useful in any industry, there are many prominent examples of these quizzes within the skincare industry. You’ll often see them billed as “routine builders” because they’ll ask questions about skin type and skincare concerns — then go on to provide personalized product recommendations for each product that an individual might need to create a great skincare routine.  

Benefits of Product Recommendation Quizzes

In terms of benefits, product recommendation quizzes are kind of like the holiday season, in that you’ll get the joys of both giving and receiving. In other words, there are benefits for both quiz takers and quiz makers!

Benefits for Quiz Takers

Consumers — the quiz takers — receive a guided, concierge-like experience, almost exactly like they would with a sales associate in-store. Even better, consumers who are shopping for others or who don’t quite know what they’re looking for no longer have to worry about finding the “perfect gift for her” or “the right shade of foundation for me.”

Benefits for Quiz Makers

For the quiz makers, the benefits are big. Making it easier for customers to find products will not only help you boost sales, but it also helps build customer loyalty since a seamless shopping experience encourages people to keep coming back for more. 

On top of that, you get to collect first-party data, which will give you lots of information that can help you enhance your marketing strategy even further. First-party data consists of the details that you collect as users navigate your website or mobile app (think location details, time spent engaging with the quiz, devices used to access the quiz, and so on).

Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Product Recommendation Quiz

As you can see, when executed correctly, a quiz strategy is a win-win scenario for both brands and consumers. The problem is, many brands aren’t getting their quiz strategy right on the first try.

They’re often:

• Overspending on development or agency resources, and then stuck with a hard-coded product quiz they can’t edit or optimize
• Spending six to 12 months on internal collaboration with engineering and tech to find the resources to build a personalized quiz in-house for the first time
• Struggling to own the end-to-end consumer experience within their team — a big problem since few people have the skillset to be able to execute complicated, code-rich systems (and they’re usually the same people responsible for driving conversion rates and conducting effective remarketing)
• Overthinking quiz design, creating long and complex questionnaires that have low completion rates since customers only have so much time and patience to devote to online quizzes

If you’re looking to implement an effective quiz strategy and overcome these mistakes, then look no further! Keep reading to learn six key tips to keep in mind and get your quiz experiences up and running in no time.

6 Tips for Creating an Awesome Product Recommendation Quiz Strategy

You know what not to do. Now, let’s talk about what you should do if you want to create a beautifully designed product-finder quiz that engages customers so that you can drive sales.

1. Choose the Right Quiz Builder

Most online quiz builder platforms will charge by the number of consumers who complete the quiz, or total responses collected. This scaling mechanism de-incentivizes you from driving the maximum amount of consumers into the experience — and that’s the opposite of what you want. Ideally, the best way to get value from a quiz strategy is to get as many people as possible to engage with the quiz.

That’s why you need a platform like Jebbit, which offers simple monthly pricing. You won’t have to worry about costs running up as more people take the quiz — and that lets you enrich your CRM with more qualified data and leads so that you can deliver more relevant retargeting messaging to more consumers.

2. Prioritize Data Handling

Not having visibility into the massive amounts of data being collected — or the ability to act on it — would be a wasted investment.

Consider this: The recommended quiz length is four to six questions. On top of that, with a simple lead generation form at the end, you’ll have the ability to capture an email and append this data to existing customer profiles. You can quickly find yourself sitting on a treasure trove of relevant and accurate data received directly from your audience. 

This is information that you can use for email marketing and other types of marketing campaigns — but only if you’ve prioritized data-handling capabilities.

That’s why the vendor that you work with should give you the option to act on the data in a variety of ways: through their platform, your own CRM, an email platform, or a personalization engine.

3. Make Experiences Accessible

Most consumers engage with brands on their mobile phones today — and in fact, recent statistics show that 71% of consumers use their phones for online shopping. When it comes to quizzes, you need to make sure that it’s not only mobile-first but also accessible via any channel. 

That’s the key thing to remember: Consumers want to engage on their own terms. Not all quiz-building platforms offer the optimal solution for creating both desktop and mobile quizzes, and many are restricted to the quiz experience having to live on-site.

Look for a vendor that provides a completely responsive user experience so you don’t have to recreate the same experience across different devices. Consider vendors that offer their own hosting while also giving you self-hosting options too. That makes it easier for you to pursue an omnichannel approach so that you can make quizzes accessible on desktop, mobile, your ecommerce store site, your app, social media, and elsewhere.

For example, one way you can launch a Jebbit experience is through a standalone link that gives you the functionality to let the quiz load within any social app or email platform your consumer uses — no need for users to flip through apps to engage with the quiz.

4. Let Your Brand Voice Shine Through

Quizzes are a brand’s chance to show off. They’re an opportunity to present your brand in a beautiful, image-rich, content-rich way. Product recommendation quizzes are no place for basic black, white, and gray forms with radio-button checkboxes like you might find in a basic survey. 

Instead, your quizzes should have all the branding that you’d expect any of the rest of your content marketing assets to have. Make sure to incorporate your logo, and be sure that you’re using the same fonts, colors, images, and other assets that your brand’s style sheet demands. If you’re going with a quiz-building platform, make sure that you’ll be able to use these elements within the template options they provide.

Creating a branded experience is crucial for a couple of reasons. It differentiates your experiences from those of your competitors for one thing. And when you can present unified, attractive branding across all channels — including quiz marketing — you’ll be driving engagement among loyal customers while preventing any confusion that may arise when confronted with an unbranded quiz.

5. Self-Service Is Paramount

Some quiz platforms are service heavy, which means that you pay for the vendor to do the work for you — and that comes with the drawback that you may not be able to edit your quizzes quickly if you need to in a pinch. That’s why you should look for an agile, nimble tool like Jebbit that you can use hands-on. Your quiz builder of choice should enable you to create the end-to-end customer experience, manage the data you’re collecting, and analyze all the reporting details.

Different vendors will have various bells and whistles or service add-ons to choose from, so make sure that you prioritize a seamless experience, effective data collection, and strategic data reporting. 

Jebbit can offer you all three. With the no-code quiz builder, you can put quizzes together in just a few hours using either quiz templates or your own designs. Once launched, your quizzes will start gathering data — and because Jebbit integrates with many popular CRMs, you can easily activate that data to further improve your marketing efforts.

6. Map Your Quiz Questions and Answers

Let’s say that you have different sets of products that you want to recommend to different segments of your target audience. This is a super common need among skincare brands, so we’ll use that as our hypothetical example. 

Some of your customers have oily skin, so they’ll want a cleanser and moisturizer made with these concerns in mind — but other customers have dry skin, so they’ll want the cleanser and moisturizer made for these concerns. Both groups will definitely want an eye serum, but only some from each group will want an acne treatment.

Sounds complicated, right? The more products you have and the more ways you can group them according to each audience segments’ needs, the more complex things can get.

That’s why the first step to quiz design should be to come up with the end results. What are all of the possible groups of products that you will offer at the end of the quiz? Figure that out, then place your possible results at the bottom of a flow chart. 

From there, you can reverse-engineer the conditional logic that you’ll need to use to get from the first quiz question all the way to the results page — with the correct answers. When you already know the possible quiz results, it’ll be much easier to design sets of questions and answers that lead customers to those results. 

3 Examples of Great Product Recommendation Quizzes

Sometimes the best way to learn is by example. Fortunately, we have plenty of those! Check below to see how some of the top ecommerce brands have leveraged Jebbit to create fantastic product recommendation quizzes.

1. Centrum

Ever stood in the vitamin and supplement aisle wondering which option is right for you? Centrum’s quiz makes it super easy to find the answer. It asks a series of questions to determine age, gender, health needs, and more — all of which helps find the right answers for customers while giving Centrum both demographic details and customer preference information that they can use to improve their marketing campaigns. 

It’s a win-win for both customers and the brand. Customers can find the right product in just seconds. Meanwhile, the quiz has a 65% completion rate, which has given Centrum a 39% reduction in bounce rates, a 43% website redirect rate, and an average of 8.9 data points captured per quiz completed.

2. Vegamour

Vegamour’s quiz actually builds the ideal hair care routine for you. It includes questions about hair type, hair care concerns, age, and overall health and lifestyle. People who complete the quiz get recommendations for shampoos, conditioners, serums, and other products — all of it personalized to the unique needs of each quiz taker.

Vegamour embedded this quiz on their website — and the results were huge. Up to 81% of website users engaged with the quiz, and 89% of those users completed it. Not only did this provide a wealth of demographic and customer preference data, but Vegamour also collected lead information from 52% of users who completed the quiz, which allows them to follow up with personalized marketing emails.

3. NuLeaf Naturals

The NuLeaf Naturals quiz walks users through a series of questions designed to help them find the ideal cannabinoid product from among the brand’s range of supplements. It’s a quick and easy way to narrow the product selection down to just what you need to improve sleep, focus, anxiety, or a number of other concerns.

This is another quiz that got great results, not only in terms of data collected but also as a time-saver too. Ninety-nine percent of website users engaged with this quiz, and 75% saw it through to completion. All told, this resulted in a 20% to 25% reduction in requests to speak with support associates for product recommendations.

Ready, Set, Go!

So, there you have it! We hope you feel empowered to make the right decision when it comes to tackling your product recommendation quiz strategy. Here at Jebbit, we’ve worked on mastering our platform over the last several years in partnership with our product leadership, Customer Advisory Board, and valued partners, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Klaviyo — all to bring you the best tools possible to create engaging quizzes and other interactive experiences.

If you want to learn more about how Jebbit can help you get started, we’re happy to help! Just schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert.