June 2019 Newsletter

Put Yourself in Your Shoppers’ Shoes with Online Quizzes

Three Tips for Using Online Quizzes to Understand Your Audience

In today’s retail environment, customer needs are constantly evolving. To stay relevant, you need to evolve along with them by staying on top of your customers’ interests and meeting their shopping needs. How can you tap into your buyers’ brains? One effective way: Online quizzes.

Wildly popular across social media, quizzes are used as both fun branding and customer experience tools as well as lead generation tactics. In fact, one recent study called quizzes “marketing’s next big money maker.” How do you get started? The answer is as simple as 1-2-3.

Quiz Tip 1: Choose the Right Quiz Type

It’s no secret that interactive content drives customers to their favorite businesses. In fact, marketing studies have shown that interactive content—aka quizzes and games—is the most effective way to keep customers engaged in digital marketing, while also capturing valuable consumer data. The first step toward implementing an effective quiz is to determine the quiz type: personality quiz, categorizing participants based on personality traits (as a pet retailer, compare their answers to animals for an added fun factor) or knowledge test, challenging your “players” on their trivia (or a perfect way to test knowledge of new pet product trends).

Pro tip: 80 percent of readers do judge a book by its cover—or, in this case, a quiz by its title. Crafting a fun and engaging title is key to grabbing the attention and participation of your desired audience. Follow the lead of beauty retailer BirchBox, whose quiz “What’s Your Makeup Brand Spirit Animal?” features a catchy title and then customizes purchase recommendations based on a participant’s results.

Quiz Tip 2: Draft the Perfect Questions and Answers

While quizzes can be fun, tests can be a chore. Ensure your quiz is on the fun side by keeping it short, sweet and full of entertaining questions. In order to keep your audience’s attention, stick to six to 10 questions at the maximum, allotting roughly two to three minutes for the entire quiz. Results should all be positive, empowering and even funny—encouraging participants to share among their friends and garner additional participants—and should direct readers to a link to your website or product recommendations based on their results.

Pro tip: Be sure to include a lead capture form, requesting only information you intend to use for future marketing purposes, such as name and email address. The average quiz has a 31.6 percent lead capture rate, making it a highly effective lead generation tool. For instance, furniture retailer Z Gallerie’s successful “Style Personality Quiz” was found to drive 1,000 leads per day, thanks to its engaging nature and simple lead capture form. Try your own “Pet Personality Quiz” to engage shoppers in personifying their pet—and making purchases to fit their pet’s unique personality. If you’d like to get more familiar with taking quizzes, try testing out a few from BuzzFeed!

Quiz Tip 3: Distribute Widely and Wisely

The average online quiz gets more than 1,900 shares on social media. That’s 1,900 reasons to start with your social channels. In fact, research has shown that Facebook is the source of 84 percent of quiz shares on social media. While you can include a lead capture form if you promote your quiz via email instead—as an added value to a promotional offer, for example—social media, both organic and paid, is likely to offer your biggest return on investment.

Pro tip: Don’t skimp on design. Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social networks and increases conversions by 86 percent. Ensure your quiz has captivating imagery to draw attention among your target audience.

Bonus Tip: Don’t Forget to Follow Up

Any lead generation tool is only as good as its follow through. Once you capture your quiz leads, don’t forget to nurture them. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, so make sure you immediately send a thank you for participating; within a week follow up with shopper testimonials or in-store promotion offers; and continue to reach out to make them feel valued and valuable, tailoring your marketing efforts and promotions to their individual needs and interests. As an added bonus, try incorporating your online quizzes into your in-store promotions, possibly with customer-engagement kiosks in popular spots in the store or at checkout, attaching answers to a customer’s rewards profile for future targeted marketing and offering coupons or gift cards as an incentive to participate.

By 2020, customer experience and engagement will take over product and price as the key brand differentiator. Quizzes help jumpstart your customer experience journey and increase your customer engagement. Get started on your interactive content marketing strategy and differentiate your brand today!