When you think of eCommerce, do you think of big companies like Amazon and eBay who ship products right to your door? While these brands make up a large part of the annual $4.5 trillion (yeah, we said trillion) we spend globally on eCommerce products, they aren’t the only ones.
We’re seeing the rise of eCommerce shops run by small teams behind the operation. Sometimes they’re even run by a single person in the beginning, making them easier to start than ever before.
With relatively low startup costs, eCommerce businesses can quickly grow and scale while they cut out typical store expenses, including brick-and-mortar retail spaces and more.
Website builders like Shopify and Squarespace make it incredibly easy to create an eCommerce website in just a few hours. More bloggers, entrepreneurs, and content creators are starting eCommerce shops to sell branded products that fit their brand. These designs can include t-shirts, coffee mugs, throw pillows, and more.
If you don’t want to produce your own eCommerce products in-house but still want to sell them, it’s incredibly easy to outsource the whole process. Sites like Society6 allow you to upload your own designs and they turn each design into multiple products that they make, ship, and deliver. You can be as hands-off in the process as you want to be.
If you want to be more hands-on with your eCommerce business, you could become a handmade artist on Etsy, a digital artist on Creative Market, or a self-published book author on Lulu or CreateSpace.
The possibilities are endless!
If you know how to build your online influence and have a high-quality product to sell, you can excel with eCommerce marketing.
With anywhere between 12 to 24 million online stores currently on the market, how do you make sure your eCommerce marketing strategy stands out and wins your ideal clients’ loyalty?
It all starts with quality lead generation, and what better way to turn leads into paying customers than with an eCommerce quiz?
Why use a quiz in your eCommerce marketing strategy?
With an estimated 1.92 billion eCommerce buyers, how do you determine which people are the best fit to buy from your eCommerce store? It starts by creating customer personas and deeply understanding your physical or digital product is built for.
The better you know your audience, the more likely you are of turning their initial interest into a sale.
By making your own Interact quiz, you give followers and website visitors an opportunity to self-identify which path best fits them. As they move through the customer journey, you’ll be able to confidently recommend products from your eCommerce store that will be a great fit because of the data you collected from the quiz.
The quiz ideally will act as an automated personal shopper, greeting your leads and enticing them to take a quiz to learn more about themselves. Through the quiz, you’ll gather the information you need to make an accurate product suggestion.
From there, you’ll funnel each person into a series of follow-up emails that’s personalized to their quiz results, helping you create a stronger personal connection so you can make the sale. There are a few other reasons why you might want to use a quiz inside your eCommerce marketing strategy.
Educate your audience
Educating your audience through your quiz and emails is essential. Everyone who comes to your website will have a different level of knowledge in your product and its related topics. The quiz is there to make sure you lead with the right information, but your emails will help you nurture the initial connection that was made through the quiz.
Think about the topics you might want to educate your audience on. They should ideally relate to your eCommerce niche, highlight what makes your product different, and share your unique philosophy or mission.
Here are a few examples you can pull inspiration from:
- If you’re selling beard oil, give tips on how to groom your beard in the morning.
- If you’re selling handmade jewelry, follow up with tips on how to care for your jewelry.
- If you’re selling sweaters, give advice on how to create a capsule wardrobe.
No matter which topics you choose, make sure it’s something that is something your audience wants to learn about or is essential to your product.
This is where your email marketing strategy comes in. Use your follow-up email sequence to create a stronger bond the new subscriber. Over time, they will build trust in your brand through the valuable educational information you share. You need this trust to win their business.
By delivering educational content through your quiz and emails, it shows you care more about your customer than simply selling your product. Leading with value is the best way to make a lasting connection with your audience member, giving you more opportunities to naturally mention select products in your content.
If you mentioned your product in the quiz results and the quiz taker didn’t convert right away, don’t think the sale is lost. Some quiz takers will need to be nurtured before they become a paying customer. Keep building this long-term relationship with them through this educational content and track your sales goal progress along the way.
Entertain your audience
In addition to educating your audience, you’ll also use your quiz content to entertain them. Asking for a product recommendation can sometimes seem like a boring and tedious task. It’s far more delightful to help your audience self-identify their perfect-fit product through a quiz.
A Buzzfeed-style quiz will help quiz takers learn more about themselves while they answer seven to ten questions. Depending on what answer options they choose along the way, each quiz taker will receive a personalized quiz result that’s automatically generated for them.
All they need to do is read through their quiz results and sign up for your email list if they’re looking for more information. You can entertain your audience throughout the quiz-taking experience with image-based answers, GIFs, stock imagery, and personality-infused copy.
If you choose a relatively serious topic for your quiz, there are still ways to entertain your audience. Here are a few examples to help you do just that:
As you write your quiz questions and answers, think about how you can add more of your personality into them.
One tip we love is to write out each answer option with a simple explanation and then go back through and jazz them up. For example, if one of your answer options is “I’ve been in business for two years,” you could say “I can’t believe I’ve been in business for two years!” or “I’m two years in–time flies when you’re having fun!”
If you need some more help on entertaining your audience, reach out to a few trusted friends and ask for their opinions. They might be able help you infuse more fun into your quiz so taking it feels like an almost addicting experience.
Upsell an offer for more income
By now, you already know quizzes can be used to suggest products, but you may want to take it a step further by upselling additional offers.
Let’s say you created a personality quiz to sell essential oils. There are four different personality types a quiz taker can receive at the end: lavender, eucalyptus, vanilla, and spearmint.
If someone takes the quiz and gets the lavender essential oil result, they might be enticed to buy the product right away. If they do, you can follow up with additional offers that will sweeten the deal. This is a great opportunity to increase your eCommerce store’s revenue because it is five times easier to retain a current customer than to acquire a new one.
In this case, the upsell offer could be a new essential oil diffuser with a special discount that’s exclusive to quiz takers. To increase the sense of urgency behind this offer, you could make it so it’s only available for a limited time. These kinds of offers are usually available anywhere between 24-48 hours, but you can decide what works best for your eCommerce business.
The best way to see if these upsell offers are working is to track your analytics, monitor quiz trends, and optimize the quiz by making adjustments along the way.
Showcase the variety of your products
Have you ever visited an eCommerce store website that offered hundreds or even thousands of products? It’s easy to get overwhelmed as you scroll through multiple pages of products. If you don’t find what you’re looking for quickly, you are more likely to close out the window and shop somewhere else.
This effect is called decision paralysis. It happens when people have too many options to choose from so they often choose none of the options. It may seem backwards, but it’s a proven psychological effect that can seriously influence your conversion rate.
Instead, you can use a quiz to showcase the variety of your products by offering a curated list of products that is specific to each quiz result. This way, you are giving multiple product suggestions at a time that don’t require quiz takers to dig for the right fit on your website.
If you have a large inventory of eCommerce products, think about how you can introduce a curated collection of products that is unique to each quiz type. Make it feel almost like a shopping list or gift guide! You can have a lot of fun with this.
ECommerce marketing secrets from successful quiz creators
Now that you know the basics of creating a quiz to better market your eCommerce shop, let’s talk about what it can look like in action. We can start by learning from these shining eCommerce marketing examples.
Each quiz creator you see here began with a physical or digital product they wanted to sell. Through the process of building their own eCommerce quiz, they discovered how they could personally recommend products and teach their potential customers how to value what they offer.
Some of these quizzes have attracted nearly 50,000 quiz takers while others have seen 60-70% start to lead conversion rates. All of them have something you can learn from as an ecommerce entrepreneur.
What body shape are you?
Trying to find a great fitting pair of jeans can feel tough, but finding them in a sea of online retailers is even tougher. Sites like ILoveJeans.com make it easier to find your perfect jeans by comparing styles and prices across dozens of retailers.
Sam, the creator behind ILoveJeans.com, decided to create a quiz that acts as an automated personal shopper for women who are looking to be perfectly matched with jeans.
To enhance her eCommerce marketing strategy, Sam uses a variety of questions to first determine what body shape each quiz taker falls into. Once the quiz identifies the woman’s shape, it can accurately pull a curated list of jeans that might be, well, a great fit!
Using image-based answers that make each option pop, this eCommerce quiz is doing all of the right things to help women confidently find pants that work for them.
We love that the quiz asks about body measurements and shapes upfront before transitioning into what each quiz taker’s preferences are. With this knowledge, the quiz gives accurate body shape results that include a call-to-action (CTA) that says “Shop Your Shape.”
This CTA button directs quiz takers to a dedicated landing page (like this) that includes affiliate links to jeans at a variety of retailers. If a quiz taker finds a pair of jeans she likes, all she needs to do is click the desired photo listing that will take her to the retailer’s website to buy.
The entire online shopping experience feels seamless with the help of this interactive quiz!
| ILoveJeans.com’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 42,847Completions: 27,496Leads: 10,389Conversion rate: 24% |
What’s your Ayurvedic skin type?
With so many skincare competitors in the eCommerce world, how do you make sure your brand stands out? Jennifer Jean, a self-titled “Naturalista” skincare product creator, created a quiz to educate her audience on her product’s clear differentiator. In fact, the differentiator is right in the quiz title!
After discovering the ancient healing tradition of Ayurveda and gaining certifications in the field, Jennifer decided to create skincare products that are Ayurveda-inspired. The same practices help Jennifer manage her chronic illness symptoms while greatly improving her health, so she is the perfect case study for her product.
Since many of her potential customers may not know about Ayurveda and its powerful effects, Jennifer set out to create a simple yet fun quiz that educates and entertains at the same time.
Each quiz question is written in a way that’s easy to understand while paired with high-quality stock imagery. There’s a stock image library built right into Interact so you can easily find the photos you need for each question. Sign up for an Interact account to start browsing through our photos!
You might notice while taking her quiz that Jennifer includes lifestyle photos rather than images that are focused on skin types. This helps to create a more casual, holistic vibe for her quiz. She also includes photos of diverse skin tones to show how her products are made for all skin types and tones.
The quiz features eight questions with three answer options each, making it easy for each quiz taker to quickly move through the quiz so they can get to their quiz result.
Jennifer’s quiz is unique in that it allows quiz takers to choose multiple options as their final answer. By doing this, she is able to deliver results at the end of the quiz that give a percentage breakdown of what skin type might be the quiz taker’s best fit. Here’s what it looks like inside Interact.
You’ll notice that each quiz result comes with a title that relates to the Ayurveda theme (like “Pitta Skin”) and also includes a helpful descriptor of their skin type (like “Sensitive/Acneic Skin”). If you were going through the quiz and got this result, you might want to click “More Details” for the Pitta Skin type since you received a 56% match.
The Pitta Skin type will reveal a well-written description that summarizes what this skin type is prone to and how to build healthy habits that will improve your skin.
It also includes a “Learn More” CTA button that takes quiz takers back to her homepage. We typically recommend using the button to lead to a specific resource like a blog post or video with unique tips, but we like that Jennifer adds links to her product suggestions in the bullet-point list.
You might be wondering how Jennifer gets more people to her quiz. In addition to sharing it on social media, Jennifer also uses pop-ups in order to direct more website visitors to her quiz. Pop-ups can get a bad rap because of their somewhat intrusive nature, but they’re often effective with getting more clicks and conversions.
We love the deeper education and helpful resources Jennifer packs into her quiz! If you are suggesting products to your customer leads, think about how you can do it in a way that adds value to their lives even before they buy your eCommerce product.
| Jennifer Jean’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 29Completions: 19Leads: 15Conversion rate: 52% |
What’s your coffee personality?
We’ve reviewed a few eCommerce businesses so far, but what about brands who are selling subscription boxes? What needs to change about your quiz when you are selling an eCommerce product with monthly recurring revenue?
Let’s take a look at Bean Box, a coffee subscription brand who uses their coffee personality quiz to increase email leads and customer conversions.
In order to help their quiz takers understand what kind of coffee personality they are, it makes sense that Bean Box begins the quiz with a question about their coffee preferences. The text for each answer option is simple, but the image-based answers help quiz takers choose their preference quickly based on the color of the coffee.
While you may think that every question on this quiz would be directly tied to the coffee theme, Bean Box decided to mix it up with a few fun questions to understand each quiz taker’s favorite desserts and ideal flavors. It still matches with a coffee personality but isn’t only coffee-related.
Did you know that 90% of the top viewed Interact quizzes have image-based answers? Bean Box’s quiz is one of our favorite examples of this because of the quality and consistency of each image. Think about how you can do the same with your eCommerce marketing quiz.
Based on the answers to these seven questions, quiz takers will then receive their coffee personality with a custom results page. Bean Box fuses pop culture into each title to make the results even more relevant and entertaining.
The quiz result description informs each quiz taker on what their coffee personality is, explains what that says about their preferences, and leads to a CTA button for them to buy a sampler.
For subscription-based products, it’s so smart to offer a product sample before asking a customer to commit to a product they want to receive every month. This gives the quiz taker the opportunity to test out a product before they decide if they like it enough to subscribe on an ongoing basis.
It’s much easier to convert someone who has tried and already loves your product than someone who just heard about your product. Use your eCommerce quiz as a way to qualify leads, give them a simple CTA, and turn their initial interest into recurring sales.
The last thing we love about Bean Box’s quiz is how it gives a special offer in the email opt-in form. 60% of users sign up for email lists in order to take advantage of special offers, so be sure to lead with an incentive your audience will love. In this case, the offer of trying Bean Box for $5 when the regular pricing starts at $19/moth makes it a steal.
| Bean Box’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 25,682Completions: 16,535Leads: 4,328Conversion rate: 17% |
Which color Tieks should you choose?
While shopping for shoes online can be incredibly convenient (heck, you don’t even have to leave your couch!), it doesn’t give you an opportunity to try shoes on before you buy. How can you make sure that you get the perfect pair on the first try?
The marketing team at Tieks, a well-known shoe brand that sells comfortable ballet flats, asked themselves the same question and came up with a fun quiz that highlights their products and gives tailored suggestions based on how each person answers five total questions.
The quiz starts by asking what the quiz taker’s Tieks style preference is along with how often they’ll be wearing their pair of Tieks.
Then the eCommerce quiz asks fun, personality-based questions so Tieks can get to know more about each customer. Without these questions, the quiz might feel too simple or serious. Keeping the tone light and fun is essential with a product recommendation quiz like this.
While these last quiz questions may seem like they are just for fun, they do have an effect on the final product recommendation result. These questions help Tieks decide which colors and patterns they want to recommend. For instance, New Year’s Eve might recommend a bold, vibrant printed shoe while Valentine’s Day might recommend a classic red shoe.
Tieks took an interesting strategy by redirecting all results to a shop page for the shoe they’re recommending. This allows quiz takers to easily add the shoe to their shopping cart and continue browsing other styles and colors.
While we typically recommend leading with a short description to describe each personality result, Tieks did a good job of adding more personality to their product descriptions.
Since Tieks sells premium-priced ballet flats that are made by hand, their personalized approach to online shopping with a simple eCommerce quiz helps them turn leads who are on the fence about making a purchase into loyal customers.
| Tieks’ eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 1,647Completions: 1,044Leads: 267Conversion rate: 16% |
What’s your signature jewelry style?
Caitlin of Boy Cherie, an eCommerce store full of handcrafted jewelry and sparkly treasures, wanted to find a way to show off her jewelry while helping her audience understand what styles they gravitate toward. She did all of this through her interactive quiz.
Like Tieks’ quiz example above, Caitlin only asks five quick questions in order to quickly deliver quiz results to each quiz taker. Every quiz question feels casual and, interestingly enough, none of the quiz questions are about the person’s jewelry preferences.
Instead, the quiz is focused on getting to know the desires and habits of each quiz taker so it can match them up with a general style that fits them. This makes the personality type description really pop on the quiz results page.
The description for The Minimalist quiz result is written in a positive way with favorable adjectives like “simple” and “stunning.” Quiz takers will also see a large CTA button that invites quiz takers to shop a collection of her newest jewelry arrivals.
Caitlin’s hope is to direct traffic toward her new arrivals shop page so quiz takers will be more likely to buy pieces from her collection.
While we typically recommend eCommerce shop owners direct quiz takers toward a personalized landing page with curated products, this works for Caitlin’s business since she has a smaller inventory than other jewelry brands.
Before you create your own quiz to market your eCommerce business, think about how you want to bring quiz takers through your brand experience. How do you want them to feel? What is important for them to know before confidently making a purchase? Make sure your answers to these questions are reflected in your quiz.
| Boy Cherie’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 15Completions: 7Leads: 7Conversion rate: 47% |
What kind of calligrapher are you?
Known for teaching iPad lettering to beginners, twin sisters and business partners Jordan and Jillian of Loveleigh Loops have been using their quiz to assess what type of calligrapher their audience is.
The quiz is positioned as the perfect place for new website visitors and blog readers to begin their iPad lettering journey if they aren’t sure where to start. It’s shown on Loveleigh Loop’s homepage as well as in a blog post about How to Find Your Calligraphy Style.
With so many different styles of lettering—from bounce to brush to faux calligraphy—this duo created an interactive quiz that helps people understand what styles they gravitate toward and what skillset they currently have.
The main goal of their quiz is to generate new leads for their growing email list community while introducing subscribers to their iPad lettering teaching methods. By leading with educational value, they’re able to build brand trust with quiz takers before they offer a variety of digital lettering courses, workshops, and eCommerce affiliate product links.
Here’s what we love about this eCommerce quiz:
When someone completes the quiz, they’ll read through a concise description that explains their results. In this example, the “Calligra-Newbie” talks about how someone who is at the start of their lettering journey might want to start with faux calligraphy.
The description then goes on to talk about why it’s the perfect style for them which builds the quiz taker’s confidence in what they should try first.
We love that Jordan and Jillian explain what quiz takers should do after they share their results. This two-point checklist sets expectations and lets their audience know exactly what to do next.
There’s also one clear call-to-action button that leads to a PDF that compares calligraphy styles and techniques. This makes it easy for quiz takers to start learning about the basics of lettering before they check their inbox for more information. It helps that the purple CTA button color really stands out against the white background.
If you are looking to create a quiz inside your eCommerce marketing strategy, you may want to think about how your quiz results and follow-up emails can lead to selling more digital products like Loveleigh Loops.
| Loveleigh Loop’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 3,106Completions: 2,015Leads: 2,015Conversion rate: 65% |
What’s the perfect soap for your skin?
With dozens of soap varieties, Bubbly Soaps wanted to create a quiz that does more than identify each quiz taker’s favorite scent and blend. It also pairs each person with the soap that is best for their skin type.
Here are a few descriptors that explain what makes Bubbly Soap’s products stand out from their other eCommerce competitors:
- All-Natural
- Vegan
- Cruelty-free
- Toxin-free
- Eco-friendly
- 100% Recyclable Packaging
- Great for Sensitive Skin
With this in mind, they used the terms “all-natural” and “vegan” from this list in their quiz description underneath the title and imagery on the quiz cover page. This is the perfect place to lead with your differentiators as an eCommerce shop!
If someone decides to take the quiz, they will need to answer seven quick questions before they receive their personalized quiz results. The themes of these questions range from what their favorite scent is to their dream vacation destination.
The quiz results are more focused on giving product recommendations than on the quiz personality type, but it works to accomplish Bubbly Soap’s goal of turning leads into customers. By sharing the specifics of each soap product in the quiz result description, audience members will be more likely to click the “Shop Now” button to add the soap to their shopping cart.
To sweeten the offer, Bubbly Soap also gives quiz takers a special 10% discount when they sign up for Bubbly Soap’s email list. This is a great way to increase your lead conversions on the email opt-in page. They’ll also receive skincare tips and updates from the brand which will nurture these incoming leads in hopes that they will buy additional eCommerce products from the brand.
| Bubbly Soap’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 135Completions: 83Leads: 42Conversion rate: 31% |
What’s your wellness personality?
With so many free resources already created in her archive of blog content, book author and food blogger Phoebe Lapine wanted to find a way to recommend health-related resources to her audience members.
Knowing each person comes to her blog with a different motivation, Phoebe thought creating a wellness personality quiz would help readers self-identify what resources they need while highlighting her key offerings: a newly published book and wellness course.
Phoebe’s quiz is unique in that it leads to a physical product (her book) and a digital product offer (her course). If you run an eCommerce business that includes both types of products, take notes from Phoebe’s quiz example on how to do this well.
Phoebe knew she wanted to create a quiz as an email opt-in for her blog but felt frustrated with the tech side of building things to sell her course and book. Interact helped her simplify the quiz building process while helping her drive more leads to her eCommerce shop.
Here’s what Phoebe had to say about using Interact to make her eCommerce quiz:
| “A friend recommended Interact to me, and the interface was shockingly simple. Plus the Interact team gave me plenty of advice on how to actually create, score, and compute the results for my quiz. For fellow quiz junkies with borderline personality test disorder who want to try their own hand at making one, I couldn’t recommend this service more.” – Phoebe Lapine |
Now, let’s break down what we love about Phoebe’s quiz.
Instead of beginning her quiz with an obvious question about the quiz taker’s wellness struggle, Phoebe opts in for a more creative question (seen below). Mentioning a “good witch” or “antique carnival fortune teller machine” granting a wish immediately gives quiz takers a fanciful image of what Phoebe is talking about.
Before you create your own eCommerce quiz, think about how you can inject more personality into your quiz questions and answers. People love taking quizzes that feel light-hearted and fun. Just make sure you don’t try to force humor. Let your personality come through your quiz content naturally so it makes a great impression on your audience.
After a quiz taker answers seven questions (which is around our recommended amount of questions), they’ll receive their quiz results.
We really like how Phoebe starts by giving her audience a short summary of their quiz result but then offers a clear CTA button that brings them to a quiz result landing page with more information (like this).
Each landing page breaks down what each quiz result says about their wellness habits and traits, helping quiz takers determine what they need to change in their wellness journey. It also identifies each person’s wellness strengths and weaknesses.
One quiz result landing page feature that really stands out is Phoebe’s curated list of three things for each personality type to try. By including only three pieces of advice, Phoebe helps her audience members take action without overwhelming them with too much information. She also adds a gorgeous styled photo for more visual interest so the page doesn’t feel too text-heavy.
Lastly, each landing page leads to a CTA section at the bottom that gives her audience the opportunity to either download her free eBook (related to her published book’s topic) or learn more about her course. It’s a simple and straight-forward way to end her landing page.
After reading through the landing page, quiz takers will receive a follow-up email sequence that primes them for future product sales based on their personality type. From start to finish, this quiz experience is packed with valuable resources and helpful tips that make it stand out from other wellness quizzes.
| Phoebe Lapine’s eCommerce quiz stats: Starts: 3,788Completions: 1,870Leads: 1,870Conversion rate: 49% |
