Good afternoon,
Welcome to Episode 15 of the BowTiedWookie substack. In this article, we are going to take a break from our regularly scheduled programming and perform a deep dive on how we custom-built a quiz to lower the bounce rate on our site, increase conversions on our digital product, and increase email capture. Being able to do any one of these on your site is a big deal. Especially when you can do it completely for free!
In this article, we are going to walk through exactly how we built this test, and why what we did is way way better than the shitty quizzes you see on 99% of e-com sites.
Below is a breakdown from the unbelievably talented and handsome BowTiedPlug.
If you aren’t interested in the technical aspect you can skip to the end to see our results so far and how you can implement something like this to generate additional revenue and increase engagement on your site.
How we came to a plugin decision
Our main requirement was finding something that could actually provide personalized results. We didn’t want to make fluff. We wanted to make something useful and engaging.
As much as we like to use Sleepolois for inspiration and strategy their quiz is embarrassing (although kudos to them for giving us the idea).
Revenuehunt’s Product Recommendation Quiz works with Shopify and WooCommerce. Additionally, it can provide customized results based on quiz answers.
This is one of the most well-built plugins we have ever used, and their support is extremely helpful. Give it a year or two, and this plugin will explode in popularity.
The details below might be lengthy, but I can’t help my passion for plugins (hence BowTiedPlug) ! I’ll break down all of the well-thought-out features this plugin has that enabled us to create this experience on our site.
Quiz Builder
The quiz builder is the engine to create the questions and offers various question types, settings, and jump/skip logic.
Question Types
Although this plugin offers various types of questions, we stuck to two:
Multiple Choice
Email Optin - Last question before results to ask if they would like to opt into getting the results and a free guide (always make it optional!)
Jump/Skip Logic
We didn’t use this feature yet to keep it simple, but it allows you to skip or jump into different flows of questions based on responses and then merge back into the main flow. For example, if you asked, “What sport do you play?” you could ask follow-up questions based on the specific sport and then merge the flow back into a general question like “Did you have any injuries?”.
We plan on making our questions more detailed in the future but are bullish on the tool because this type of specificity is built in.
Linking Products + Voting System
The previous section was pretty cool but how can it help you make money? You can link your products based on the answers. This makes the quiz tally up “votes” on products based on the user's responses and displays the products with the most votes on the results. Linking by-product is tedious, especially if you have a ton of products, so we decided to link based on attributes instead.
Linking by Categories/Attributes/Tags
This is the more dynamic and preferable way to link products. Remember how I said to use WooCommerce to store affiliate products? Well, I created and populated attributes for each product through WooCommerce and linked them to the specific quiz questions.
Example of how this works:
Create attribute “Diet” in Woocommerce
Link each type of diet (paleo, keto, vegan, etc) to the question in the quiz
When you import products to WooCommerce, assign the skin type
Now products will automatically flow into the quiz without any additional extra manual work. We went a step further to add another attribute called “Quiz Enabled” to prevent unwanted products from flowing in.
Exclusions are also an awesome feature! Certain products are clearly marketed toward females, so we tag them accordingly and exclude those products if the user selects Male.
Integrations and Customer Tagging
This plugin comes with awesome integrations, and we utilized the Google Analytics and Mailchimp integration. Both connected super smoothly without any problems!
GA:
Start, Question, Choice, Product, and Email events are created automatically with the connection. This is POWERFUL for segmenting in Google Analytics and tie sessions based on some of these options. Just another way to get closer to the customer and truly understand opportunities.
Mailchimp
Each answer to a question can be tagged and passed through to Mailchimp or another e-mail integration. We tagged every answer and long term looking to segment email journeys off of this.
Quiz Design
This part of the plugin could use some work, but they still offer great features! In the meantime, it’s a decent amount of raw CSS, but they provide templates and snippets in their documentation.
I had to add some custom CSS since the quiz is more built toward D2C sites. For example: Hiding the empty price. However, the quiz is pulling in affiliate products from WooCommerce and pulls in the external link within the results. Now if your main affiliate link ever changed it would automatically flow into the quiz results.
Finally, the magic! Tailored Results!
Fair warning, anything customized will take writing loads of content for each scenario depending on how deep you want to get. It’s easiest to start with an idea of which buckets of content you will need, then work on adding the content within those buckets.
For example, if you wanted a section that elaborates on their skin type then we wrote content for each skin type.
Products
Let’s say you have a basketball quiz and want to show the top results for shoes, ball, and shorts. The product slots allow you to create sections to pull in products and then assign categories or attributes to pull into that section.
This way, it’s not just the total “votes” coming down to a set number of products but can also be a number of votes based on the slot.
We set this up based on four product types.
Putting it all together
One lacking feature is the final piece of displaying it to the customer. All of the options feel a bit clunky, so we decided to create a new page and embed the quiz within the new page. Any time we link to the quiz, it is set to open in a new tab so the user can come back to their article easily.
Promoting and Split Testing
I am a huge fan of the Advanced Ads plugin! This plugin is meant to manage ads but can also be used to embed content dynamically within blogs.
I created four reusable CTA blocks, took the shortcode, and created “ads” within the Advanced Ads plugin. It’s currently set to display before the 4th H2 on all but the top 10 blogs currently.
Looking forward
We are trying a few things next to push the quiz.
We realized our magnet pop-up only converts on about 20 articles. We will create a pop-up for the quiz on the rest of the articles.
Testing image embeds for the CTA embed to improve CTR
Alter wording of the first few questions to prevent drop-off. The first questions are pretty personal, so we might move those to the end and describe how we don’t sell that information, and it’s only for the quiz.
Results So Far
So maybe you love the tech side of this stuff or maybe you hate it. Either way, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get good results!
So far the results have been outstanding. If you have been following our progress over the last few months you will know that despite traffic being flat to slightly up our sales have tanked. We went from ~20 digital product sales a month in February to 7 in April. Since introducing this quiz over the last two weeks we have gotten 10 sales!
V1 of the quiz has almost brought us back to our previous sales levels. As we continue to run different tests we believe it could generate 4x what we are currently doing.
Right now we are just testing different embeds (4 different ones). The CTR on every variant is under 1%. If we can get the CTR on the embed to 2%-3% we anticipate we will capture ~25 emails per day and make around $1,200 per month just from digital product sales.
We are excited to share more about our overall month with you next week in our monthly recap.
Have a great weekend.
❤️
BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug
Love the step by step breakdown of the plug in. Will definitely try to incorporate a quiz on my site 💪