To succeed in the high-stakes realms of B2B and B2C ecommerce, retailers must provide personalized shopping experiences that foster trust and lasting relationships.
According to MarTech, many customers are willing to exchange their information with brands if it helps them access personalized content and engaging experiences.
What is a Product Recommendation Quiz?
Product recommendation quizzes (also known as ecommerce quizzes or shoppable quizzes) typically present shoppers with a series of questions to help them narrow down an online merchant’s product selection. Some quizzes are written with a linear, unrelated flow, while others are crafted in a decision-based flow. In other words, each response dictates the next query in the “interview.”
Just like human customer service clerks in physical stores (the kind that aren’t motivated by quotas or commissions,) guided results can help a shopper quickly navigate to products that meet their buying criteria. Online buyers are often overwhelmed by choices, search fields, and promotions for products they are not interested in. While these promotions might be an effort to sell overstocked merchandise, they often emphasize that the merchant knows nothing about their customers.
Increasing Transaction Value by Gaining Trust
Offering transaction value-based promotional pricing a set of recommended products to an online visitor based on their product quiz results is more effective than scattershot promotions. A Forbes article suggests offering discounts when they increase their average order value (AOV).
For example, offering $25 off to a customer who typically spends $200, if they buy $250 in merchandise. Yet earn permission to incent a customer to spend more money than usual, you need to understand what they usually like, and what they need now.
Many digitally-savvy online shoppers have grown to distrust browser cookies and trackers. A guided product quiz can create transparency in the online sales process and increase conversion rates from prospects and returning customers. Transparency and assurances that you can provide an enhanced, stress-free shopping experience often compel customers to let their guard down on sharing their private zero-party data.
Addressing Unfinished Customer Buying Journeys
According to ongoing research by the Baymard Institute, 69.57% of customers abandon their online shopping carts on desktop computers and 86% on mobile devices. A 14-30% completed purchase success rate means online sellers lose around $18 billion in sales revenue because customers are sufficiently dissatisfied with their product buying journey that they find another online seller to buy their items.
Many of these abandoned carts result from dissatisfaction with the checkout process, lack of trust in a brand’s online store, and unwillingness to create an account. Yet a guided selling tool can help an online merchant earn the trust to make an initial sale. Further, it can merit upselling or cross-selling of new lines of goods and services at transaction time, or soon. It’s ideal when a prospect or customer feels that the products or services you offer them when they submit their quiz are truly based on their quiz results. It removes much of the friction which may otherwise scuttle a purchase decision.
Guide a Shopper to a Purchase Decision, Don’t Push the Envelope
As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Ensure your guided selling tool offers questions that instill confidence that your goal is to assist the customer in finding the right products, without seeming too pushy. Like horses, online buyers can get “spooked” easily if they feel cornered or pressured, and bolt for a competitor’s website.
A 2018 research report referenced by Forbes found that customers get “creeped out” during the buying process if a seller discloses information about them that was gathered from a 3rd party provider. Especially if it was clear the online shopper didn’t disclose it during one of their interactions with your company.
It helps to customize your to match the style and tone of the rest of your online storefront and provides an engaging, consistent shopping experience. Do you have built your online store on a platform like Salesforce Commerce Cloud that is SFRA and SiteGenesis certified? If so, create a cohesive, informed shopping experience for your customers which ends in confident, hassle-free purchase decisions.
For more information about OSF Digital’s Guided Product Finder cartridge for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, visit our website. Or contact us to schedule a live demo.
