How To Capture Zero-Party Data to Effectively Personalise At Scale

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online [Music]
hi and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson all of
this week's notes and links can be found at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
now the power of personalization is a game changer for any
business if you've ever wanted to know how to capture zero party data and effectively drive revenue you're in the
right place that's for sure so stay tuned and we'll show you how you can do just that
in a simple and affordable way hey there are you a business owner here at oregon
digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
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customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters
most save yourself the time and the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business
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come check us out at oreodigital.com and let us know what you think
thanks for joining us on the ecommerce podcast it is great that you are here it's it's always great that you turn
into the show uh i i really appreciate you being part of the audience here uh part of the econ podcast family uh it's
great it really is now whether you are just starting out or if like me you've been around for a while the goal of this
show is simple it's to help you grow your e-commerce and digital businesses and to do that
every week we bring you great show sponsors who are going to help you but we also want to bring you amazing guests
experts in their own field with their stories and insights and ideas and
principles that we can use practically to help us start adapt and grow on
line so today we are talking to again he is the co-founder of pre-hook a leading
quiz platform for shopify merchants he also hosts the e-commerce marketing
podcast card overflow where he shares what the best brand operators agencies
and tech platforms are doing to grow their e-commerce revenues again has been
around e-commerce for years in fact more than years and with the last seven years in
e-commerce sas or software as a service as they say prior to pre-hook he was
part of the founding team and lead marketing at jungle scout the
leading software for amazon sellers if you've heard of it i definitely have and have used it in the past so i was
intrigued to talk to this young chap who was part of that whole team he is a native new yorker but these days calls
austin texas his home he'll tell you how he got from a to b you'll want to know that he lives there with his wife and
four-year-old daughter and when he's not working on pre-hook or podcasting or parenting
you can find him playing basketball can't help but think that should have started with a p but there you go
or hosting dinner parties pre pandemic there we go we've got the p in that way [Laughter]
so before i totally wreck this intro with unnecessary alliterations here is my interview uh you're not going to want
to miss it well again thank you so much for being with us here on the ecommerce podcast
Where is Matt
great to have you whereabouts in the world are you dialing in from yeah thanks matt for having me i'm in austin
texas oh okay central texas and i imagine uh as i look
out the window now again as many a listener will know i tend to lament
about british weather uh because today is no exception to the standard rule it is gray and damp and drizzly uh so i'm
assuming uh you have sunshine and rainbows uh that's just how i picture it
sunshine in texas freedom texas yeah are you uh are you have you always been
a texan uh or have you sort of been imported in uh yeah imported and i i was
born and raised in new york city and i lived on the east coast
for uh most of my life and then moved out to california uh ended up in texas from san
francisco i was working at jungle scout we were a remote team and
open the headquarters in austin texas so pretty much moved here with my family and uh we've been here
ever since which is like four years and we really loved it all right i imagine it's quite different from new
york city and from san francisco i'm not i just mean i i just i've never been to
austin i've been i've done dallas quite a few times and i in my head i'm just like quite different places aren't there new
york san francisco totally totally growing up i thought like ah new york is like the pinnacle of the world
capital everything revolves around life in new york maybe some ways true but now you know especially post pandemic or in the
pandemic things are very different uh yeah a lot of space and austin's just a great place to raise a family and
yeah quality yeah no interesting in fact but funnily enough we've had recently quite a few guests on the show from
austin texas so there must be something about about austin and e-commerce do you guys
i've never really asked this do you guys have like a digital hub there where they're sort of they're encouraging uh businesses online to sort of thrive
that's a good question uh i don't think so i mean they're they're definitely like some co-working spaces
that are like the epicenter of a lot of like stuff but in general just like the tech and the companies that are moving
here the opportunities uh like tesla's right down the block for me and right apple samsung amazon google facebook
they're all here um and opening up and growing so a lot of opportunities i think it's like people moving here a
day oh wow yeah so they're bringing them a lot of talented income tax so that's a big financial
incentive there's okay wow that's always nice when you pay less
tax uh yes absolutely absolutely so again your specialty um
What is Prehook
as we talked about on the uh pre-call was something which uh you caught well you said you're talking a lot about this
idea of zero party data at the moment and um your company specializes in creating um
if make sure i've got this right and correct me if i'm wrong but you you specialize in doing sort of quizzes don't you on e-commerce sites um
and you use sort of quizzes or questions to help direct buyers uh to making
quicker easier better decisions is that a fair summary totally yeah it's uh so i'm a co-founder of pre-hook which is a
quiz platform for shop by merchants basically we help merchants learn more about their customers so
ask a few questions capture a lead whether that's email sms even a crypto
wallet address if you want to airdrop something and then recommend a product so the goal is to improve conversion
rate by simplifying the buying process uh this is especially helpful if people
don't necessarily know what they're looking for so in some ways simulates what an in-person sales associate would
do where you have a conversation learn what your goals challenges interests preferences are
then from there you're accelerating less growth by you know whatever the offer is like how can we
send you more information about this and the third pillar which i think is maybe even the most important at this
point is capturing yeah zero party data as you mentioned which is data that a
customer willingly and proactively shares with you with you being the merchant so this differs from
first party data which is data that you're tracking as a merchant passively so this could be stuff like
what items were purchased or how much a customer has spent or maybe
where they live based on the billing zip zip code or the shipping zip code um but
there's a lot of assumptions baked in there if you're going to assume that say matt lives in england and therefore you
know has these things of gray weather and and other things but if you ask matt like what are you
looking for or maybe what your ideal is or you know questions specific to the brand then
you're actually able to understand what they're looking for and then therefore position your product and your brand
specific to matt's interests matt's needs so ultimately it helps improve positioning
and marketing after their on-site experience with a quiz
now that's great and i i thank you for defining what zero party data means uh
and first party data and i i like that because you're right i think as e-commerce businesses we've over the
years we've relied heavily on the data which we gather like you know how often you buy when you buy what time
of day where whereabouts are you from what sort of products do you look at this is all data that we gather based on
what your actions are and it's rarely based on questions that we ask you um and and so
um if i'm hearing you right one of the the dangers then is the assumptions that we make
based on the data that we collect and we think it's data driven but actually it's assumptions based on data
as opposed to being necessarily clear-cut data uh and so i can see how that leads to
confusion um i we've recently uh done a podcast with a guy called valentin um
and valentin was telling a story yeah yeah do you know valentin yeah yeah such a cool guy he was telling us a
The Cuddle Factor
story about how um a company uh that sold blankets he was talking
about heavyweight blankets and they were selling them with what he called the cuddle factor and all their images do
you know i mean that sort of cozy kind of feel um but it wasn't until they actually asked their customers that they
found out that a lot of people were buying them because they couldn't sleep at night and these blankets helped them sleep it was nothing to do with cuddle
factors and being cozy it was quite a real life problem that they had um but they didn't understand that until
they actually started to ask customers the questions which i thought was fascinating um so is that the kind of thing that
you're talking about it's that kind of listen you've got to you've got to ask them the
customer some real questions to actually understand what's really going on here absolutely yeah absolutely
it's about understanding yeah what problem you're solving and so seth godin
has a great quote in uh this is marketing his book uh maybe like from a few years ago
that marketing is a selfless act of helping others achieve who they want to become so
we as a customer have this aspirational end point of what we want to be and then we have this
current state of where we are and then there's the difference the delta between the two and if we understand where we
currently are as a customer and where they want to go so point a point b then you can effectively bridge the gap
with your brand and your product hey like you know matt you are for whatever problem you're experiencing
we we will help you get there so if it's say a product like a multivitamin
a multivitamin that's a good example just because there are a lot of different use cases or
benefits that people are trying to derive from the product but you don't know what that is until you
ask so if it is uh fighting an immune system or if it is just general health or reducing anxiety or helping with
sleep or any of these things if you just ask one or two questions you can far more effectively position your
product to solve the problem that the customer is looking for so um marketing ultimately is about
getting the right message in for the right person at the right time and with a quiz you're able to kind of like add
these data points to help you do that yeah it's interesting because one of the
things that as you're talking about these the the questions one of the things that we learned several years ago
that good seo or good search engine optimization was understanding what questions people were typing into google
and then writing a blog post answering that question and i appreciate that's an oversimplification but do what i mean it
was like they customers had questions and you can answer them and the more you answer them the the more uh
the better engagement you had with whatever it was that you were selling um but what is how does that then tie in with
The Quiz
how you would use a quiz for example um and and i i asked this slightly uh
tongan cheek knowing for well that in england a quiz is like um there's a thing in england
called the pub quiz right and we go to the pub and basically you'll sit there with your friends and
they will ask all kinds of general knowledge questions and you have to write the answers down that's how we
view a quiz so is that what you're talking about um when it comes to quizzes for websites
as a mechanism for and asking these questions yes and no um
it's yes in the sense that it is asking questions but not
in in it's not like supposed to be an arduous task or something tedious like the whole
goal where it becomes effective is that there's an exchange of value in the quiz and i think that's where
the brands that do the best with quizzes uh get it right and so
customers today are willing to share data but in exchange
there's an expectation that there will be a better shopping experience there will be personalization and that the
data is the the gathering of the data is transparent and that's exactly what a quiz is
uh so there are some interesting stats uh i think it was from segment which is
a software company uh and accenture a consulting company independently they've found that people will have a spend more
so improve their or increase their average order value have more repeat purchases and
ultimately higher lifetime value if there is a personalized experience
around the um their shopping experience but if you don't get it right then you will you
will kind of like the blast email the one size fits all campaigns that will deter
customers from shopping with you right or purchasing so it's really important to narrow
what your what you're saying and to whom you are saying it and i think that's that's one of the biggest opportunities
in and uh and beyond and where we're trying to help which is this
customer experience gap that customers are looking for personalized experiences
but the challenge and the opportunity is that markets are struggling to do that and it whether it is about the tooling
or whether it's about the data that they have or the know-how of how to actually implement that is
it's not happening it might be like three out of ten or something are actually executing on the promise of
personalization so the brands that are able to do that can captive capitalize on the higher aov the higher improvement
of conversion rate and a higher lifetime value from the personalization
that's really interesting i like that phrase the customer experience gap uh i i think that's an interesting phrase so
i guess in if i'm if i can just echo back what i've heard you've got to ask customers questions
that they actually want to answer um is a i appreciate that might be
oversimplifying things but it in my head i get asked a lot of questions a lot of questions every day most of which i
ignore because i simply don't want to answer them i don't want to take the time to answer that question
so i guess with with this whole idea of gathering zero party data
you've got to ask something that people want to answer they're willing to answer and to do that there
has to be an exchange of value i'm also um i'm also intrigued
by what you said about how that obviously can increase average order value and average order frequency which
has an impact on your lifetime value i get that what was fascinating to me was actually
if you get it wrong it has a detrimental effect on sales so it's almost better not to ask those questions if you're
going to ask the wrong questions have i understood that right well not that
asking the wrong questions necessarily would do that but if you're not you're not
providing a good customer experience essentially and so that under that umbrella of bad customer
experience would just be like um uh irrelevant experience or irrelevant
messaging irrelevant offers um just something that's misaligned with what i'm looking for as a customer so
um you know up until this point brands have uh relied the dtc brands have relied
heavily on advertising as a platform because there was this rich repository of data that say uh facebook or or
google would have and so you can create campaigns and with finely targeted campaigns that you understand who you're
reaching well now that we have ios which removes the access to data and so
you've seen that with facebook and you know they're plummeting and valued because brands can no longer rely on ads
as a reliable and profitable channel uh same with third-party cookies so third-party cookies are going to be
deprecated in so these these platforms that track customer data are
no longer available it's incumbent on brands to build that relationship to capture that data
themselves and i think that that is becoming a uh a defensive moat and a competitive
advantage for those brands that have it and once you do have it then you can
create campaigns you can create tighter segmentation to improve the relevance and the timeliness of uh who you're
sending and what messages and offers you're sending great
god i'm i'm sold i'm in right i i think i you know it and it makes a lot of sense and you're right it's getting
harder and harder to track data and so you've got to go and find that information at yourself
so um before we get into the how would you how you do that because obviously that's the
the the big question people have him now he's like this is great but where do i start and how do i get going with this
whole thing um what was your journey to get you to this place to being um i guess
Journey To Jungle Scout
you mentioned something earlier about jungle scout taking you from uh san francisco to austin and you've been
there about four years and now you've got this company um uh webhooks where you're pre-hook yeah
sorry pre-hooks uh where you're you're helping customers with these sort of quizzes how did you get from from
between those two things what led you on that journey to where you are now i'm intrigued yeah totally so
yeah it was uh i joined jungle scout in the fall of at that point it was it
was a chrome extension soon to launch the web app and just to clarify jungle scout is an amazon product research tool
the leading tool for amazon sellers to find products to launch and understand their inventory and manage their sales
and essentially grow and uh so as part of the the founding team led the marketing
um from took it from the founder and ceo greg mercer uh and then part of that
founding team that started building the initial web app were what are now my two co-founders uh as in
diedrich so um we've been working together a long time we both left a few years ago and
realized it for amazon merchants or amazon sellers
they didn't necessarily need to um they had a different marketing strategy and a lot of it was based on seo that you know
you have like one widget and you are ultimately trying to uh rank as high as
possible for a basket of search queries or keywords so it was focused on
creating the right listing because you kind of had an idea of who would be buying it and why
shopify merchants or brands that have their own traffic drive their own traffic have a different challenge which is to understand what
problem they're solving for understand what their shoppers are looking for so that you can solve that problem and sell
your widget and so we did a little bit of research because at the time and this
is maybe early merchants were maybe using type form to solve that
problem upfront maybe ask a few questions and then but typeform did have its limitations we
found out based on uh how it could integrate with shopify how it integrated
with other uh key tools in the tech stack that merchants use um so we we
thought that there was an opportunity to improve that for merchants so that they could directly
integrate with shopify recommend products directly where after the quiz they could add to cart
checkout and and the conversion process would be far easier
so yeah we started building it maybe uh for months or a year
and then launched in early so at that point you know in that span of
time there had been the ios changes there had been uh you know like cost per
clicks have been rising for ad platforms ultimately um acquisition costs were
increasing and so there was a greater urgency and need for brands to to capture the data to to
build a direct relationship and ultimately own the customer relationship as opposed to
uh using ad platforms which aren't owned you're basically like buying access to
it from these monoliths that's wonderful yes it's a fascinating
journey that you've taken and and and honestly i it just leads me to ask quite a lot of questions yeah which we are
going to get into in part two of my conversation uh with again here so don't
go anywhere as we're just going to listen to some messages from this week's show sponsors
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consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
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How Often Should I Ask Questions
so here i am back again with again carrying on our conversation so listen but uh the um
you've sort of you've gone from jungle scout you've you've set up your own business uh
helping people and mainly shopify sites with your platform right and um
i guess that let's let's maybe start with some of the the big questions like um i have a an e-commerce website we
have let's say you know we're a reasonable size couple of million turning over how often should i be asking customers
questions like every time they come to the site or or just once and that's it is there
is there some place that i need to think about when it comes to starting in terms of the quantity of times i ask questions
uh by quantity do you mean like where the the quiz should be like where the call
to action to take a quiz should be yeah like um do do you survey
uh customers every time they come to the site for example or or not oh yeah well
OnSite Personalization
ideally not i i think um and that that kind of goes to the personalization like uh you know like one of my pet peeves is
you know register for a webinar but i get an email and they're asking me for to register but they already have my email so why are they asking me to like
opt in again yeah yeah so it's like if you can show that you
you are building upon the existing knowledge of the customer that you have great and and so i think we're starting
to see some some brands that are doing really cool things with on-site personalization so um yeah ideally
you're not bombarding them with uh you know take the quiz or or opt-in
or you know some of these these like um intrusive pop-ups
but where where can you take the quiz and how often
should somebody take it well i guess it depends on the brand like for example some of these subscription
e-commerce brands um stitch fix or wink or
scent bird these are all subscription e-commerce as in uh every month you're getting a
package sent to you those experiences have to have a quiz and so they have an onboarding quiz
reason being is it's so important for them to understand what the the preference is what
ultimately what the customer is looking to receive on a regular basis so that they can be satisfied with every
purchase that's or every box that's sent to them the more data that they have the better they can do to fulfill those
needs and ultimately you know it's very interesting stitchfix has become
a data science platform in a sense that their you know their quiz has like maybe
something questions kind of quick tinder style you know like or don't like thumbs up
thumbs down um but they have that on the front end and then on the back end you know what did you
like about your your package what didn't you and so of course they're incentivized to
send a product because or send boxes that meet as many of my requirements as
possible because they get paid or you know the more that they send that i buy the higher my average order value per
boxes sure but ultimately this comes down to churn on a recurring
basis for the subscription e-commerce for some of the brands that are more one-off purchases and don't rely on
subscriptions it it depends on how important the quiz is to the experience
uh one of our uh one of the companies that is doing really well with the quiz is called t elixir that's
t-e-e-l-i-x-i-r uh and they're they're like an adaptogen brand like a mushroom
uh t to solve different problems the value that they're seeing from the
quiz is that people don't necessarily know a lot about adaptogen so it's an opportunity to
educate the customers uh and from there simplifying the buying process like
they have a wide range of flavors but a wide range of uh
health problems that they're solving with their product and so by asking a few questions they make it very simple
to know okay so this is the lion's mane tea that i need or this is the the chaga tea that i need and here's why
so they use it on the onset experience but then as i was saying earlier it's about the
data that you're using and then how you're you're using it to send more relevant information so they
they use it very effectively with clavio to create segments based on hey this is
like the health problem i'm solving or this is uh my goal with um with buying this product
and then creating these these flows or these automations in klavio that address
specifically what i'm looking for and so by increasing the relevancy light bulb moments can go off at a
higher frequency right great so i i
bringing this back a little bit then to education so i can use the quiz idea to i get when it comes to
a subscription model i suppose the one that i think about the most recent one that i did personally was i was on a
site which did bespoke uh vitamins they made this and so they asked you a bunch of questions and then
they gave you a bespoke prescription every month and that's kind of a quiz and i get that with uh the subscription which leads to
the stuff you get every month being the right stuff that you want um and i i get how it works with the
just come tea licks here is that right the the company t elixir so um
what about um what about using it uh destroyed on
something that you said which intrigued me could you use it for education so let's for say for example um i don't
have that many products um so i don't i don't necessarily need to give you a quiz to narrow down because i've got one
or two products you either buy them or you don't right um but could you then use the quiz
idea to find out where you need to educate the customer
just in you know how your products work maybe or the benefits or whatever it is you know
i guess i'm thinking give an example let's say i just manufacture
um a hand plane for woodworking you know some it's just a manual and that's all i
manufacture could i use quizzes then to
help me understand this customer understands how to use a hand plane this one doesn't this one knows how to sharpen it this one doesn't judah mean
and all those sort of ideas which i can then integrate with systems like clavio to send them email sequences to onboard
them well have you does that make sense yeah it totally does and uh what popped into my mind is
it was a harvard professor and i think his name is theodore levitt an old marketing professor and is his uh
phrase which has become a marketing adage is people don't buy a drill they buy the whole as in it's not the features it's
the benefits and that's very similar to what you're talking about like yeah sure it's a hand plane but what are you going to be doing with a
hand plane you don't know if you're in a vacuum but you do know if you yeah like you say
current experience or potential use case or yeah like
willingness to pay is in like price range or you know like preferences um
these are all things that would definitely help to um to create more effective messaging uh
in the on-site so like merchandising and hey this is why this hand plane is ideal
for you um and but then also so you can then you get into your marketing and your copywriting where you're walking
them through say like here's let me grab your attention with this hand plane here's here's a little
bit more you know you can probably maybe for following the ada framework attention interest desire um
action yeah thank you um and then yeah so so you're kind of like
walking them through that but you're you you have more detail to what they're looking for um an example with few skus
but where merchandising is really important is say a mattress so a mattress is
a high average order value say a thousand dollars or more and it's not something that you purchase
a lot um and it's also in some ways a commodity right because like
who knows the difference between a tuft needle mattress versus a casper mattress one brand that i think like one of my
favorite quizzes is by a brand called helix sleep so at their hero image they have you know
take a sleep quiz and it starts with basic information how many people are going to be using
bed maybe say one or two uh what are these people like in terms of gender weight height um so
that's like okay that makes it easy in terms of sizing then we get into what their preferences are do they like
a hard soft medium feel then uh where are their pains is it like um back pain
neck pain no pain uh that that helps understand like which mattress is the best uh and then sleep
position side back front and so they go through the the quiz is i think
five questions ask for an email and then exactly after the
taking the quiz opting in with an email you're taking to a landing page specific
for the recommended product why it is the right product for you why
helix has decided to recommend that for you and it's incorporating the quiz responses that you just gave
and then their subsequent email um sequence is addressing those needs and
that's really important because if you think about a like an uh thousand dollar mattress
i obviously don't know the numbers but i imagine it's not a super high conversion rate on a first time visit maybe
more of the sales are attributed to email or sms or some of the subsequent messaging and
that messaging is is far more powerful with these data points that they gather in the quiz so that that's an example
it's maybe similar to a hand plane in that it it's
kind of a simple thing but it can be uh far more elaborate of a marketing and
effective of marketing campaign uh with these data points gathered in the quiz
i tell you where i saw a phenomenal example of what you just talked about again and it's the idea that sort of um
or the example that came to mind as you were talking i remember once i went into the apple
store here in liverpool and i remember standing there sort of i like to do it every now and again just
go and watch how apple do things love them all hate them and at the moment i hate them um tomorrow i might love them
but i won't go into the reasons why i hate them uh i have my issues um but i
you kind of go into the apple store and i remember watching a chap walk into the store he
was an elderly gentleman um and the the the sort of the the chief
welcome i don't know what they call him but the person that says hello when you walk through the door said to him hey why are you here today that was the
first question and he said oh i think i want to get one of those ipad things
and so he was like okay let me point you in the direction of i don't know tom tom over here he's our ipad expert he can
help you so question number one was asked and answered and they were pointed in the right direction
tom then says i hear you on an ipad and the guy goes yes and um i was very intrigued by the
question tom what ethnics and tom said to him he said well can i ask why why do you want an ipad what will
you use it for question number two and so the chat then says well i think
you can do something can't you where i can i can call my grandkids but i can see them
and he was talking about facetime right and so tom uh just went yes we have something that
can do that we actually call it facetime but don't worry about that for now let me show you how it works and so just stands there for five minutes
demonstrating how facetime works and he says i'll tell you what you wait here i'm gonna go to
the side of the store with a different ipad i'm going to call you you and this is just to show you how easy it is you
click the button we'll have a conversation and then you can call me if you like and this old fella's going brilliant that's great and so they do
this call this whole simulation takes like i don't know three or four minutes you know it's not a long time that they do
this and so uh the the chat that walked in was
he he was like great where do i sign this is exactly what i want and tom the apple guy never talked him
once about the ram the memory the size the color he didn't talk to him about
all the other stuff you can do with the ipad he never once mentioned gaming or any of that sort of stuff he just literally focused in on why he came in
and the chat walked out very happy because he knew what he could do and he knew how to do what he needed to do
and i and they did that just with two questions and i thought it was incredibly incredibly powerful actually uh to watch
that and so i've always been intrigued since i i did see watch that it's like how do i how do i replicate that on my website
right which is what you're talking about so where do we um
where's a good place to start with you know the sort of the questions that we think
customers want to be asked it's like how do we figure what they figure out what those questions are even you know how do
we know what to ask yeah that's a good question so uh
What to ask
how did how to know what to ask uh i i think that one good way to start is
how you as an as a marketer as an e-commerce marketer like what data are you going to need what like customer
questions like um the chap at that i don't know i can use the word chap um
what are they looking for so like what what problem are you trying to solve
um then how how would you uh speak to different customers in
different ways so that's ultimately like what data points are you creating segments around um so if you are a
fragrance brand for example we uh fragrance bands find a lot of value in quizzes or or a
skincare brand is it a normal uh skin dry skin oily skin or for
fragrance they're like citrus floral woodsy and so that that might help you
understand like what products would be most relevant and so you create segments in in your email
service provider um then it might be uh
maybe what problem they have um and so that's where like your vitamin brand or
or the adaptogen brand um might be helpful so you know like what what
success looks like to the customer so then you can help paint the picture and and so this could
be translated in in multiple ways like say for example if it's like the type of
user generated content or customer test testimonials or success stories that you want to show because i think that's part
of it um or maybe it's part what part of the founder's story you want to share with them in their in your post quiz or
your welcome flow um so i think maybe the the problems that you're solving maybe some of the preferences and
interests might be helpful to know um so if it's clothes like um what
colors do you like or or patterns or um we have like a ring brand um like what
setting do you like um so i think maybe thinking through some of these things of like of based on your existing customer base
or your experience with speaking with customers or your support tickets um ultimately you're thinking about like
from a conversion rate optimization perspective the the key to that is just removing
objections so addressing any questions or or challenges that they might have and then um simplifying the buying
process uh and that's exactly like the the story that that's the main takeaway that you just shared from the apple
store um but the main caveat i think that underlies all of this
is that it should be as short as possible and this is
you know there's a little bit data driven and a little bit just uh from my personal preference but um
try and remove as much fluff or irrelevant things as possible because
yeah you don't want to waste somebody's time and every question will have a decrease
in completion rate and ultimately like most quizzes will have the opt-in at the
very end and then after that the the recommended product uh will come in and so if you don't get a customer to the
finish line there then you're losing out on a lot of opportunity in terms of list growth or
uh sales so yeah i hope that answers your question
How to stop people getting annoyed
yeah it does i mean one of the things um that i think i've been frustrated by in
the past is when you've done these quizzes and they've asked you sort of questions and then it's like right
now give us your email to get the answer and you're like oh there's that sort of that that let down
should i mean and there's then becomes a defiance and i just go no you get you've taken up this much time and you you can
knickers because i'm not having i'm not giving you my email now to get the and you should have just given me straight away or i should have known ahead of
time this is what's going to happen um and so i like that get rid of the fluff uh keep it so but how do you get
to how do you stop people like me getting annoyed that you've asked for an email
for example how do you how what kind of things can you do there yeah so there are
two things i think one is that you create a compelling enough
offer that matt like wants to have this and it could be like a personalized assessment
or a routine or a recommended product or helping matt learn more about himself
because ultimately as humans we have this innate curiosity to learn more about ourselves and self-discovery so if
we can create a compelling enough hook matt this is why you should enter your email because once you do we'll send you
this information if it's if it's that valuable the mat will have no qualms about sharing an
email so i think that's one thing the second thing is you could just simply make it optional and i think if maybe
the first part is done well as in it's valuable enough then
matt will want to enter it but optional email opt-ins is is always doable um
both technically for you know in pre-op or any other quiz platform um but i think it might be a nice idea to uh to
make it optional um so yeah those are two ways and then i think if you
have an alignment and this gets to kind of some of the advertising principles of having the the um
the hook in your ad and then the landing page be aligned so if you have this continuous understanding of like the
customer knows what they're getting into knows what they're going to get out of it at the end of the experience
then a asking for an opt-in if it's i think if it's positioned well isn't as
jarring of an experience and isn't like hey i just spent five minutes doing this stuff and
like it there's i i cannot get to the very end without
this thing that i don't want to do so um if you can create a compelling hook at the beginning maybe that would
lower the barrier to getting an email yeah that's very good that's right and i
appreciate not everybody is an awkward so-and-so like me but you know i just remember recently doing one of those and
just been incredibly frustrated by one of the things that i'm thinking you know when it comes to an e-commerce site
is let's say you've got on the site i don't know skus skincare skews you talked about skin today we've got
skincare products on our site and you can use a quiz to help create uh
for one to a better expression a prescription for your customer you know these are based on the answers you've
given these are the recommended products um in some respects uh
customers can achieve the same outcome by using the filters as long as your filters are good on the website right
you can filter things down to find the information that you want and i'm thinking also when it comes to
education actually a lot of the questions that customers have like you know the elderly gentleman that went to
the apple store that could already be a blog post or video which is on your website where you're answering that
question and again using search or filters people could go and find that
and i'm as you're talking i'm seeing the sort of the quiz section is almost like a really
simple but advanced kind of search function you're you're making it so people don't have to
use filters you're just you're tailoring stuff for them based on answers
but it feels like if it's done well it's like it's going to be a better customer experience than the customer having to
sort of go through various filters would that be would that be right yeah i i think that
that's that is exactly right because sometimes the customers don't know what they don't know but if you can
prompt them then it can be easier and and so one example might be coffee or wine like if it were a filter
like it might be do you like uh tannins or no tannins do you like
uh oaked chardonnay or not i don't i don't know but you can also ask do you like
chocolate or do you like coffee or do you like cherry do you like uh you know like vanilla these are all
questions that are kind of like proxies they make it more accessible for me as a customer because like i
might not have the expertise to know exactly the type of flavor profile of coffee or wine that i like but i do know
the simpler things of the fruits or the the sweets that i like and so that's one way
like it's it's easier to create the filters of course i guess you could have the filters based
on uh fruit types or flavors but the quiz also is supposed to be a fun
and engaging experience and so i think that's like key here
um and so wink or first leaf some of these wine quizzes do a nice job of that and
and i think ultimately it just makes it more accessible in the same way as sommelier
would do it if you're at a fancy restaurant and they kind of like ask you some of these things so it's about simplifying the customer experience to
get them to their end ideal end goal yeah and getting them there quicker isn't it and it's in a in a much nicer
The customer experience gap
way i coming back to your phrase earlier the customer experience gap um i think there's a reason why apple
has somebody stand on the door and say why why are you here today or how can i help you um rather than just having eight desks
one of which says ipad one of which says iphone and you could i guess walk into the into the store you could sell filter or
one ipad so i'm going to go stand over there and see what happens do i mean there's a there's a reason they've created that experience of someone
asking you that question and and yes you can have filters and yes you can have search functions on your website but it it comes down to the
experience and i and the other thing that i'm thinking here the sort of psychological
principle and i'm i'm definitely not a psychologist again i i don't know about you but i'm not it's way above my pay
um i always understood that if you ask somebody a question they always answer
it and even if it's never verbalized they always answer it in their head even
if it's a yes or a no and it's like um is it raining where you are well
instantly subconsciously you have answered that question jeremy that i have just gone and asked you and so the
power of using questions um i see how it can give a better experience but i i see how it increases
engagement as well because you're actually um engaging the visitor to the website you're getting their brain
involved with what you're doing even on a subconscious level i mean
is that is that how you would sort of um what's the word i'm looking for is
that how uh you would maybe lay out some of these questions you know almost that kind of what are the default questions i
need them the customers to answer they're going to enhance their experience almost like the guy that stands at the front of the apple store
asking the obvious thing yeah that's exactly right and and in digital marketing you might call it like a micro
conversion or a micro commitment and so you want to like start with the small
easy asks so a lot of the quizzes for example might say like hey what's your name and and you'd add like matt or
again and so that's that's an easy one and it's not not intrusive
uh the flip side would be like hey what's your email and all of a sudden you're like put on the defensive because
that is a far more intrusive and personal ask um and and sidenote the the what's your name is just um it's a
little bit of a trojan horse because it's it's an easy question to ask but also it's incredibly valuable because
then you know the first name as opposed to you know in your custom property in klavio you'd have like
nothing and then you'd just be um you can use a first name both in your
emails and sms but also in the quiz with a feature called recall where you could use other so you could use you know
their first name matt and any other questions um but yeah so i think starting small with
easier questions you can build up um and in build up trust you can build
up the comfort of the customer asking or answering these questions is important um so that's
almost like a just a digital marketing principle of like slowly working towards a micro conversions and if you zoom out
that's just like you know asking for an email address it's far easier than asking for a sale up front because then
you have time to work towards the sale by laying out your your story and laying out the benefits
laying out the features and how how customers have found success with it
and then the other thing that i wanted to mention which you touched on is education and uh the buyer psychology
uh so robert shieldini for example who wrote influence um like the great book
marketing books of how how to influence customers and and move towards a sale
one of the the key pillars is authority and expertise so and you establish that
by educating customers but exactly if we go back to staying in an apple store
the old guy didn't want to be educated on ram or the screen type or size just want
to be educated on one particular thing and by doing that and laying out all of the minutia related to that of how to
like set up the facetime and how it works and whatever all of a sudden like yeah that that sales person is an expert and that can
that expert can be trusted and that's somebody who i want to associate with and buy from so
if you're able to ask these questions know how you can educate the customer and how you can establish
your brand as an authority in the space then you're far more likely to create a path for
your your own brand to have have this influence built um in the
customer's mind and again this comes down to the quiz and the data that you're
gathering in the quiz that's really yeah it's really powerful
i've got this phrase running around in the back of my head which they um uh which they taught us years ago when
The issue is never the issue
we weren't i won't bore you with the details but we we've done counseling uh we've done my
wife and i've done marriage counselling with various couples over the years and um one of the things that you
learned quite early on is the issue is never the issue but it is a good place to start right
and um if you're married you'll know exactly what i'm talking about when i use this phrase it's like you know
there's an argument which erupts over the fact that the toothpaste is not in the right place well that's that's not
the issue really but it's a good place to start and i and i like how you can
use the quiz ideology that you're talking about as a place to start with the issue
that the customer thinks they have but drill down a bit further to find out what the real issue is uh just with some
very well crafted questions which is just going to come from expert expertise from trial from error
from just having to go and see what happens and just it's a good place i'm just thinking like
How to get started
how do i get started with this is it a case of the best thing to do is just call up customers with some
questions that you think would work and just ask them the cust the questions and see what feedback you
get and then maybe adjust the questions on the fly be before you put them on the website
or as a case of actually no there are some pretty standard questions like name and so on and so forth which you can
just put straight on the website and then just watch the data point uh you know watch the interaction the engagement and then adjust it on the fly
Practical advice
yeah you know i think you don't necessarily need to like jump on the phone with customers i
think that's one of the beauties of a quiz is it structured data so
you can gather the data and it's easy to analyze it's easy to manipulate or put in pivot
tables um as opposed to say a support ticket or sales call where you kind of have to
like write it down and organize it so it's clean and easy to understand
so i would recommend maybe you can you can have a hypothesis based on previous
experience with customers test a quiz uh and and so there are different ways to test it whether it's
you know a dedicated landing page for paid traffic or if it's in your hero nav or your header nav um get get people to
take the quiz then you can analyze the data and so one way for example to analyze the data is to create a segment
of in in google analytics those who have taken the quiz and those who have not taken the quiz is there a difference in
conversion rate is there a difference in average order value is there a difference in time to purchase
and then maybe you can also dig one level deeper uh based on quiz responses
how are you uh how are you seeing difference in purchase behavior so if somebody
you know like silly example might be or like ipad do um somebody looking for an ipad um
purchased more more regularly or it could be like what path you take them down from
the quiz and once you identify that they like the ipad so yeah i to answer your question i think you can
run a quiz and and test it almost in real time analyze the data and then maybe iterate from there um
and if you if you maybe put a little budget behind it you can get results pretty quickly
and then you know pre-hook for example we have a -day free trial and
you can see how valuable that is also on the back end of people who have taken the quiz and go through a post quiz
automation or flow do they do they have a higher conversion rate or a higher um contribution to
revenue that's very very helpful very helpful very practical advice listen again i'm
i'm aware of time and i'm aware that i still have a hundred thousand questions um but uh
where do if people want to reach out to you connect with you find out more about um your software your platform what you
do or even connect with you personally and maybe you've got a few questions for you how do what's the best way for folks
to do that yeah totally um so reach out by email again that's g-e-n at
Outro
pre-hook p-r-e-h-o-o-k dot com uh check everything out on prehook.com
um and yeah i'd be happy to uh to jump on a call or answer questions um we we
do have a free trial like i mentioned so it's maybe at the very least worth just gathering some initial data and seeing
is it valuable or like do people who uh who take a quiz or
are you able to use that data to drive more revenue happy to answer any questions or or um
get people started on the journey but just to go back to the very beginning i do think that there is a a huge
value and importance especially from from what i'm hearing from the merchants that i'm speaking with and working with
on them gathering data and and moving away from a reliance on paid ads or uh what
facebook or google uh know about end customers and instead uh building that repository of customer
relationships on their own yeah no fantastic and it's and you're
you're totally right and i apologize listeners that i've not got into things like how do you store the data what's
the best way to interpret the data and all that sort of stuff which we could uh spend a lot of time getting into so do
reach out again if you've got any specific questions but do check out pre-hook as well now pre-hook um is
available for shopify merchants but if you're not on shopify uh i'm a i must does it work for those
that aren't on shopify is it really if you're if you're the shopify and get them or we only work with shopify but
there are other quiz platforms if you're on say big commerce or magento or woocommerce or something
okay yeah great fantastic but check out prehook um and there'll be all kinds of information on there which will help you
again thank you so much for being with us on today's podcast been great to chat to you i've got ideas now
floating around in my head uh and i'll be talking to the team about them tomorrow uh but yeah i appreciate your
time thanks for being here thanks so much matt so a huge huge thanks to again what did
you think what did you think to what he had to say interesting stuff eh uh i hope you got a lot out of it and of
course if you didn't you want to recap you want to go over the notes to transcripts the ideas you want the links
you want to reach out you can get them for free at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
you don't even need an email so they're all on there for you head on over there and grab them
next week because if this wasn't enough for you you need more next week we get to talk to the absolutely delightful
lauren gonzalez and she's going to be talking about how to leave your amazon
how to leave i'm not your amazon unless you own it unless you're jeff how to leave amazon and set up your own brand
that's right it's quite interesting because so many guests come on the show and talk to us about getting on to amazon lauren's going to tell us why we
need to get off here's an excerpt and it becomes a bit more challenging
especially for those brands that um they have maybe a lot of products and they they're trying
to see okay what's the next level i can get to so i have found that
a way to really really just take your brand to the next level see what other
possibilities there are in the e-commerce world is to start
shifting that focus onto other other platforms like shopify
that's your own site getting yourself and maybe a lot of sellers already do on amazon have a shopify site but they're
not utilizing it to the maximum amount they can or really know what to do or say or
or even what presence to have on social media and how do they use this whole
great big thing called the internet their focus has been so much just amazon and
and there's a whole world out there aside from that
i am looking forward to this one lauren is just a delight to talk to let me tell you a really wonderful person
and so do make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast from or if you watch on youtube or
facebook make sure you like and subscribe and all of that good stuff to make sure you don't miss out when
that episode with lauren comes live let me tell you and back to this week if you've enjoyed it
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great content so win win you win i win everybody wins it's an all-round good thing so please do it we'd really
appreciate it as i said at the start all of the notes links and transcripts from today's show are available online you can grab them
for free at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash all that's left for me is to
say thank you so much for being with us really really appreciate you being here like i said at the start of the show uh
make sure you like i say you like and subscribe come back next week for my conversation with lauren you're not going to want to miss it have a
fantastic week bye for now
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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