How to Make A Product Recommendation Quiz That Drives Ecommerce Sales on Autopilot

After some Googling, you discover a new skincare brand. The only problem: they sell five different moisturizers, and you’ve no clue where to start. 

All of a sudden, a personalized product recommendation quiz appears. You explain that:

• Your skin is drier than usual in the morning;
• you’re already using a makeup primer; and
• you don’t suffer from acne.

Just like that, the moisturizer best suited to your skin type shows up front and center—no second guesses needed. 

In your shopping cart it goes 🛒

Potential customers are likely having the same experience with your ecommerce store. They don’t know which product best suits their needs—and a little personalized advice would make them more confident about hitting “add to cart.”

This guide shares how to create a product recommendation quiz that does precisely that, without investing thousands into web development or brushing up on advanced coding skills. We cover best practices, quality examples to model, and a step-by-step guide to creating your own.

<what>What is a product recommendation quiz?<what>

A product recommendation quiz is a fun, interactive piece of content that asks the visitor a series of questions. The end result? A personalized list of products that reflect the answers they gave.

These personalized recommendations help shoppers know exactly which product is right for them. The obstacle of DIY research is no longer in their way.

Plus, a small selection of recommended products helps overcome the paradox of choice—a psychological phenomenon where having too many options actually makes it more challenging to make a decision. 

It’s like having a personal shopper or virtual salesperson on-hand to filter out products that don’t fit with what they need. 

If that wasn’t good enough, product recommendation quizzes create the personalized shopping experience that 80% of consumers demand from brands.

I’d call that a win-win all-around. 

<best-practices>Product recommendation quiz best practices<best-practices>

There’s no doubt that a product recommendation quiz can improve conversion rates on your website. 

But there’s a right and wrong way to do them.

Keep these best practices in mind to convince people to use your quiz—and buy the recommended products at the end:  

• Make it obvious. Show website visitors that your ecommerce quiz exists with popups, sticky bars, and site messages. Include it in your social media marketing campaigns and direct anyone visiting your site to the interactive quiz, including those landing on the homepage or product pages.
• Make the questions relevant. The product recommendation quiz will have better conversion rates if you ask questions that pull out target customers’ pain points. Make them buy into the idea that your recommended product is something they need to buy. 
• Show a progress bar. Appeal to completion bias—the fact that people are more likely to complete a task they’ve already started—by showing their progress.  
• Ask for their email address. Not all quiz takers will buy the products your quiz recommends. But if you ask for their email address on the quiz results page, you’ll be able to retarget them with other offers.
• Sweeten the deal with a discount code. Make an offer they can’t resist, and encourage impulse buying by giving a discount code as the call-to-action (CTA) on your final quiz page.

EXPERT INSIGHT:

"From our experience of running over 25 of them in the last five years, don't give too many options at the end of the quiz. We found our conversion rates for quizzes increase the most when we give 2-3 options at the end of the quiz for products to choose from. Anything above that, the conversion rate to get them to purchase drops heavily."

~ Jeff Moriarty
Marketing Director, My Supplement Store

<examples>Product recommendation quiz examples<examples>

Before diving into the process of creating your own ecommerce quiz, let’s take a look at two stellar quiz examples and what you can learn from them.

1. Undersun Fitness 

Undersun Fitness is an ecommerce company that sells fitness programs and workout equipment. 

Traditionally, customers looking for fitness advice would head to a local gym or find a personal trainer to create tailored fitness plans. Undersun couldn’t do that, given that they’re an ecommerce brand.

So they did the next best thing: 

Create a product recommendation quiz that directs potential customers toward the fitness program best suited to their goals. 

Undersun’s quiz collects essential information, including the participant’s:

• Gender
• Age range 
• Experience level
• Preferred workout location
• Fitness goals
• Pain points

After answering the seven questions, a lead capture page appears. The participant needs to enter their email address in exchange for the result. 

And, as an extra sweet bonus, they’ll get a $10 discount code to redeem on the product they’re about to be recommended:

 The result? A produce a product recommendation quiz with a 27% completion rate:

This product recommendation quiz example works for several reasons:

First, it uncovers pain points and directs shoppers toward the landing page of products designed to ease them (such as its at-home muscle-building fitness program).

Second, the email follow-up that arrives immediately after taking the quiz builds trust. Potential customers see before and after photos, 5-star customer reviews, and a personalized greeting from the founder:

2. Amelia Gray Skincare

Here’s another product recommendation quiz example to show what yours could look like.

Amelia Gray Skincare uses an ecommerce quiz to understand the pain points its participant is suffering with. They’re asked:

1. How their skin feels after washing 
2. What their pores look like
3. The overall condition of their skin
4. Their favorite skincare product

But instead of only asking for the participant’s email address in exchange for the recommended product, Amelia Gray Skincare’s lead capture page also asks for:

• Their first and last name for an even more personalized experience
• Explicit permission to opt in to email communication

The end result? A personalized product recommendation. 

My results show that I have sensitive skin. So, the retailer recommends the Sensitive Skin Fundamentals bundle:

But just in case I’m not ready to buy just yet, there’s a secondary CTA that helps me learn more about my skin type. It proves that the brand’s skincare advice is something I should trust—and therefore, their products are worth investing in.

<how>How to make a product recommendation quiz<how>

Feeling inspired to make your own product quiz? 

Here’s some good news: There’s no need to set aside hours of your week or bug developers to create one for your ecommerce website. 

Here’s how to make a product recommendation quiz in seven simple steps. 

1. Choose a free quiz builder

The days of waiting for your development team to code a product recommendation quiz are long gone. 

Quiz builders exist to do that process for you—no coding skills required 🙌

Create a free ConvertFlow account and choose from a pre-made product recommendation quiz template. Here’s an example:

2. Select a display type

Next, determine how website visitors will interact with your quiz by selecting a display type.

Options include:

• Popup overlays
• Bottom-corner site messages 
• A dedicated landing page 
• Embedded in an existing page

In ConvertFlow, you'll be given this option after selecting a template:

3. Configure the quiz questions

Once the foundations for your product recommendation quiz are set, it’s time to move on to the most important part: creating the questions. 

Going back to our best practices, tailor the quiz around a pain point your target audience suffers with. Brainstorm a list of questions that pulls information from your quiz participant and shows them they need to purchase the product recommended at the end.

Let’s put that into practice and say you’re creating a product recommendation quiz for your supplement brand. You know your target customer suffers from tiredness. 

So, the first question in your quiz is: 

Your morning alarm goes off, and you need to get up for work. What are you most likely to do?

1. Hit “snooze” for as long as possible
2. Have just 10 more minutes kip
3. Jump out of bed as soon as I hear it

Anyone selecting options A or B will love your anti-lethargy supplements. By the time your recommendation rolls around, they’ve already bought into the idea of making a purchase.

(It’s this type of pain point-driven digital marketing strategy that led Your Super towards a $70 million in sales 💰)

Once you’ve got your list of questions, upload them to your ConvertFlow quiz builder, creating a new page for each one.

Use the drag-and-drop editor to tweak the quiz design to match your website’s colors, fonts, and styles:

4. Set your product recommendation steps

You'll need to also customize your outcome steps. In other words, the place people are sent to where they see relevant product recommendations.

There are two main options for this:

1. Create a new landing page to send people to once they've completed your quiz
2. Create each product recommendation as a separate step within your original quiz

We recommend the latter option because it keeps people engaged and in one place. But, it depends on your needs—if you have a lot of copy to add to the recommendations, for instance, then it might be best to move them from a popup and into a landing page for the last step.

Whichever option you choose, it's easy to quickly add products to your campaign steps with ConvertFlow's products element:

You can choose to add products into ConvertFlow manually and customize in any way you like. Or, if you're a Shopify user, you can simply use our Shopify quiz app and connect your store and pull in a live feed of your product catalog.

You'll be able to filter the product selection by showing products that are either:

• Currently added to cart;
• related to a specific product;
• filtered by name or tag; or
• manually chosen from your catalog.

The final three options in the above list are likely the most relevant for your quiz.

Once you've got the right products showing from your Shopify catalog, you'll then just need to customize the design and style:

You can also customize what happens when someone clicks the CTA button on these products.

Standard options include pushing people towards the relevant product or landing page URL. But, Shopify users using ConvertFlow's products element can choose if they want the CTA to redirect to a product page OR simply add straight to cart.

You can even set a special discount code to be applied on click:

All this makes it super easy to build out your different product recommendation options as quickly as possible!

5. Build the conditional logic

A high-converting product recommendation quiz takes the answers a visitor has given and presents them with the best product. The recommendations are personalized and different depending on different answer combinations.

So, now it's time to connect up the questions part of your quiz with the recommendation outcomes created in the previous two steps.

To do this, head to the lead capture step of your quiz (where a visitor will enter their email address and/or submit the final quiz question).

Click the submission button in the builder and then select "Confirmation Actions" from the side panel:

In the modal that appears, you can use conditional actions to start building out the pathways that match answers with recommended products.

(Don’t worry: It’s not as complicated as it sounds!)

Just:

1. Scroll to the bottom and select “Add Conditional Action” 
2. Create a condition that matches each option with an action. For example: If survey selection matches “I’m tired” and “I struggle to stay awake,” jump to product recommendation “anti-lethargy supplements.”

You should end up with something that looks like this:​​

Simply repeat this process for every question and answer combination in your quiz. Alternatively, you can also make use of ConvertFlow's quiz scoring system—learn more about this method in the help guide here.

PRO TIP:

Pass your participants’ quiz responses to your email marketing platform using the "Map to Custom Field" option. This way, you can use their responses to segment your email list and send them more personalized follow-up sequences and campaigns 🙌:

Learn more about custom field mapping in ConvertFlow in the help guides here

6. Add the lead capture form 

Speaking of email retargeting, a lead capture form collects the participant’s email address before sharing the personalized product recommendation. 

To do this:

1. Skip to the “Email Capture” section of your quiz
2. Open up the same "Confirmation Actions" window as in the previous step
3. Press “New Integration” (if you've already added an integration to ConvertFlow, you'll instead see an option to "Manage Integrations")
4. Choose your email marketing software
5. Follow the integration instructions

ConvertFlow’s quiz builder integrates directly with popular ESPs—including MailChimp, Drip, and Klaviyo.

Once you've setup the integration, just create an automation in ConvertFlow that pushes leads who fill out the form to the correct list in your email software:

You’ll build your email list while also pointing shoppers to the right product for them.

Note: You can add further automations here, too—such as adding the lead to a list with SMS consent (if you collected a phone number in the lead capture form) and updating specific contact properties in your ESP.

7. Add the product quiz to your online store

The final step of creating a product recommendation quiz is to add it to your website.

Here’s the good news: you can check this box in just a few clicks.

ConvertFlow integrates with popular website builders, including Shopify and WordPress. Simply preview your quiz and head to the “Launch” page to set your targeting conditions and launch to your site:

If you’ve already installed ConvertFlow’s one-time script on your website, your CTA should now be ready to show on relevant pages. If not, you’ll be prompted to add this script to your site first.

Just copy the code and insert it into your website’s <head></head> tags.

Alternatively, you can connect without needing to touch the code at all via WordPress plugin, Shopify app, Google Tag Manager, or Segment. Instructions are all there as soon as you toggle that launch button the first time 🙌

Note: If you’ve selected the landing page display option, then the pixel and targeting conditions aren't necessary. Just create a custom URL (such as yourwebsite.com/quiz) and start sharing the link!

<templates>Product recommendation quiz templates<templates>

Convinced to add this type of interactive content to your online store?

The ConvertFlow library is home to high-quality product recommendation quiz templates. Simply choose one and follow the instructions we’ve just walked you through. 

This one, for example, is pre-made for you to drag-and-drop product recommendations:

There’s also this one perfect for stores in the hair and beauty space:

Check out the full range of quiz templates in our library and start customizing in ConvertFlow today!