Welcome back everyone. Thank you for joining us for this. Next episode of the e-commerce marketing podcast. I am your host Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest Josh Josh is the co-founder of interact quiz Builder, which is a tool used by more than 30 thousand businesses including the American Red Cross Home Depot and Forbes.

He’s probably seen more quizzes than any other human on earth right now. So, uh, welcome to the podcast Josh. Thanks for. This here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, not a problem. That’s pretty astounding stat. I’m from what you do. You probably should be in the Guinness Book of World Records with regards to quizzes.

You know, I feel like I need to get myself on there somehow I don’t know exactly how they’re going to measure that but I have seen so many quizzes at this point. It’s ridiculous. Okay that that as interesting. So we’re talkin about quizzes. Why don’t you tell me about you know, what it is you do your company and really how you got into creating this company that provides.

And what did you do before that? Yeah, so it’s a platform for making quizzes just like the ones you see all over Facebook, but it comes from a business perspective. So if you are selling let’s say coffee beans you would do what kind of coffee beans are you as your quiz, which people would love taking obviously and then once they figure out what kind of coffee beans they are, you can ask them for their contact information and then you can segment your email list and send people, you know light roast emails versus medium roast emails.

Dark roast emails and you can also link to your actual coffee beans so they can buy them right away. So that’s the concept of what it is. It’s been a wild Journey for us. We started this company about five years ago my co-founder Matt and I before quizzes were cool before they were on BuzzFeed all the time before they were all over the internet right back when we started.

It was all like, Everybody was wondering if we were doing school quizzes that’s changed obviously right prior to that. I had started several different companies everything from installing Lawns to buying and selling laptops to running a web Consulting Agency for a little while. Okay and interacts spun out of the web Consulting agency because one of our clients had requested a quiz to be made as a custom thing and we built it and it performed incredibly.

Well just crazy. Stats on it and it was just such a big deal that we decided to try to turn that into a platform took us a while to do that. But we did and then we were Off to the Races. Okay. Okay. That sounds great. So sounds like you prior to you starting the company you kind of had your hands in variety of different things and then kind of came on this and you know, as you mentioned this is really big deal these quizzes these days I’m starting I see them all over nowadays and we know what you mentioned as far.

As it being a really effective tool for segmentation and finding out you know, what your customers needs are their interests are and then you know providing them with content and marketing to them various ways based on their responses. It’s very cool. You know in the quizzes is a great way to do it as opposed to just you know doing this the standard, uh standard surveys now.

As far as quizzes, you know our audience here most of the listeners here in the podcasts are e-commerce businesses variety of businesses in various Industries. How do you think a typical Ecommerce business can use quizzes to drive leads and sales? Like if they’ve never done it before you know what you do speak their interest.

What um, how would they get started and what they do? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a really simple way to get started and it can be very overwhelming at first to think about how do I make one of these quizzes but the way that you kind of break down all those walls and just think about it in a very straightforward manner.

Do you think about who you sell to so let’s take a really simple example, you sell to people who buy jewellery because you sell jewellery, right like so you sell the people to buy jewellery. So your audience is jewellery buyers, just everybody that buys jewellery and then you think about okay, what are the different personalities of the people who buy jewellery from my store?

Obviously, they’re not all the same but they probably break down into different segments. So maybe you have The Eclectic buyer who’s always got the newest craziest things, right? And you’ve got the classic and just kind of classy and simple and you know put together and then you’ve got The Cutting Edge, right?

You’ve got like the out there and whatever you want to call that one. So you’ve got your three personalities of jewellery buyers, and obviously that’s uh terrible analogy because I don’t actually sell jewellery. So I don’t know exactly what that’s gonna be. But hopefully that makes sense to you sure and if you know no matter what you sell there are different personas of the people buy from.

Your brand so you break down your audience into personas. And so then those become the outcomes of your quiz and then in order to figure out what your quiz is actually called you simply say what kind of jewellery buyer are you or what’s your jewellery style or what’s what coffee bean is best for you?

What cocktail is best for you? What’s your fashion style? Right like no matter what you’re selling you say. What is your and then insert the name of your audience? Style or what is your just insert the name of your audience? And then you have a quiz then you set up your questions for it to figure out you know, which of the personalities the person is and all of a sudden you kind of backed your way into a really solid quiz.

So it’s much simpler than most people think just because all you have to do is break down your audience into different personalities and then make a personality quiz to figure out which one somebody is. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Now a company that’s that’s doing this in launching an initial one.

What and this is what I was thinking about earlier was looking to your website. What are some of the best ways to I guess you could say launch it or or place it, um, you know, because you know, I guess there’s a number of ways that a business engages with their customers or prospective customers units to social media their website.

You know, how do you what do you recommend initially getting it out? As far as you know the survey or excuse me the quiz. Yeah, there’s really only two that you need to focus on to start with and it’s on your website and it’s on Facebook. Okay, and on on your website, we have two options built into our platform.

So you can either have the quiz automatically become a popup on your website with a timer delay, or you can have it run as an announcement bar across the top of your site so you can simply do that and then it’s connected to your quiz that you built within the platform then the other option is to set it up as a Facebook ad or as a Facebook post.

Both of which we handle for you. So you just click a button. It turns it into an ad. It turns it into a post and then you up and running with your quiz on Facebook. So it’s either Facebook or okay, gotcha. Gotcha, pretty straightforward. One of the things that I always tell our customers that I’m speaking to as far as marketing is concerned.

So, you know, we we talked to a lot of here outside Philly software. We talked to a lot of businesses that are startups that are just getting going. You know can get bit can get overwhelmed with regards to marketing and online marketing and they don’t know what to do. What I always tell people is one of the things that you you don’t want to Discount is learning from you know, the big guys and with some of the big companies are doing I saw on your website that you had example quizzes from some of your, you know top customers and I saw, you know, there’s some of the big guys were there like Home Depot and things like that.

What are some things that these big guys are doing that? Guards to quizzes that you know a newer business could learn from yeah. I think the thing that’s kind of magical about quizzes is that it’s the same regardless of how big you are. So Home Depot for example did uh, what kind of couch are you quiz, which is hilarious because they’re selling couches under you know, their home decorators collection brand and it’s the same concept as what we were just talkin about where it’s like, who do you sell to people who buy couches?

What are the different types? People who buy couches. Okay, let’s break those down and then let’s connect those personalities to couches. So all of a sudden you’re getting a personality quiz, that’s what type of couch are you and it leads to a couch. You can actually buy at Home Depot which is genius and it’s amazing to me that it scales up and down, you know, a big brand will have a million people take a quiz in a day all retail company will have you know, maybe they’ll be lucky to have 100,000 over 10 years, but the difference.

Is that there is no difference actually, which is kind of the genius of it. All is people are just people and you’re still selling to those folks and they’re interested in quizzes because of the personality aspect of it. So it really is kind of the same thing no matter how big you are. Okay? Okay.

Yeah, that’s uh, that makes sense. I guess one of the things though you can pick up though from the big guys like you mentioned in that Home Depot example. What what kind of couch are you? The thing you can learn from that is they took a whole creative spin to it because that catches your eye. You know, what kind of couch are you?

You know, it’s not they’re not just doing a the basic question. Okay. What type of couch do you usually have in your in your living room, you know that a different spin on it. What kind of college you are that catches your catches your attention, you know, and then so that’s gonna invoke more engagement because people are well they talkin over top of couching line and you know, that’s gonna prompt them to move forward with it.

So I think. That’s one thing that you know a business trying, you know launching for the first time can think about is, you know, putting a creative spin on it aside from the things I was thinking of and I don’t know if anyone does this much as far as your client base, but to kind of mix it up as far as the questions are concerned.

Do you ever see companies throw in just like total off-the-wall questions just to you know tie gets lighten it up. Is that something that’s done or. What would you recommend? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think you made a really good point there with the what kind of couch are you especially with e-commerce, one of the ways you can make it more light hearted and kind of eye-catching is if you turn it around and instead of saying what’s your you know, whatever style you say.

What kind of card again are you or what kind of hat? Are you? What kind of couch I just like it’s so silly but at the same time when you figure out which one you are like, oh, maybe I should get that because it matches me. So that is one really important aspect of it and then in terms of the questions, yeah, you definitely want to have some curve balls in there.

You want to make it non obvious what’s going on? Because people like to answer questions about themselves. So for example, where do you want to go on vacation has nothing to do with what kind of hat you should buy necessarily but. You can kind of connect it up. So if somebody wants to go on vacation in New York City, maybe they’re more fashionable versus if they want to go on vacation in a cabin, right?

So then you can kind of connect that up but you definitely want the questions to be not necessarily directly related to the outcome so that people are going through it and they’re starting to get curious. They’re like, how does this have anything to do with what kind of had I am but his then they want to know because they want to know how going on vacation.

Place that makes them get a certain hat sure sure. It definitely can peek your interest. And as far as the quizzes are concerned, of course, you know your I’m sure of course familiar with your platform and what it takes to get it out there. I haven’t heard of a lot of companies that do what you do.

Would you say that you guys are in the same space as some of the other companies that provide online surveys or how do you how would you guys differ actually? Yeah, so we’ve kind of just created our own segment. We started when we started this company five years ago. I actually called a bunch of marketing experts really well-known folks and asked them if anybody was doing this and the response was no across the board.

There was literally nothing out there. And now there’s there’s quite a few that are have entered the space. Okay doing the same kind of thing, but it is a new category and it’s interactive content. For personalization. It’s not a survey because the survey is something that’s designed to get feedback.

It’s not designed to help you do marketing. Whereas ours is a marketing tool for creating quizzes. And we also do polls and giveaways and stuff like that. But the whole purpose of ours is to help you go out and reach new people. Whereas a survey helps you understand who you’ve already reached. So that’s that’s the big difference that makes total sense.

Now, you mentioned of course a little bit about social media. Now the quizzes would interact with that on the technical side because I’m not that familiar with it. And I’m sure my audience would be interested in it. How exactly does that work as far as you know launching a quiz out on you know, your Facebook your Twitter LinkedIn.

Is it as simple as adding a link or what exactly does it work? Yeah. So if you want to just share it directly you can just do that in one click. So we’ll create a social post for you from the quiz and we’ll automatically share. Out if you want to set it up as an ad, so I have more complicated targeting and stuff like that.

We will pre-populate what that ad should look like so that you can go create it in your Facebook ads manager really quickly. So you can do either you can either post it directly with one click or you can populate in that. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. And that gold this is that the same for all social platforms like Twitter as well as LinkedIn or some of the others.

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest. That kind of stuff. Okay. And what about Instagram? Is that is it possible with Instagram? Yeah. So with Instagram you can do it as a cross post from Facebook or you can do the same thing when you populate a Facebook ad because they’ve integrated everything into the Facebook manager at this point.

Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. That’s really powerful. Now, you know for a company that’s thinking about doing this and focusing on like their website. What’s the I know you mentioned a pop-up. That the best way to engage somebody with liquids. Is it through a proper? Yeah in terms of on your website. It just depends on your style.

So with a lot of fashion brands for example, pop-ups are the industry standard and so everybody’s got a pop-up already and that’s something you’re doing you replace your existing pop up with a quiz and you can expect your opt-ins to double that’s usually what we see. So in that case you definitely want to use the pop-up.

However, if you’re in a more hands-off industry where. Pop-ups are not the norm and you haven’t been using one. Then you’d want to use the announcement bar, which is a little more subtle. It just kind of calls out the quiz without putting it right in front of you. So okay. It really depends on kind of the industry that you are in the audience that you face that kind of stuff.

Okay? Yeah. I see that night. I understand what you’re saying. As far as retail brands are concerns. We have a lot of retail brands that are using our software and and that industry it is it is common to see pop-ups It’s Not Unusual for somebody. A you know, it’s a women’s fashion site to purchase something and then they see a pop up for promotion.

So they wouldn’t be alarmed if they saw pop up for something else like a quiz. So yeah, that makes definitely make sense. Um, but yeah the, uh, the the bars the offer bars these days are really cool. I see those a lot more these days and I like them because they’re a little less intrusive but they stay there and they definitely can display the um display the point of which.

Trying to accomplish now, um, you know, when we talked about launching the quiz and an example we talked about as far as a Home Depot’s concerned with what type of couch you are trying to segment, you know your prospects interest and what what you’re going to how how specifically you’re going to Market to these different types of customers based on the responses.

What are some other types of questions that a business should typically ask to to Peak there? And even new and really ultimately Drive engagement and ultimately Drive sales. Yeah. So the whole concept was asking the questions is to develop a personality profile and there’s some questions that are very generic that you can pretty much apply to anyting.

We actually made a list of them that you can just kind of Pick and Pull to make a quiz examples of them are stuff like what color best describes your personality. What’s one word that your friends would use to describe you all sorts of things like that. Where it’s it’s describing you as a person which can be applied to any sort of product or service.

So once you figure out who somebody is you can say, okay, they’re the best fit for you know, this really fancy looking couch or the more, you know, minimalistic one. So that’s the way that you do it is you ask these questions that are very personal but also very generic so then you can figure out who somebody is and apply that to a product.

Okay. So the main goal is to develop that Persona and that. To figure out really who they are. So you’re not just kind of blindly, you know, putting them in your in your pipeline your funnel and then just sending everyone the same marketing, you know, email or newsletter this this just gives you the beta to kind of tailor it which was definitely seems to be more seems like it would be more effective of course because you’re you’re you’re catering to their specific interests.

Yeah. Exactly IBM. Does this study every year with email marketing? They always find that personalized emails are opened more than twice as much so do hundred percent increase over just a generic blast. So this is an easy way to personalize everything it is it is it makes sense. One of the things though that I been talkin to small businesses that I know businesses struggle with because I you know, I listen to a lot of different podcasts as well about marketing and I’m always listening to The Experts and they always send the same thing just like what you mentioned that personalization.

Is definitely the way to go but I think the challenge that a lot of small businesses have is the personalization and creating these individual personas where your where you have the different marketing buckets. It does take a little bit more time. You know, it’s a lot easier for businesses to just create a blanket.

Newsletter or a blanket mass email sent out to everybody but it does take time would you say it’s well worth it to spend that little extra time personalizing these individual campaigns and marketing as opposed to just you know, sending out Mass. Yeah. Absolutely. I think I have a personal philosophy.

That is the more real conversations you can have with your customers the more successful you’re going to be. Closer, you can get to having actual conversations the better and personalized emails where you’re referencing their interest their their product selections. That kind of stuff is one step closer to that actual conversational level.

And so I think it’s always worth it, you know, every time even in our business we switch back to something that’s more generic. We just instantly lose so much of the value even though it saves. Time it’s not really serving the customer. Well, so I think you have to think about what the customer wants and what they’re actually interested in.

You know, they’re busy they’re going about their day. They have an email in their inbox if it’s not applicable to them directly. It’s a waste of their time and it’s it’s more annoying than anything. But if it’s actually helpful to them and says, hey, here’s some, you know fashion picks for you and it.

Actually on point to where it shows them things that they’re interested in then it becomes helpful to them and it’s not waste the time. It’s not a distraction. It’s actually assisting them in their own goals. Right? Right. I guess the key there is as long as you’re you’re providing specific value to them then yeah, they’re not going to be turned off.

They’ll be interested in. Yeah, I think like you said the only way to really do that is to to try to form that personal relationship and then create those personas, so you. You understand what the individuals needs are and it’s and then you know, it may take a little extra effort. But it’s like I think it’s like you said it’s definitely uh well worth it to create these different um channels now, um, one of the things that we always do here to wrap up is uh, what’s one.

Thing that an e-commerce business can do right now to help businesses grow get traffic and get sales, you know can be anything regarding online marketing or Marketing in general. I think one thing to do is pick three to five customers or prospects. And have an actual phone conversation or even in person meeting with them talking to them about their experience using your product buying your products any of those things it’ll reveal so much and if you don’t do that consistently you’ll be surprised how much you’re going to learn in those conversations.

So just pick a few people and have an actual conversation about your brand just kind of off the Record stuff, you know. Take your emotions out of it. Just let them talk about their experiences and see what you can learn from that. Yeah, that’s that’s very powerful. Yeah. I haven’t heard um heard anybody put it just like how you put it but it makes sense.

You know, it’s a lot more personal than you know, sitting out the survey which, you know, a lot of people just do. And just basically like you said you really you have to take your emotions out of it and just be willing to to hear whatever they say good the good or the bad because ultimately whatever they they’re telling you is it’s really gold actually because they can if if you pick three random customers, they can definitely reveal a lot about your business things that you about a lot about your business and things that you really had never thought of so, yeah, I really like that.

That’s that’s a great point and it’s a great takeaway. For our audience here. So yeah, I’d like to definitely thank you Josh for joining us today on the on e-commerce marketing podcast if you know if anybody wants to get in contact with your reach, how do they do it? Yeah, so you can reach me through our website it’s interact.

I’m also on LinkedIn at Josh haenam. Okay, great. Okay. Thanks again Josh for joining us. You have a great rest of your day. And we appreciate you joining us. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast to access eCommerce videos and other resources to help your business.

Grow. Please visit get forward slash videos subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for e-commerce marketing podcast, and please leave a rating and a review. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Podcast Guest Info

Josh Haynam
Co-Founder, Interact Quiz Builder