The gimmick that can win BFCM 2023

eCommerce is full of gimmicks. 

Spin the wheel to win, mystery gifts and pin the tail on the donkey. Ok, not the last one, but all of these tools and tactics seem like gimmicks that are short term, and often, lead to hooking your customers to discounts. 

Am I proposing a gimmick for BFCM? Well, if you talk to some of my prospects that I’ve pitched this idea to, they would say so. But what if I told you that this ‘gimmick’ has helped brands achieve:

• 25% conversion rate

• 31% higher AOV than those customers who don’t use the ‘gimmick’

• 37% higher revenue per recipient on welcome flow emails than those customers who don’t use the ‘gimmick’

So what is the witchcraftery?

An onsite quiz.

Before you mutter under your breath, you need to check out the stats and the strategies you can use now, during and after BFCM with quizzes. Right, buckle up.

Before BFCM

What’s the biggest problem with BFCM? Ad cost. Since day one of social ads, we’ve seen 100%+ surges in ad costs. The typical play here is to avoid the ad costs in the 2 weeks before BFCM, collect email addresses and then either use email and retargeting to help your budget go further.

Great. But how do you get the email address? 10% discount code? Please. Use a quiz instead. 

But what the heck do I ask, and what do I give them in return?

Relax Sandra. Read on.

Question 1 to ask yourself - What’s the struggle that customers have when they come onsite?

One of our clients, Hunter & Gather, had an issue. Visitors were coming to the store with differing levels of knowledge and backgrounds. For example:

• Visitors who had been following Keto, Paleo and Carnivore diets for years.

• Visitors who were interested in one of them, but didn’t know what to eat or buy.

• Visitors who had heard how good their Avo Mayo was (Damn, it’s good)

Question 2 to ask yourself - What do they actually WANT?

With each of these groups and the many variations, they all have one thing in common. They want expert advice that helps them get what they want from food. But let’s take a few other examples.

• If you’re a fitness brand, it’s likely your visitors will want to be healthier and fitter.

• If you’re a children's shoe brand, it’s likely that your visitors will want to make sure their children are comfy in their shoes.

• If you’re a dog food brand, it’s likely that your visitors will want to make sure their dogs are as healthy as possible for an affordable price.

Question 3 to ask yourself - What can you give them?

Depending on your margins, the discount you’re giving for sign-ups could be harming your margins. So, if you want to improve these, thinking about freebies is a good move based on the information you’re armed with. Let’s take the examples above.

If you’re a fitness brand, it’s likely your visitors will want to be healthier and fitter.

• Personalised fitness plan via PDF

• Personalised diet plan via PDF

• Free consultation with an expert from your company

If you’re a children's shoe brand, it’s likely that your visitors will want to make sure their children are comfy in their shoes.

• Recommended shoes based on age and level of activity

• A print-at-home foot measurement pack

• Activities for children’s parties

• A guide to days out with children in the country/state they live in

If you’re a dog food brand, it’s likely that your visitors will want to make sure their dogs are as healthy as possible for an affordable price.

• Personalised food recommendations, including amount and product combos based on breed and weight.

• Dog care guide based on breed

• Dog-friendly pubs/bars guide in the city that the visitors are from.

Ok, so what does this look like in reality, and what are the results?

Well, here’s what we did with Hunter and Gather.

1. We created an onsite quiz with Octane AI that asked the visitor some questions about their diet preferences, lifestyle, flavour preferences and how they prepare meals.

2. We then created a set of outcomes for those questions that then presented 6 recommended products for 10 combinations of answers.

3. We then hooked up Octane AI to Klaviyo through the integration, and then created a personalised welcome flow based on the data the visitor gave when they completed the survey.

6 months following the launch of the quiz, the quiz converted at 20% versus 5% onsite conversion, and 64% of those taking the quiz completed it. 

But hang on, you said this was for before BFCM?

Yes, I did, and this is why it works for pre-BFCM. 

If a brand implements this before BFCM, it's a great opportunity to gather email addresses from new visitors. BUT, it's also a great way to get more data on customers and email sign-ups from your existing list. As you’ll be able to get the data from Octane AI into the Klaviyo profile of each member of your list, this then helps you to define better segments as part of your BFCM campaigns. 

Going back to your existing list for a second. That quiz you came up with in your head when you read the start of the article? Yep, imagine what you’d learn if you had the sales data you have on them already, PLUS the answers to the questions you want to ask. Get my drift? Create it, send it out, and move on to the week itself, BFCM.

During BFCM

Big discounts, small discounts, bundle offers - frankly, they all mean nothing if they're not relevant to what the customer cares about and desires. Now you have the data in your Klaviyo account, all segmented by sales activity and the answers to their questions, you can use this to your advantage on BFCM.

Let’s imagine we’re a supplement brand. We’ve created a quiz which asks about health goals, workout activity and career. Coupling this up with the sales data, here’s how we can market the offer on BFCM week.

1. Create a ‘Weight loss’, ‘Weight Gain’ and ‘Muscle Mass’ bundle from your product assortment. Add 2 products, remove 2 products, and you’ve got 3 variations of the bundle. Apply a staggered discount across all three levels of the bundle that allows you to maintain a viable margin.

2. Use the segments you’ve created, including these three variations of the bundle in your email marketing campaigns to drive sales.

3. Export the segments CSV’s (if they are bigger than 1000) and plug these into a retargeting campaign.

Depending on your size and budget, you can expand this strategy with more ads and campaigns, but ultimately, you're creating a ‘relevant’ offer based on the customer's needs, rather than peppering your list with a product they don’t really care about. 

Talking of what people want, let’s not forget that customers are using BFCM to buy gifts for the holidays in order to save some cash. Why not use a quiz to help them find a gift AND collect their data?. Gift stores, apparel, accessories and beauty brands can all make good use of this. Adding a quiz CTA to the main banner of your store to ‘Find a gift’ is the perfect way to drive sales and data.

Suppose you’re a beauty brand. You have a quiz that asks:

1. Who are you shopping for - yourself, your partner, BFF, or co-worker

2. Which of the following images best represents their skin tone - show various skin tones

3. What colour eyes do they have - blue, green, brown, unknown

4. What’s your budget - $15, $25, $50, $100

5. What’s your email address?

Based on the answers to 1-4, you can then curate 3 products or bundles that fit to their needs. Additionally, the data you’ve picked up from the quiz that now sits in Klaviyo can be used in a welcome flow around these details, as well as any browse abandonment or cart abandonment emails during the BFCM period. Relevant offers, for THEIR needs. 

After BFCM

The deals are done, and the show is over, right? WRONG. If you’ve ever done any analysis of those customers who bought for the first during BFCM, it's likely you’ll have seen many of them never shop again. The issue is that usually, they’ve purchased from you without any real connection or need and know little about the brand. They just came for the discount. Sorry, but it's true.

If you’ve not asked them for any information via a quiz, what do you have to build a relationship with them? Well, not much. BUT, if you know a little about why they were shopping, who they were shopping for, PLUS the products they purchased, well, chances are you’ll have a better chance at future sales, post-BFCM if you know this.

Let’s take a shoe brand and imagine they have a quiz on BFCM. I tell them that:

• I am buying for my wife.

• She’s a size 6

• She loves neutrals

• Her favourite clothing brand is Zara.

I also then purchased a pair of beige flats on BFCM. So, without the quiz information, marketing logic would then say:

• Warm them up to brand values, founder story and production process

• Test multiple shoe types via email

• Plug their email into retargeting ads

• Push towards the second sale.

Seems sensible, but here’s the issue. I’m not in the market for different types of shoes. Especially not those knee-high red leather boots, and well, frankly, I’m unsubscribing pretty quickly.

On the other hand, imagine we have the quiz data. Maybe it’d look like this.

• Post-purchase email after Christmas with the subject line ‘What did she think of the flats?’ with an email quiz that allows for feedback.

• Based on my feedback, a customer service email flow takes place, and with a positive response, triggers a company review email.

• Following a positive review, an email with the subject line ‘Want to keep her happy on her birthday?’. Email asks to submit her birthday in order to get a discount. This then triggers a discount code to be sent 4 weeks prior to the date.

• New launches that fit the size and colour preferences from the quiz are the only emails that are then sent.

Again, while this is a good start, bringing more data collection into the process can be a way of expanding the spending potential of different customer types and improving the Lifetime Value of a customer.

Time to try the Gimmick? Maybe not.

Sounds good, right? More data, more engagement, more sales? Well, that depends on you and your team. Before getting started with an onsite quiz, you should ask yourself.

1. Do I know what questions to ask and how I can link these back to product features and benefits?

2. Am I prepared to make the effort to personalise my approach to email marketing and ads to increase sales and LTV?

3. Do I have different products with different purposes that can be used to differentiate in an offer?

Ultimately, if the answer is no to any of the above, consider it carefully. But after working with quizzes for a number of years, my team at Blend have seen some incredible results. Check this out. 

A brand we worked with had 2 sign-up mechanisms on site

1. Pop-up based email sign-up.

2. Quiz sign up.

The LTV of customers who signed up via a quiz was 54% higher than pop-up-based sign-ups. Yup, maybe it is time to give a gimmick a try this BFCM.

If you think your brand might benefit from using an onsite quiz this BFCM and beyond, take a look here at how my team at Blend could give you a helping hand.