MBA2223 Guest Teacher – Gen Furukawa – How to Increase Sales & Personalize Your Marketing with an eCommerce Quiz

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Hey oh welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Because when you grow, so does your business. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episode we bring on an exper to teach their area of expertise. Today I'm so pumped to have Gen Furukawa who is the co founder of Pre Hook and is here to show you how to increase sales and personalize your marketing with an e Commerce quiz. Now whether you have an e commerce store or not, if you have a website, you're going to love this episode. He's going to show you the benefits of creating a quiz on your website to generate leads but also to create a personalized sales experience for your visitors so you actually give them what they need. Like I mentioned, Gen Furukawa is the co founder of Pre Hook who helps hundreds of high earning e commerce stores on Shopify grow their sales and capture zero party data with quizzes. This means you're not relying on other platforms, you're only relying on your website to gather the data you need for your customers so you can create a unique experience for them but also close more sales. And he's also the host of a great podcast that I was on. Actually loved being a guest. It's called Cart Overflow where he shares great strategies with his guests. How to market better when it comes to e commerce stores. Can't wait to get into this one because you're going to see the power of quizzes on your website and how it can help you get more leads and sales with Gan system. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business Support for today's show comes from virtual gurus. Many business owners get stuck. They can't scale their business anymore because they've run out of all the time they have. They're working, they're hustling, but it's just not enough. The key to scaling your business is offloading work you shouldn't be doing. You need to start building a team of people doing tasks that are sucking your time but not really. Your secret sauce, your superpower that you love doing every day. How do you start building that team? Well, that's where virtual gurus come in. They help you build a team around you to get the support you need without breaking the bank. They match you with skilled, remote administrative talent and you pay only for the hours you need. With an affordable subscription plan with no long term commitments or recruiting costs, you can build the support team you need while keeping your operation lean, saving you up to 40% compared to traditional hiring costs. And virtual gurus can help you find great people with great skill sets in all kinds of areas like bookkeeping and data entry, sales and marketing support, email and calendar management, and a whole lot more. They can connect you with one general assistant or multiple specialized assistants. But one of my favorite things about virtual gurus is that they're on a mission to provide meaningful work opportunities for underrepresented communities. So you'll benefit from an incredibly diverse talent pool. Book a free consult@thevirtualgurus.com MBA that's thevirtualgurus.com MBA MBA and get the support you need. What is the number one topic you think people like learning about? Science? Nature? Travel? None of those. It's actually themselves. People like learning about themselves, about who they are and what they need. That's why quizzes are so powerful and why you should start thinking about offering quizzes to your visitors on your website to provide tailored information about what they need and how you can help. Well, when it comes to quizzes, I'm not the expert here. Gen, our guest teacher is so I'm going to pass you on to Gan, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and share my insights. But for now, take it away Gen.

Hey everyone, Gen Furukawa here. I'm the co founder of Pre Hook, a leading quiz platform for E commerce brands. So thanks so much for joining me today. And I want to talk about ecommerce quizzes, personalization and zero party data. So just think about the last time that you were in a store or a restaurant maybe and you had the waiter or someone there helping you find the right product or drink or meal for you. How does it go? Well, they might ask you what your interests are, what flavor profile you like, what are your likes, your dislikes, and then ultimately at the end of that conversation they would come up with a recommendation. Here's what you'd like, here's why you might like it, and can I get it for you? Because it fits in your criteria and that's basically what a product recommendation quiz. And they the whole experience of a quiz is on your site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But actually there's so much more than that in a quiz. It's actually a Trojan horse where you're providing an engaging and entertaining experience for your customers. And in return, you're capturing a lot of data that can help you improve your sales, your conversion rate, and ultimately help you build a foundation of customer data, zero party data, which is how you will power your personalization strategies. So just really quickly we can back up and just establish what zero party data is. So zero party data is data that a customer proactively and willingly shares with you. Contrast that with first party data, which you're tracking passively, say the pages that they visit on your website, or the actions that they do on your website, or maybe if they purchase, you know what they've purchased and how much they've spent. But the data is super important now, especially when you consider what's going on in the macro level. So we're seeing with iOS 14.5 or third party cookies being deprecated, it's now harder for E commerce brands and marketers in general to identify and target who their ideal customer is, whether that's with paid ads or influencer campaigns. But the old playbook of a direct to consumer brand spinning up paid ads, running them profitably and then growing quickly, has changed so much since iOS 14.5 has rolled out. So there is an immediate urgency to build direct relationships to capture leads that's a phone number and or a SMS number and then customer data alongside that. And that's exactly what you get with a quiz. So here are the three high level benefits that a quiz will offer. It will help you accelerate your list growth, improve conversion rate by simplifying the buying process and making the decision process. And perhaps most importantly, the benefit is the capturing of zero party data. Now just here's a quick note of why zero party data where you are learning the intent, the explicit intent of the customers is so important. So your job as a marketer, as an e commerce marketer, is to help people fully realize their aspirational self, understand what it is that they're trying to accomplish and then how your brand and your product can get them from where they currently are to where they hope to go. And there there are a few key data points to help you get there. One is what are their current challenges or problems and two, where what are their goals? And once you know point A and point B as a marketer you can easily bridge the gap with your brand and your product in there. Now another thing where the quiz is really important, especially a quiz if you're an ecommerce brand that works with your existing tech stack, so often that might be a Shopify brand working with Klaviyo or Omnisend as their email or SMS provider. So all of the data goes immediately and automatically to your email service provider and then from there you're able to personalize your communications by creating better segments. So whereas once you might be segmenting high VIP customers who've spent over say $200 or something, now you can do this with VIP customers who like the color red, or you can obviously do something a little bit more specific like their skin type if they're a skincare brand, or their dog breed if you're a dog brand. So all of the data goes immediately to these platforms and then you're creating a post quiz follow up, which is where you're able to stand out. Now if you've ever read Robert Cialdini's book on influence, one of the key pillars of the six pillars of influence are expertise and authority. And that's exactly what a quiz helps you build in when you gather that customer data, because you're able to send follow up campaigns based on what their explicit challenges are. And then you can establish your brand and your product as the authority in the given space. And guess what happens when you establish yourself as the authority? The customer is far more willing to listen to what you have to say. To look to your product as a solution for their problems, because you know the problem inside and out better than they can and better than they understand it. And you can articulate the problems perhaps better than they can. And so that's a foundation of expertise. And when you're able to do that in your email and your sms, and you can do so much better in terms of standing out from the competition who might be sending generic messages because they don't have the data with which to send more specific, engaging, relevant content. Now I'd like to talk about how to actually tactically go in and create a quiz experience for your brand. So if you are kind of like a generic content management system, say you're on WordPress or Webflow, you might want to look at something like Typeform. They do offer free, free opportunities, even Google forms. The key important thing is that you're able to capture the data, including their email opt in form. Now, the benefit of a tool that integrates tightly with say, Shopify, if you're in the ecommerce space, is that you can use the recommendations to integrate with your inventory and then recommend a specific product based on the quiz responses that you've received. And what that does is that will help improve the conversion rate, make it easier for customers to buy what you recommend, because you can create a compelling pitch. Hey, here is what you've told us and based on your responses, here's what we think is best for you and here's why. So when I'm working with merchants, the first thing that I think is most important, after you've determined whether you want to, say, build a custom quiz, which might be more expensive and take longer, but you can craft it specifically to your needs. Or a third party tool like say Pre Hook is that you want to identify what the most important data points that you want to gather are. Because remember though, you're using the quiz to recommend the product and capture a lead, it's really about what you do with it afterwards, how you're going to create your segments, how are you going to dynamically recommend products or create your personalization, whether email or SMS campaigns. So what data is most important? That might be what their challenges are, what their goals are, what their interests and what their preferences are. After you have that, then you can craft your questions around those key data. Now, how long is the ideal quiz? Obviously it differs depending on what your brand and product is, but I think the metric that you want to keep in mind or the proxy that you want to keep in mind is to keep it as short as possible while still gathering key information that you will use. I don't think it's helpful or valuable for either your shopper or yourself to ask superfluous questions that will not actually impact your marketing. Because remember, every question that somebody answers is also an opportunity for them to drop off. And if you're dropping off, then you're not getting them through the quiz and you're not able to capture their contact information, which is critical because all this doesn't necessarily mean a lot of if you are not able to email or SMS and say you have to rely on your remarketing campaigns. Because again, remember, targeting is more and more difficult with iOS14 making the consumer data harder to access. Now, once you know what your data points are that you're going to be asking and what the questions are, you want to think about what the hook is, what the incentive is to get somebody to take the quiz. Now there's some interesting data from Sumo.com, an email opt in company and they saw that over millions of impressions, the opt in rate of somebody on a site to share their email address is 1.95%. Now that's not a lot. Out of 100 people visiting a site, two people will share their email address. But if you get a quiz and you can really get a great hook in front of them, here is why you'd want to take this quiz. Click here. You can see completion rates of 50, 60, 70%. And so that is a significant improvement from just a generic opt in of 2% where take 2% and get a 10, 15% discount. So not only are you getting no information with that, you're also getting a discount which cheapens the brand equity and also is a direct drain on profits because that discount has to come from somewhere and it will be from your top line revenue. So now that you know, okay, I want to ask these questions, here's my hook. Here's a value of what I'm going to be asking them. How are you going to get people to actually take it? Now the best will really optimize their quiz. Make sure that they have the completion rate as high as possible, that they have an engagement rate, a quiz experience that's great for the customers and also adds value to their marketing. But then how will you get people on it? One way is of course on the homepage. So it might be in the hero section of the homepage. Hey, take this. It could be elsewhere on the homepage, it could be in the header, Nav the footer. Nav and then of course you can have a landing page and that landing page could be dedicated to paid traffic. So all of your paid campaigns will land on this landing page and there they can take the quiz. Remember, ideally it is a multiple hire than what your generic sending them to the product description page or a general opt in page might be because the quiz is going to help them learn more about themselves and also be more engaging and entertaining. So they would want to share their information and then share their email so that they can get their feedback or their personalized regimen or whatever it is that you're offering sent directly to them. Now I want to share a quick example of a brand that's doing really well with a quiz and it is called t Elixir. That's T E-E-L-I-X I R.com and they are an adaptogen brand using plant based superfoods. So think Reishi mushrooms or lion's mane mushrooms. It's an ancient medicinal technique but the modern consumer is not very familiar with adaptogens. So this was a challenge is how do we get these consumers who don't know a lot about the products to the right product and then how do we help them get the most out of it? The brand did a lot of testing with their quiz to figure out what questions worked. How do we get people through the questions the best? How do we set up the recommendations so that we can optimize our conversion rate at the end of the quiz experience. Now after perfecting the quiz, they set up paid campaigns for their top of funnel traffic to send paid ads to the quiz. They also set the quiz on their hero image, their homepage in the header nav also as an exit intent pop up. So when somebody seemed to be closing out the window, a pop up would appear. Hey, not find what you're looking for. Take a quiz and we can help you get there. Now these results had significant improvements to their top line revenue. So they improved their conversion rate by 35% just by simplifying the buying process. They were also able to double their opt in rate of emails as opposed to just a static opt in. And they were able to 5x their revenue per lead. The value of that is staggering and I think it is because not only are they getting an email, but they have so much data with which to share about the consumer, how the T elixir product can help their health needs and just stand out from the competition with highly targeted segmented emails and SMS messages. They say that an email address is an evergreen asset that you should be gathering from day one. And I absolutely agree. I think point one a is that the same should apply to customer data. So with every email address you're only doing yourself a benefit in the future if you're able to capture some key data along with that email address or that SMS phone number. And that would be what their interests are, what their challenges are, what their goals are, what their preferences are. And from there you can offer a far more personalized experience and that those personalized marketing messages and campaigns translate to significant real revenue growth. We can see that people will purchase more, have a higher conversion rate, and end up purchasing more frequently from brands that offer a personalized experience. And you can only do that if you're able to understand what people are looking for. And that's why zero party data is so critical right now, especially in light of the changes in data privacy. So I would love to help you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out genehooked.com or check out prehooked.com, we have many resources to help you understand how an E commerce brand can help you accelerate your list growth, improve your conversion rate and capture zero party data. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Gen Furukawa. Talk to you soon.

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To wrap up today's lesson. If you are intrigued if you loved today's lesson and want to learn more about running quizzes on your website, you can download the Ecommerce Quiz Blueprint that Gann offers. Just go to prehook.com eCommerce Quiz Blueprint ebook One of the things I learned over the last 20 years as an entrepreneur is that the more questions you can ask your customers and your potential customers, the better chance you have of creating something they actually actually are dying for that they actually need. So running these quizzes is really free R and D for your business. Even if you don't have a product or service, it's good for you to run these quizzes so you can know what people want and you can create it or offer it. Ever wonder why people run surveys and try to gather feedback after any kind of event or experience or course so that people can improve course correct and get great ideas from your customers. But also in these quizzes people are giving answers or typing in words, right? These are very powerful words for you because you can use the same language your customer is using to describe their problem or their challenges in your marketing. This is really going to resonate with them when they see your ads, when they see your headlines, when they see your copy, when they see your blog posts and they say, oh wow, this person totally gets me. And it's because you asked them, right? You got amazing information and amazing language that you can use for your business. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. By hitting subscribe you get access to over 2,200 business lessons in our archive. So go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When it comes to marketing and business and sales in the 70s, the 80s and 90s, it was all about exposure. It was all about brand awareness. It was all about getting as many people familiar with your business, brand or product. But now in the 2000s and and beyond, data is king. If you can gather more information on what your customer need, want or all about their profiles, you can create an incredible offer and business around what people actually need rather than you try to guess and force it down the throat with advertising. The more you know your customer, the better you can serve them. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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