Why Quizzes Increase Conversion Rates On Shopify | #114 Tom Coburn

This episode features a conversation with Tom Coburn, the founder and CEO of Jebbit.com. We discuss how quizzes can be used to increase engagement, conversions, and revenue.

Tom has been named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 and Jebbit has been named one of the Top 25 Most Promising Companies in the World by CNBC. Tom is also co-founded two nonprofits: The Enjoy Life Leadership Academy, focusing on youth leadership empowerment, and the Soaring Startup Circle, helping Boston College entrepreneurs launch their companies.

On the Show Today You’ll Learn:

• How quizzes increase conversion rates on Shopify
• How to capture the visitor's attention
• How to use quizzes effectively
• The importance of selecting the right quiz topic and design
• And more

Links & Resources

Website: https://bit.ly/3T0zhCp
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jebbit_inc/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jebbitinc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jebbit/
Tom LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomcoburn/ 

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Transcript

Claus Lauter: Hello and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Coffee Break. Today we want to talk about ways on how to increase engagement and revenue on your website. Now, one way to do this is interactive quizzes and digital experiences, so therefore, I have Tom Coburn with me. He's the founder and CEO of JEBBIT.COM

that's GE double B it.com. Tom has been named one of Forbes 30 under 30, and JAB has been named one of the top 25 companies in the world by cnbc. Tom, also co-founder to nonprofits, the Enjoy Life Leadership Academy, and focusing on use leadership empowerment, and the soaring start up circle, helping Boston , College entrepreneurs launch their companies.

Hey Tom, how are you today? I'm doing great. 

Tom Coburn: Thanks for having me. 

Claus Lauter: Tom, gimme a bit of a background. What got you into eCommerce? 

Tom Coburn: I was in college, , in Boston, Massachusetts, and I was studying biology and planning on going and becoming a doctor like my grandpa. So probably not the normal path, , my school had a business plan competition and all of my roommates were in the business school.

And we first tried to start a medical device company and no one took us seriously cuz we didn't have any medical degrees. So they were, probably right. And so then we pivoted into something that's easier to get into when you're 18 and 19 years old, which was, eCommerce and software to help eCommerce brands.

Claus Lauter: Okay. So Ja obviously helps with creating engagement and very specifically with quizzes, with surveys and so on so forth. Give a bit of a rundown of, , what got you into this kind of, , niche within e-commerce. 

Tom Coburn: Yeah, I mean it was really just our experience as consumers. , and , for example, I love snowboarding, right?

And you'd go on a website to find snowboards and there'd be 75 different options for you to choose from. And it takes a lot on the consumer end to do all your research and figure that out. And meanwhile, we were seeing. this was 20 13, 20 14 when we were getting started. We were seeing traffic go more mobile, and we were seeing brands just say, Okay, I took my desktop site and I made it responsive to mobile.

And they would check the box and they'd say, Eh, now anyone can buy a snowboard on my mobile site. And our thinking was, that's even worse now you just crammed all 75 snowboards down onto one small screen. I'm on my phone on the go, maybe I'm in line at Starbucks and I see an ad for snowboard and I swipe up on Instagram and I go to this mobile site and all the work was on the consumer.

And so really where it started was how do we create something that's more interactive? It makes the shopping experience easier for the consumer where I can answer five questions about. Who I snowboard with, how often I go, what I care about in a snowboard, et cetera. And then the system can recommend the right products for me.

And then that led us to many other things, But that was the original insight. Okay, 

Claus Lauter: so with quizzes, with surveys, interactive experience, obviously you are on the side of entertaining people, of capturing their interests, their curiosity going into and finding out what the result is for a quiz, for instance.

Yeah. So people have an attention span of, I don't know, what is it, three seconds, five seconds, somewhere there. So you need to be very quick , on that side. How do you do. 

Tom Coburn: Yeah, so if you've ever seen a jic quiz, most of them take about a minute or two to complete. So to your point, most of them are not 25 question surveys or anything like that.

And they're designed to be really simple and easy and beautiful, like a lot of the answer choices or images, and it's normally only one question per screen. So if you are in that example of in line at Starbucks and you see an Instagram ad and you swipe up on it, all you have to do is read a simple question.

Pick an image that's the right answer for you. Go through and they're just like really fun and captivating and interesting for the consumer and the data backs it up. We average an 85% completion rate across all of our customers, which is obviously a way higher completion rate than you'd get from a traditional survey or something like that.

But consumers enjoy these experiences and they give them real. Because the consumer gets the real genuine value of saving time in their day and getting a recommendation on a product they're interested in or care about. And that's often way more valuable than, getting a gift card or a sweepstakes entry or a coupon or something like that.

Claus Lauter: Now, obviously all the funness with the, , customers, the potential customer for the merchants is more on, the hard side, I reckon. , I have experienced that in the past. So you need to come up with an idea for a quiz, and then you see the marketing guys sitting there scratching their head as like, Oh, that's a difficult one.

How do you help with that? What kind of, , support do you give on that side? 

Tom Coburn: J it's often known for the data that people get from the quizzes, right? Cause , we capture an email, we capture four or five things about you. But what most people miss is that really the core of our technology, and we've been around for 11 years now, which is crazy to say we've raised a bunch of money in funding.

most of the energy and funding that we raised has gone into really building a creative platform. when you log in as a marketer, you're greeted with a whole different host of templates. Of all different, ideas of what you could launch. Oh, here's a gift finder quiz, here's a personality quiz, here's a product recommendation quiz, but also designs.

And you can choose a design you like. You can simply apply your fonts, colors, logos, all your branding to it. And then the systems are really easy, just drag and drop system to use with. You don't need any coding experience. You don't need to be technical at all. And so a lot of our customer. Do get that inspiration of what should we build next from that template gallery.

, and there's technically many things you can build besides a quiz. You can build lookbooks and polls and trivia and things like that. But, the concept of doing a quiz that provides a personalized recommendation at the end, that is definitely the most popular thing that people build on our.

Claus Lauter: What's the next step once you have someone in the quiz? Obviously as a merchant you're interested in selling something, promoting a product or service. How do you get them , from a quiz to becoming a customer? 

Tom Coburn: a lot of it definitely depends on the context of, is this a higher funnel quiz just designed to capture leads?

Is this a lower funnel quiz? We're trying to drive sales, but let's stick with the one where it's, a quiz on your website and you're trying to drive sales. Normally the flow will be consumer lands on your website. You greet them with the quiz, maybe you embed it on the page, maybe you have a box pop up that asks them if they wanna take a quiz.

The consumer spends a minute or two, they go in and answer their 3, 4, 5 questions. And then at the end, we'll normally say, Okay, we have the right product recommendation for you before we give it to you. Put in your email. And 55% of the people put their email in. You can give 'em the option to skip it, and then we get to the product recommendation step.

And so this is where GEBBIT will ingest your whole product feed and all your product catalogs. And then we'll recommend based on the logic you set up in Jeb it of if they answer the questions this way or that way, show them this product or that product, or them this set of products. A lot of our beauty brands will recommend an entire routine, so it's, here's the foundation you need, here's the moisturizer you need, et cetera.

And so of that can be recommended at the end, and then the user can just simply add to cart, right? they can just click on the products, add what they want to their card. And so not only do we normally see a higher conversion rate, we also often see a higher average order value too, because people are buying more products after they get these recommendations.

Claus Lauter: Okay? So basically you can see this whole recommendation quiz flow like a personalized. White glove service helping you to find the right product. Is that right? 

Tom Coburn: Exactly. And it's not too dissimilar from what happens in the real world if you walked into a clothing retailer, there's normally someone there that greets you and says, are you doing today?

Can I help you find what you're looking for? Would you like me to help show you anything? And it's, a lot of what we're doing is very simple in that it's. Trying to take those white glove experiences you mentioned that we love getting in the real world and making that digital. And on every website you land.

Claus Lauter: Okay. Going a little bit away from the marketing psychology, from the marketing strategy into the technical part of it on your side, I see you are a no code platform and you are using a ous world, so, Not everyone knows what I'm talking about. So give us a bit of a background, what it actually means.

Tom Coburn: So the no code part is just what I was referring to a minute ago of just anyone can build a j quiz regardless of your level of experience. In fact, , one of our marketing guys just launched a video this week of. Him building a whole quiz faster than he could wrap a Christmas present cuz we're about to get to the holidays.

And , he actually did this, He filmed himself wrapping a present and he filmed himself building a jet quiz and he put them side by side. But anyways, the point is you won't need an engineer. You won't need any technical experience. You can just use our templates and use our drag and drop system.

I mean, if you've ever used Canva, Or even PowerPoint or Photoshop or any type of creative platform. It'll be very intuitive and easy to figure out how to use Jet and how to get it to match the look and feel of what you want. The other part you talked about the cookie list world. So as I'm sure many of your viewers know, like is getting rid of third party cookies and all marketers have to prepare for a world, or we won't be able.

Use cookies to track individuals around the web anymore, and it will make Facebook ads and all different types of ads perform, , less well once we don't have all this tracking in place. And so regardless of if you know all the technical details of it, the main takeaway for any eCommerce marketer is we need to get more data directly from our customers.

We need to learn things about them. We need to have them tell us about their interests, their preferences, their motivations, et cetera. we need to get their email address or their phone number too, so we have some type of identifier of who we are. And so the beauty. Quiz is that the quiz not only helps you provide that better shopping experience so that in the moment you're driving more sales and your consumers are having a better experience, but it's a very natural and organic way for you to ask them five questions about themselves and get five data points and ask for an email.

And building up that database of identifiers and data points will be really, really valuable to marketers. Once cookies end up going. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Talking about privacy, data privacy, obviously you're collecting data there from , the visitor website visitor. How do you deal with all the GDPs of the world? 

Tom Coburn: we have global customers that use us in every major country all around the world, and We're GDPR compliant, CCPA compliant, , all the different acronyms, all the different countries we're, compliant in them.

And we have a whole data security and privacy team that makes sure we're staying up to date on everything, but similar to what I was just saying. The good news with the Jeb, it , like philosophy of what we're doing is it's in line with the intention of all the laws, right? The intention of all the laws is put your customer first, be transparent with your customer and ask for permission to.

Get their data. Don't just drop a cookie on them and track everywhere they go and buy third party data on them and on all of that. the good news is that's what we're enabling, right? The core of our software is to let you, as an eCommerce marketer facilitate a conversation. And so we just have to make sure we do things when you ask for that email, make sure you ask for permission and make sure you make it clear what you're gonna do with the data and make sure you enable them to ask for that data to be deleted.

And as long as we follow those steps, which are very easy for us to follow and build into our software, , then we're compliant with all the global privacy laws. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Are we talking about data? Obviously you want to have the data in different apps in your business. How does that work? Do you have integrations into other apps?

Tom Coburn: Yeah. I'm glad you asked about that. We're the creative platform to build this interactive content and get the data. We are not trying to be the end place that the data lives. And so we've built hundreds of integrations to send the data out of JIT and into the systems that make it actionable for the marketers.

So whether that's like the data going into Clavio or Salesforce Marketing Cloud or any. A Marsis, any email platform that a marketer might use, or whether that's the data going into a CDP like Segment or Blue Con, or whether it's, you just want the data to go right to Facebook or right to Twitter or Pinterest or Snapchat, so you can use it to power personalized ads on those platforms.

, we have all those integrations built. 

Claus Lauter: Okay, who's your perfect customer? What kind of store size? What kind of niche industry would be perfect for using jab? 

Tom Coburn: I hate , to give you a non-answer and say it can be anyone, but it really can be. ECommerce is one of our largest verticals, , we have customers in CPG space and the travel space and sports entertainment and things like that, but eCommerce is definitely one of the largest ones.

And we have everything from, two people in a garage. Building their own snowboards and selling them on Shopify to, global brands that use, Salesforce Commerce Cloud or have built their own, eCommerce platform. We service all of them. And obviously we have, different versions of the product at different price points and different service levels of, , do you get a full white glove service from Jeb with our team or do you do it all self serve?

we can service any size company. 

Claus Lauter: Okay, let's stick on the price. What's the entry level to start with? Debit 

Tom Coburn: free. You can sign up for a free version. You can do it directly on our website or if you use Shopify, we have a Shopify app. , and if you do Shopify, I'd recommend using the app because when you download the app, it will automatically be connected with your whole product catalog and product feed.

So it'll make the quiz building process way easier. , but yeah, you can start for free. You can launch your first quiz and , I believe we enable up to 500 people to go through that quiz for free. Then you can upgrade to higher tiers to have more people go through it and you can upgrade to higher tiers to get unlimited people that can go through it or to get more advanced features from a, creative standpoint and from a, what you can do with the data standpoint.

Claus Lauter: Okay. Now we have a merchant and eCommerce business owner wanted to try out or wanted to try out jab at going into quizzes. What kind of homework do they need to do before they can get started with you? 

Tom Coburn: I would encourage them to think about what are. The three most important things they would want to know about every customer, they could just sit down and have a conversation like we're having right now.

Like I said earlier, most of our quizzes are three to five questions. So if you're at least coming to the table knowing, Oh, if I could know X, Y, Z about someone, that's honestly the most important part I assume they have all their branding and assets and all of that stuff that they'll need when they log into jbo.

, but that's probably the biggest one. And I think the second one is just thinking about where would I wanna put this quiz and what's my most important objective? So is the quiz gonna go on my website and I'm gonna optimize for driving sales? That's my most important objective. Or is the quiz gonna go on social media?

And my goal is to just build engagement or capture emails is often a popular goal through social media or. maybe I have an email database already and I've got, a million people in that database, but I don't feel like I know a lot about them. So maybe I wanna email the quiz out and I just wanna learn more about them so I can put them into one of my five customer segments or whatever might be.

So, , those are things our team will help a person on. If they come to us and they say, Hey, I wanna do a quiz, but I'm not sure exactly where to start. We have a team that's very consultative and will help them figure that out and show them what other brands are doing. , the reason I started with the what?

Three things you wanna know about every customer. That's really something that has to come from the brand, right? They know their brand, they know their product, they know their customer. these are the things that if we did know would help us recommend, the right product to them.

Claus Lauter: Okay, what time do you need people to put aside to learn j to get their first campaign, their first quiz up and running? 

Tom Coburn: We literally have people every day that sign up through Shopify and have the quiz live on their website and under an hour. it does not need to be a big complicated thing.

Now, we have much larger brands who. Might take six weeks to get their quiz live cuz they wanna debate every button color and every little detail of the quiz. And they have seven lawyers that have to approve everything before it can go live on the website and things like that. , it can take a lot longer, but.

If you know what you wanna do and you have a clear vision, the Jitt software is very easy for you to jump right in with no experience. , we have video tutorials in there if you wanna watch them, but it's honestly very, , intuitive to just figure out and, grab a template and write in your questions and drag and drop the logic and things like that.

Okay, I'm 

Claus Lauter: gonna say I'm a sucker for quizzes. Maybe I'm just too curious as a person, so I know their work , I will definitely recommend JAB to try it out specifically if you can try it for free. And, , where can people find out more about it?

Tom Coburn: jebbit.com J E B b, it is probably the best place to go. , if you go to jebbit.com we have a quiz waiting for you that you can take and then we'll give you a recommendation on the right way to get started with jebbit okay, sounds 

Claus Lauter: good. I will put the link in show notes and you're just one click away. Cool.

Thanks Tom. I think it was very insightful and thanks for your time and talk soon. Thank 

Tom Coburn: you. Appreciate it. Bye bye.