Ecommerce: A Masterclass on Ecommerce Quizzes With Gen Furukawa of Prehook

Hey guys, we're here today with Gann. We're going to be talking about some quizzes and whatnot. How are you, my friend? I'm doing well, thanks. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Chase. Yeah, of course, man. I know we were talking before this. You're a new dad for the second time, so congratulations. Thank you. How do I look? Do I look younger? Older? You look younger. You look like you're getting some sleep, so. Yeah. I'm not sure what your wife would say. I don't know if you're helping out enough. Five hours, so I'm doing, you know, I'm used to eight, but doing five these days, so I'm okay. Good, good, good. Well, cool, man. Do you mind starting with kind of like what you're working on first and foremost? Yeah, for sure. So I'm a co-founder of Prehook, which is a Shopify app. We just launched about two months ago, and we're a Shopify staff pick, but we're basically a quiz builder for Shopify merchants. So we started, I'm building it with two friends who I met about six years ago. We were at the early team of Jungle Scout, which is an Amazon product research tool, help people find products to sell on Amazon. So we have a lot of expertise in terms of like e-commerce SaaS, and we started building Prehook because we realized that merchants, Shopify merchants in particular, don't necessarily have the insights to know what problem they're solving for. And what I mean by that is like, there are a bunch of people that may be going to a site and browsing around, but there's not any indication of what exactly they're looking for or what problem you're trying to solve as a merchant. And with just a few simple questions in a way that's presented that's fun and interactive, engaging, a merchant can capture that information, capture the most important information, particularly like you might say it was an email address, and then just guide them towards the most appropriate product based on their product responses. And then follow up with subsequent messages, whether it is email, SMS, remarketing, paid ads just in general, that's really targeted towards creating a relevant experience, a personalized experience. So yeah, I've been working on it for about a year, just launched and have several hundred merchants using it and getting great feedback so far. That's awesome. I got a bunch of questions. So the first one is like, walk me through like, so someone visits website, does this thing take place of like a typical pop-up from Klaviyo or Just Uno? Is this something that happens the next time someone comes to the site? Like, can you walk me through and people through like, when does this fire? Like, how does it fire? Does it pop up? Does it fly out? Is it embedded? Are you sending traffic to a specific lander? Like, can you walk us through that piece first? Yeah, for sure. So in terms of like the website experience, any of the above that you just mentioned are possible. It can be a pop-up, it can be a button or a link in the nav. That doesn't really matter so much. But in terms of how the brand uses a quiz might differ. And so what I've seen is, it kind of like depends on what the use case of the brand is. So I can show you for some, for example, that are like a subscription-based business. And if you think of like Trade Coffee, for example, subscription coffee or Ipsy, which is subscription makeup or Scentbird fragrances, whatever, these are all brands that rely on month over month sending packages that are really important to nail down exactly what the customer is looking for. So that is a quiz is a requisite part of the onboarding experience. And it serves two functions. One is to capture the email address. And that can be at the very beginning of the quiz, or it can be at the end of the quiz, like enter your email, and then you'll see the results. But more importantly, maybe is that it captures what the user's preferences are, what their intent is, what they're looking for, so that month over month, you're guaranteed or you have a high, greater likelihood of getting a package that you would like. Awesome. That's interesting. So do you have any like metrics or stats like on people that go through a quiz, they're likely to be more engaged in terms of openers of emails or SMS messages, they're likely to have a stronger LTV, like, whatever the stats are, there's some metrics that you can kind of share based off of your own data or any research you've done? Yeah, yeah, sure. So interesting about email, I'm actually not sure about that. But in terms of like, conversion rate, definitely have seen higher conversion rates. And this is both anecdotal. You know, one person I spoke with is a is a broad brand new day, and she was having a 10x conversion rate, basically, 30% of people who went through their Fitbinder or she actually has kind of like a physical product would convert into purchasing as opposed to just like a 3% onset conversion rate. And I think the takeaway there is it's just that that's actually like a small purchase. She has a digital Fitbinder. But it's a show of intent. And it's kind of like the tripwire, if you will, of the purchase that will lead to the larger purchase. And in general, we're seeing just higher average order value, higher lifetime value in the first 60 days. One interesting statistic is Common Thread Co. They have a brand, Bamboo Earth, and I really like their quiz. And they've shared a lot, you know, they're very good about sharing the insights that they get from the experiments that they're running. I think that they showed like a 50% increase in lifetime value in the first 60 days. That's because they are able to take the questions and the responses that they get in the quiz, repackage it, and then basically just create a more relevant, relevant onsite conversion experience. So here are the products that we recommend based on your skin type or what you're looking for the problems that you're experiencing. But then I think in the subsequent post-purchase emails, the upsell or the cross sells, they're able to bump up their lifetime value in the first two months after the purchase, based on the data that they're gathering from a quiz. I think a lot of brands are able to capture this. So generally, you know, the term that you might have heard is zero party data, which is data that a customer proactively and willingly shares with you, as opposed to say, first party data, which is based on transactional history. So that might be what they, what products they've purchased or when they purchased it, how often they purchased it, or you could extract maybe their location, what the geolocation is based on their billing zip. But zero party data is actually like forward looking. What does that customer want? What are the preferences that they have in terms of flavor or style or what problems are they solving for? And this is really like something that you can get from transactional history, which is backwards. So I think that that's really the gap that we're trying to fill is helping brands understand the mindset of the customers and what problems they're trying to solve. And then that permeates the marketing strategy and the channels in many different ways. Awesome. Yeah, this is great. This is super helpful. So question for you, do you have any sense of like how many questions a quiz should have before you see a lot of drop off? Like the types of questions, like, you know, how much time it should take someone to complete? Like, do you have any data around any of that? Yeah. So Typeform had a really good data point on that. And Typeform, it's not e-commerce focused, but it is just questionnaire surveys. And as you might imagine, it's kind of like a curve that slopes down. The more questions, the lower the completion rate. And I forget the exact statistic. I might have to send it to you later, but basically for every question you're asking, you can expect a drop off and that totally makes sense. So how does that actually impact how you put the quiz together is I think you really just want to think about what's most important, what data is most important to you in terms of focusing on the conversion rate. So knowing what the customer needs, what you need to know about the customer in order to present the most relevant product recommendation, and then really just try and whittle it down. I think for list questions, like I've taken a bunch of quizzes, just kind of like in doing my own research and looking at customers and how they're using quizzes. And I do the same as well. If there's a lot of fluff or things that aren't of value, then I'm just like, you know, it's just not worth it. And I think that there needs to be a direct correlation of what's most important, like basically the value being delivered to me as a consumer and the value that you're kind of like gathering as a merchant. So if you think of things that are more clinical, maybe like Kim's, which is, you know, it might be like an erectile dysfunction. It's almost like a medical questionnaire or Roman is very similar or like eyeglass prescription eyeglasses. These are things like, okay, I'm okay, willing to fill out a longer form. The value that I'm receiving is like, you know, I'll be qualified to use this product or not. But if it's a long forms to like ask me, like what's my favorite season or my favorite color, or what kind of like spirit animal I am, like that, that just kind of like frivolous and doesn't add value. And therefore I think the longer that type of quiz goes on, the higher the drop-off rates. So in my mind, you know, the answer to your question is like, of course it depends on the ideal length, but it really, I think should be as long as the customer is deriving value from it and understands why they're answering these questions, you'd be all good. Awesome. Thank you for that. Do you have any data or any thoughts around like are people on your platform or even people who've studied, are they incentivizing people to do it? Right. Obviously the incentive for him is people have a need, but they have some kind of disorder that they want to get treatment or some solve for whatever the right word is. Like outside of that in a more traditional brand, like are people incentivizing, you know, kind of prospects or potential customers to fill out these forms through the form of a discount, whether it's a 10% off, $10 off. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is there a right way to think about it? Is there a wrong way to think about it? Yeah. So I've seen some like paid ads, Facebook ads, for example like stitch fix or, or, or trade coffee. It's like, you know, get your first bag, 50% off first bag of coffee, 50% off, you know, complete the quiz. Basically that's where you would fill out the forms of what type of coffee you like, your email, and then you're, you're presented with, you know, this bag of beans for 50% off. So in general, but they've also offered that discount, I think kind of regardless of whether you take the quiz or not. I think the incentive, I haven't really seen incentives specific to taking a quiz, except maybe free shipping. I have seen that. But yeah, the, the incentive really is like, all right, I'm going to get a better customer experience from it. So like I'll find the bra that fits me best or I'll find the, the perfume that I like because, you know, perfume is a great example or candles. Like I think fragrances is very hard to communicate online. Like what, what I like, but if you can do it in a way that is accessible to me, like, do I like, you know, like a woodsy smell or flowers or fruits like that, that's a little bit easier for me to understand. And then I can get brought to the right product as opposed to looking at bottles where obviously the scent doesn't come through. If it's a yellow liquid in a bottle. Yeah, it makes sense. Thank you. I have a question. I'm trying to think about the best way to ask it and it kind of, it might kind of sound stupid, but I'm going to ask it anyways. How important in your mind is the context of the quiz and like why someone should take it versus the actual like copying the design of the quiz? Like how important is context versus actually like what it looks like and what it says? Yeah. So, I mean, I think design matters a lot and I think that's where like the really beautiful quizzes, you know, like Warby Parker has a nice, they have like custom illustrations and there's a transparent background and it's simple. That's nice. And that kind of like fits in with the brand. So I think, you know, as a brand has more resources in order to like create their own customized look and feel of that website experience, like that's ideal, of course. But, you know, if you, if you look at some other ones and it might just be like, you know, like Priyanka, for example, like I think our design looks nice, but ultimately like in some ways it might just be a multiple choice. It might just be a dropdown, but the takeaway, it's like the content of that is really important. So you can inform that, you know, in your email flows in Klaviyo, that it's like, there's a 20 year old female who's like dealing with dry skin as opposed to a 65 year old male with, you know, like acne or whatever, wrinkles. Like, so yeah, regardless of what that, the form of like the look of that form is, I think you're able to like hone in on more of like the emotional part. And maybe that's where like the copywriting comes in, but you're able to communicate at a more, a greater relevance, even though the design might not look so great. So yeah, I hope that answered your question. I think like form over function, function over form. Yeah. I think that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. I'm trying to think like, for example, like what else would be helpful? So one thing that comes to mind is like, is there like a minimum traffic that people should have before they start experimenting? Like with a quiz, like for example, say someone's getting a thousand people a month, are they a good candidate to leverage something like this? Or would they be better off leveraging, you know, a more traditional, simpler form, you know, at 10,000, a hundred thousand people a month, like does traffic actually matter in terms of when you think it makes sense for someone to invest into building a quiz and, you know, doing it? No, I don't think so. I think that there really is like no threshold at which point it makes sense. It's similar to like, if, you know, if you're speaking in person, would it make sense to like greet people individually? If they were to walk into your store and like, you probably do it as much as you can and you'd want to like create the best experience possible. And I think the same with a quiz, the quiz in some ways, if you like craft the experience is like, you're trying to get into the shopper's head, into your customer's head. And like, what can I ask them? And what information would I need in order to create a better customer experience? And I think that's maybe one of the main takeaways of the quiz. Ultimately, if we do our job right in building a quiz is to improve conversion rate. And you do this by knocking down some of those barriers and where the anxieties, where the questions that people have. And a quiz is also helpful because you can take that like, hey, what challenges are you facing? Like let's say skincare, for example. And then on the next question, you can have an interstitial, you can have a statement about like to maybe affirm what they're feeling. You know, I've seen this in many quizzes. You'll kind of like personalize the next question or the statement like, hey, you're not alone. Lots of people have dry skin. This is a, this is like what we're all about. Here's how we help people. Noom is one example, a diet app. And so it's like, they'll personalize it to kind of like recognize who you are. You're not alone. So it's just kind of like a way to personalize the journey. In terms of like size, I think where it might matter, like how many people are taking the quizzes, if you're like looking for statistical significance, like, all right, we know that, you know, if you're only dealing with a hundred people who took the quiz, it's hard to tell if you look at like the segments of quiz takers and those who didn't take the quiz, like how much did the quiz help in driving average order value or having an improved conversion rate? So I think that's where size matters. Maybe like in the analysis after the fact. Yeah. That's super helpful. A couple more questions. I know you've mentioned a couple of brands and categories that it does work. Do you mind recapping like a couple, just like brands or categories that people can go check out whether they're your customers or not? And then on the flip side, are there any categories or industries where you think this doesn't work within e-commerce? Like for example, I think you mentioned makeup, right? Like it will work great for a company that sells makeup because they want to find out, you know, what colors or what foundation I've never bought makeup. So I'm just rambling like something that works there, but maybe it doesn't work for, you know, this vertical over here for these reasons. So like, do you mind just raffling off like one to three of like categories or brands that are doing quiz as well, or should be doing quizzes and then like one to three that like you haven't seen work and whatnot. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, we're talking about like conversion rate, how to help improve conversion rate. One example that I like there is Helix Sleep. I believe it's helixsleep.com. It's a direct-to-consumer mattress brand. Average products are probably like thousand dollars or more. So I don't even know what the conversion rates are. I imagine far lower than if it were almost an impulse product of $50 or so. But they have a little bit of a dynamic quiz. So like what it's a little bit starts with the basic who the customer is. And I think that's where some of the better quizzes are. You don't want to jump into some of the more intimate or like questions that are probing into the deep personal stuff. But easy, you know, like how many people will be sleeping on the mattress? How tall are you? How much do you weigh? What size mattress? King, queen, double. And then it progresses towards like what's your ideal mattress firmness or where are you experiencing pain? What type of sleeper are you in terms of like backside? And then it has a recommended product at the end with an email address. And I think from there, that's a great example of they've captured some of the key information that you might share if you're going to a mattress store and talking with a salesperson. They give you the right product immediately afterwards. And then from there, you know, like it's probably they're relying heavily on the subsequent email campaigns in order to work through the problem of, you know, for whatever reason, you're buying a mattress. This Helix mattress is great for you. And here's why. And it might start high level problem. And then it might go into some of like the alternatives and maybe some competitive analysis of sorts, Helix versus Casper. And then, you know, like here, so you are, you know, buying for two, you want a king size and you have back pain, so this is your mattress. So I think that's a really nice example in terms of like improving conversion rate. Another are like the subscription businesses. And so we kind of like touched on that earlier, but to understand like what you need to know as a brand in order to provide month over month, like a great customer experience. And so this applies to anything on a recurring basis, whether it's like, you know, the coffee or the makeup or the fragrances or the clothes. Stitch Fix, for example, is another great example. They went public earlier this year, I think. And ultimately, yeah, sure. They're like sending monthly boxes of clothes. But at the core, in some way, they're a data driven company, right? They're like accumulating millions of data points of all these people who go through their onboarding. And, you know, they algorithmically recommend products based on both upfront pre-purchase, what their preferences are, and then every month afterwards, they're rating the clothes that they get. So that's another one. And, you know, another interesting example that I've found with quizzes is one question is like, what is your opinion on, you know, Farmer's Dog is an example. Like, what is your opinion on fresh food for dogs? Like, are you sold? Are you convinced that your dog needs it? Are you questionable? Are you skeptical? Like, or are you a non-believer? And essentially what they're asking there is like, where are you on the funnel? Like, what type of content do we need to send to you in order for you to like believe that this is the right product for you? And so that's like one question that they sneak in there. It's kind of like a quick, easy question, but I think it might pay dividends a lot in terms of like on the backend, what flow they drop into, right? Man, that was so good. You've pretty much gone through like a master class. I guess the last question that I have for you is, is there any like key points that like we didn't discuss today that are like top of mind for you? I mean, I imagine we covered probably 90% of them, if not all of them. Are there anything that stands out about stats or facts or things that you want to mention about quizzes before we wrap up? Yeah. So I think like there's maybe the macro question and you'd have good insights on this in terms of like a reliance on paid ads, right? So we see like third-party cookies being deprecated, iOS 14, like things are changing in terms of like how Facebook can track customer activity, you know, off that. And so maybe there's a greater reliance on like email, right? And like what you know about your customers, how you're communicating with them, and then kind of like the data that's informing those campaigns and the greater need to building a relationship directly between brand and customer. Like the paid ads playbook is maybe changing, maybe not, still TBD, but nevertheless, I think when you consider that there's an impact in customer acquisition costs potentially increasing as a result of this and competition just with like additional products in the market increasing, how you're communicating like this personalization is I think going to only manifest in terms of importance and what customers are looking for. And the data actually does back that up in terms of like the willingness of people to share data in order to receive a personalized experience. And what happens if they do get a personalized experience is average order goes up, willingness to pay goes up, and ultimately like lifetime value increases if you can nail this personalization. But I forget what the exact number is, but there is a challenge for marketers in order to do this, in order to like nail personalized marketing. And so it's called the customer experience gap of like what customers want and what customers get. And I think if you're able to fill this in with the zero party data or the data that customers share with you, repackage that and ramp up the relevance in your campaigns, whether it is your email or your onsite web experience or paid ads, remarketing, whatever, the data that you're feeding it, feeding these platforms is super important. And I think if you're able to capture that, a quiz is one way to do that, then it's a competitive advantage for sure. Love it, man. I could not agree more. So I guess the final question I have for you is you've launched officially about two months ago. You've been around for about a year. I think you mentioned you have a couple hundred merchants using the platform. I guess just out of curiosity for me selfishly and also anyone listening, how have you guys gone about like acquiring users and how do you plan to go acquire more users? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think communities have been helpful and that's kind of like direct outreach, connecting with people, you know, like Slack groups, Facebook groups, Twitter. I'm not super active on Twitter, but I think Twitter is like a really great place of activity and people are accessible sharing their knowledge. So that's been one way. Shopify also is interesting in terms of like its own ecosystem is a distribution channel. So Shopify app. So like I told you, like we were a staff pick, you know, a few weeks ago. And so we're seeing an influx of merchants just from having that awareness. So I think that's important. And then I think focusing on partnerships. And so that's kind of like from a tech perspective, the integrations that we're building right now, we're integrated with Klaviyo, but there's like a ton more opportunities of where the data and the responses of a quiz can inform, say, you know, your Facebook ads campaigns, or maybe it's your SMS campaigns with like PostScript or Tentive. So we're trying to build out partnerships, both from a tech perspective, and then also kind of like from an educational and content marketing perspective. But yeah, we're still early to it. And yeah, just trying to like share as much of, you know, our belief on quizzes and the channel to build a merchant and customer relationship, regardless of whether it's or other products. I think that there's a lot to gain from this. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And final final question, actually, is what are your thoughts on something like a product hunt for actually distributing, you know, an app like this? Like, do you think product hunt is still as relevant? Do you think the, you know, you'd get a lot of user from product hunt? Have you seen any Shopify apps on product hunt? Maybe you haven't looked at product hunt at all. And that's an okay answer too. Yeah, well, we've thought about product hunt and for some reason, like haven't done it. I have seen one app, it's called Review, that was on product hunt. I think we're actually top product of the day. And they said that it worked well. I imagine though, I don't have the data to back it up. That is like, maybe some good awareness. But in my mind, product hunt is not super ecom focused, but maybe more like SaaS or creators based stuff. So yeah, haven't haven't launched a product hunt launch. Maybe we will. But yeah, it's not it's not kind of like focused. And then the other thing as well, is it's a little bit of a spike. And then you know, it's a long tail relatively quickly, because every day there's a new leaderboard. Yeah, I think that's a really good and fair assessment. Well, dude, thank you so much for being here. What's the best place for people to find Prehook? It's prehook.com, right? I think you have like the dot com? Yeah, prehook.com, or email me again at prehook.com. It's free to use, we have a free forever plan. And I'm happy to kind of like set up whatever quiz. So I don't know if I actually even answer your question, like who would it not work for? I think that if you're selling online, like just imagine that you know, quizzes is sales associate, like, is there anything that would sell itself without any interaction? Like, maybe, maybe not, I can't really think of any. But I think, you know, if it's even just, you know, a simple question and an email capture, like there is there's something to be gained. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me gen at prehook.com. And I'm happy to like help you build out a quiz and use Prehook or even if you use another product, but I think it most definitely is worth at least considering what can I learn more about my customers in a way that scales that will help my marketing email on site, paid, whatever. Amazing. And then any social handles you want to throw out there? Or is your email the best? Oh, yeah, email or yeah, it's again for a cow on Twitter at again for a cow. Cool. I'll drop your handle. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for the insight. Really appreciate it. Yeah, for sure. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Chase.