Information is transforming customer experience. It drives Google’s personalized search results, fuels the revolution in personalized medicine, and even puts you and Donald Duck on first-name terms.
You’ve heard the hype—big businesses are throwing big dollars at big data to learn what tickles your pickle.
But there’s good news for small and medium business too: it doesn’t take a team of data scientists crunching gigabytes of info to power more personalized customer service.
Jeff Goldenberg did it with a 5-minute quiz.
How do I deliver more personalized content to my customers?
Jeff is Head of Growth at Borrowell, an online lending marketplace in Canada. As a seasoned growth hacker, he knows that personalized marketing is a big driver of sales.
Think about financial advice. When it comes to money, not everyone starts in the same place, and not everyone has the same approach to duplicating their dollars. Jeff needed insight into his customers’ financial personality.
He came up with the idea to make a quiz to get the insight he was after.
“We launched our financial personality quiz to provide our customers with the most personalized content and finance tips. We wanted to find out what their financial personality was. Once we know that information, we can ensure to deliver the best content possible for them.”
For the information Jeff needed, Typeform was the perfect tool:
“The quiz was easy to create, easy to customize and design, and easy to circulate and amplify. It’s great for growth marketing because you can test the effectiveness of the initiative without committing a lot of resources and money.”
But to put this all together, Jeff had some thinking to do.
Inspiration from an unlikely source
Leonardo DiCaprio. That’s right. In The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio depicts the rampant lifestyle of stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Wolves are known for their keen reliance on instincts and appetite for freedom, traits reflected by Belfort like a full moon on a still lake.
Jeff had the idea to extend the financial animal metaphor to his customers’ financial personalities. The result? The Financial Spirit Animal Quiz.
To make this idea work, Jeff had three main things to figure out:
What were his customers’ financial personalities?
What questions should he ask to pinpoint a customer’s financial personality?
What technology could make this quiz work?
He thought about his customers. There are some wolves out there, but not everyone’s so aggressive. Some prefer to play it safe, like beavers, investing time to build solid dams. Others carefully hunt the best opportunities, like raccoons sniffing out a hearty picnic.
After some research, Jeff and his team came up with four main personas: polar bear, loon, beaver, and raccoon.
No wolves here. They wanted to resonate with their audience’s experience.
“We wanted the results badges to resemble boy scout badges, and we wanted the survey to focus on Canadian animals because we are a Canadian company, helping Canadians save money on their debt.”
With these profiles in mind, they plotted their questions.
“The thinking and the science behind the questions took some time. We worked from the profiles backwards. We created the 4 results profiles and brainstormed dozens and dozens of questions that could be used to determine someone’s financial personality.”
When they had that figured out, it was time to match the look and feel with their brand identity.
“Our ad agency helped us create the icons, the quiz logo, the copy, and the results profiles based on our guidance and research into the personalities. They really incorporated our brand into the typeform. The attention to detail makes this form stand out from the pack.”
With the tough stuff out of the way, they could focus on the right technology.
“It had to look beautiful, be user-friendly, embed nicely into our site, have custom scoring, and push to our own landing pages based on score.”
But how could he make sure his typeform could handle the heavy lifting?
“Logic Jump was essential to our project to give customers a personalized experience. Scoring and custom redirect allowed us to score each result and send them to a specific results page. We created the landing pages for the results on our website.”
Every response has a different score associated with it. As you answer the quiz, your score gets quietly summed up in the background. When you’re finished, your score sends you to one of four customized Thank You screens. There, a customized redirect button sends you to the Borrowell website, where you learn about your financial spirit animal.
Releasing it into the wild and getting results
The quiz is embedded into the Borrowell website and promoted through social media, blog posts, and their newsletter. But how is Jeff making the results work for him?
“We send the responses to Mailchimp automatically and group them based on the result. This is the key to ensuring that we understand our customers better. It lets us provide them with a more personalized experience, which we believe is the key to establishing a long-term relationship.”
Is it paying off?
In terms of dollars spent, it’s paying off big time. Jeff estimates that his typeform saved him about $3,000 of custom technology development. In terms of responses, it’s looking good there too. They launched the quiz in early 2016, and within the first few days hundreds of people had already completed the quiz.
“Identifying the financial personality of our customers allows us to customize their Borrowell experience, deliver tips and advice based on their personality, and tailor our messaging. Thanks to Typeform, we can achieve this in a fun and easy-to-use format that our customers enjoy.”
We asked Jeff if he had any advice for people looking to create a typeform like his. He told us:
“Just start. Don’t be afraid to launch it early, iterate along the way, test everything you can, and basically assume that it’s always a work in progress. Don’t treat it as a precious thing that needs to be babied. Get it dirty and get feedback from customers. It’s their opinion that counts.”
“Just start.” It got me thinking, how many different questions could I get answered through a quiz? And to get started? Check out the how-to below.
How did Jeff do it?
Jeff’s story gave us some tips on the hard part: deciding on personas and coming up with questions that will classify respondents. Here are some tips on the easy part—putting it all together in a typeform.
1. Customize your background to fit your brand
You can add a customized background to any typeform. Use it to match your brand, evoke emotions, or just to make it look sharp. Learn how to customize the look of your typeform.
2. Recall information for a more natural conversation
Want to make your typeform more personal? Be more conversational by reusing answers from previous questions with Recall information.
3. Keep a running total of scores and costs with Calculator
Calculator lets you assign points to different answers. You can keep a running total, and use this to classify respondents at the end. Find out all the things you can do with Calculator.
4. Use Logic Jumps to customize the screens they see
Do you need to send respondents to different questions, depending on the responses they give? Then you need to use Logic Jump.
5. Personalized Thank You screen with custom redirect
On the final Thank You screen, you can add a customized URL to send respondents to any webpage you want. Find out how to personalize your Thank You screen.
If you haven’t already got a Typeform account, you can sign up for free. And of course let us know if you have any questions! Our team is always here to help.