Quiz Unboxing: Beardbrand
In this instalment of Quiz Unboxing I’m dissecting the latest offering from DTC heavyweights, Beardbrand.
Known for sharing a generous amount of educational and entertaining content, in a variety of forms, Beardbrand are no stranger to testing out ideas. And their Say Goodbye to Scent Confusion quiz is a solid concept worth taking a look at.
So, what’s the quiz about?
The quiz is designed to help you find “your fragrance” — a smell that feels like you, and that you can layer on with multiple products.
However, it’s masquerading as a “stop scent confusion” quiz, which might be because it looks like Beardbrand have trademarked the term “scent confusion” (nice score!)
The problem with this is it requires a decent amount of pre-quiz education around wtf scent confusion is.
Rather than having to put a multiple line explanation before the user has even started the quiz, it’d make more sense to meet them where they are (“Idk which scent to buy?”) and then layer on the education around scent confusion via the results pages and/or follow-up emails.
Say goodbye to what now?
Instead, positioning it as a Find Your Fragrance/Scent quiz will boost that warm fuzzy personalised feeling — the user feels like they’re going to find a fragrance that they can make their signature scent.
You want them to consider this scent as a representation of who they are, rather than just a nice smell. If it’s “their scent”, they’re more likely to purchase multiple products, multiple times.
What they’ve done exceptionally well
This isn’t Beardbrands first stroll around the shoppable quiz block (it’s at least their third, as far as I can tell), so they’ve picked up a trick or two by now.
The quiz is designed to help customers with their purchasing choices ← a fundamental (and totally underrated trait) of a good shoppable quiz.
The Q&As are on brand and insightful, collecting some useful data for Beardbrand, particularly around shopping habits and how their customers see themselves (both in reality and aspirationally).
This shopping habits question is a perfect example of using the quiz to gain intel — the user’s answer doesn't correlate to their quiz result, but it provides data that's valuable to the brand.
The explainer screen prior to the results page also adds a nice, conversational touch. It makes it feel slightly less like a computer is doing the math, and more like an actual human is making a recommendation.
Hyping up the result 👌
The results pages display like collections pages, with some info about your scent at the top, followed by a vertical list of products in that scent.
Each product includes the star rating + number of reviews, a description of the product and an Add To Cart button.
All of this, along with the option to add a bundle of these products to your cart, will help boost conversions and AOV from the results pages.
The results page in all it’s lengthy glory
It’s also worth noting that the scents themselves are SPECTACULARLY named: Tree ranger, old money, four vices… basically, I’m here for these scent names (except for tea tree), plz never stop.
Where they could make some changes?
The obvious change would be repositioning the quiz as finding your fragrance rather than ending scent confusion, as mentioned above.
The other glaring issue for me was that the result I got (tea tree *gag*) didn’t feel accurate… I may be lazy AF and live my life virtually, but I’d still rather smell like a forest than tea tree.
I just really like forests, ok
This seems to be related to the questions — the majority are around lifestyle, with only 3 questions about my scent preferences. I did love that there was a logic jump that made me choose between the scent I’d picked before and a new one, and adding in another 1 or 2 comparison choices might help with the accuracy of results.
Beardbrand also offers a fragrance sample kit — something they could totally include at the end of the results page and as part of the follow-up email flow, segmenting out buyers. Even if you design a quiz for accuracy, there’s still room for errors, and there’s nothing wrong with giving the customer other options.
Well hello there 😏
With 12 questions in total, including email capture, the quiz is also a little lengthy — I normally recommend keeping it at 10 Qs or less to reduce drop off. Not a deal-breaker, but if they found that there’s a spike in dropoffs at a certain point, or a low completion rate (under 50%), then the questions would need work.
Overall the Typeform design doesn’t do much for me. It’s not terrible, but compared to the seamless design on Rooted’s plant quiz, this could be better. Ditto using images to break up all those texty questions and enhance the quiz taking experience.
When it comes to the results pages, making the bundle option more obvious would be a huge win.
The bundle option is easy to miss 😕
They mention a killer Happiness Guarantee too, but unfortunately it’s hiding all the way at the bottom of the page. A little icon next to the products with a link to the info would help overcome those pesky “What if I make the wrong choice?” objections.
When your returns policy is this good, you wanna get more eyeballs on it
Ditto shipping info. It’s on the product pages if you click through, the FAQ page and there’s a dynamic free shipping reminder in the cart slide out… but customers need to easily access and see the shipping info right there on their results page.
Lastly, even though this quiz has pride of place on the mantel, er, I mean homepage header, it could also be linked to via the Fragrances submenu. If someone is looking to shop via scent, it makes sense to help them find the right one.
WHAT ARE THEY SENDING POST-QUIZ?
At first it looked like I wasn’t going to get anything hitting my inbox, post-quiz.
But overnight 2 emails hit my inbox: one with the subject lie “Your beard sucks” (most likely the start of a standard welcome sequence) and another one an hour-ish later for a product restock (most likely a blast sent to the whole list, not just quiz takers.)
The delay could be a backend issue with Typeform only syncing data every so often, but if you’re an easily-distracted human (so, everyone) it’d be ideal to have this info in your inbox immediately after completing the quiz.
But the really big missed opportunity here:
Sending the quiz taker their results (with links to those products and/or the results page).
From there I’d recommend sending a welcome sequence tailored to these quiz takers… because they didn’t ask if their beard sucks (infact, they’re probably already worried that it does), they asked what fragrance was right for them. 2 very different problems.
The final verdict
This is a solid start from a brand that’s no stranger to quizzes, but it also leaves a bit of room for improvement.
The quiz topic/positioning and the accuracy of the results are a pretty big deal when it comes to building a shoppable quiz, and are 2 things that would be relatively quick fixes.
TL;DR How you position a quiz might just be the most important aspect of it + results accuracy is everything.