How To Turn Customers Into Superfans With Quizzes | #228 Lindsay Kolinsky

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Claus Lauter: Hello, welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we want to find out what kind of store features help you to turn customers into super fans and how to maximize your post purchase experience. With me on the show today, I have Lindsay Kolinsky. She's the director of marketing at Okendo.io

She has five years of e commerce experience and has worked across various go to market functions, including sales, customer success, partnerships, and marketing. Lindsay is passionate about relationship building, storytelling, and turning complex ideas into relatable concept that everyone can understand.

Okendo obviously is very well known for their review solutions, but they do much more than this. So when we want to dive a little bit deeper into that, so let's welcome Lindsay to the show. Hi, Lindsay. How are you today?

Lindsay Kolinsky: Good. 

Claus Lauter: How you on the show. Let's see. Okay. This is a well known brand was in the Shopify ecosphere and mainly for the review solutions, but you do a lot of more things. Now let's find out how you can turn out or how you can turn a customer into a super fan with the different features that you offer.

Maybe give me a background. What's the best starting point to. get someone to become a superfan. 

Lindsay Kolinsky: The way we look at superfans right is That is your ideal customer. They're there already. They're the ones that are already loyal to your brand. You've worked so hard to get them to that point, whether it's through your product, your great experiences that you offer, customer service, all of those things combined that you're doing to get your customers, to be loyal to you to retain with your brand.

And it's really about getting those customers. To be your best marketing channel. So they probably already, , are doing some level of word of mouth talking about your brand to your friends, but it's really about amplifying that making their point of view visible to other people as well.

Not people just immediately within their direct network. And then on top of that, just giving them an incentive to keep talking about your brand. For us, again, it's, you have these customers. Yeah. Let them help you build your brand, grow your brand, and drive growth. Revenue. So that's what Okendo is all about.

 Like you said, we're really well known for our reviews product. But within the last, I'd say, year or so, we've really transformed into a customer marketing platform so that we can help brands accelerate their growth with their super fans. So we have a surveys product where you can do NPS or marketing attribution, collects your party data.

We have a referrals product, which is, again, really built off of that brand advocacy, that word of mouth, getting your existing customers to tell their friends about you. And then last week we just released our quizzes product, which is really focused again on getting people to your site, to the right product for them.

 Personalized product recommendations based on their needs. And again, ultimately on the front end, that's going to create a super fan later when you're making sure that they're buying the right product for them. So that's how at Akendo we think about super fans and why every brand in the Shopify space should really be thinking about that.

Claus Lauter: Now reviews obviously speaks for themselves. Let's dive a little bit deeper into quizzes and surveys. I haven't spoken much about that on the show in the past. quite curious, how do you build a quiz that's engaging and that's speaks for the brand? What's the process? How to get started with that?

Lindsay Kolinsky: The best way to think about a quiz, again, it's just backtracking a little bit. So you want to make sure that you are helping get your customers to the right products based on their needs. You can think about it as what's our most popular product line?

To start. And what are the different types of, variants within those popular product lines? So say I'm a hair care company, shampoo or you can even go a step deeper. I want to help them build a routine. So it's a combination of shampoo, conditioner, whatever other hair gel anything else that you might want to use.

 And you just have to think about what are those variants and what are the different ways we've built the product? Who are these products for? And then think about the questions that will help you identify which customers first. Would be best for each product. So thinking about again, if you're a hair care brand where do you live?

What weather temperature? Are you in dry heat? Are you in humidity? Are you do you have frizzy hair? Do you not, asking those questions? And then at the end, Essentially, in the backside, we have conditional logics. You can build those questions and say, okay, if you've answered these things, this is the product we'd recommend or maybe skip this question because it's not really relevant because based on really the answer to this one question, we know what they're going to do.

The other great benefit of a quiz that I think is really important to mention is that while you are guiding, customers to the right product, once you do those product recommendations, we have a really simple add to cart button. So that's really how you're going to help the conversion by making it easy to not only recommend what's right for them, But make it easy for them just to add and continue their purchase.

 But the additional benefit to you is you're collecting all this zero party data about your customers with these questions. So it's two folds where the customer is getting the benefit of a really personalized experience. And the merchant is, of course, getting higher conversion and being able to deliver a personalized experience.

But they're also getting data that's going to help them continue to keep that customer later on. So now I know this customer, lives in dry heat, has issues with frizz. I can continue to, not only recommend them other products, but deliver them content that's relevant. How do you take care of your hair in this heat?

Here's some tips, all these things that are really going to help these brands build better relationships with their customers over time. Just having this data available to them is a huge advantage to a quiz as well. 

Claus Lauter: So it's a little bit to me, if you go to a very good restaurant and you have a very good waiter, and then he basically to find out what you actually really like, what's your taste is, what your preferences is.

And the next time you come back, they already know, and they basically continue where you left off. With the last visit. Now, you said that you can continue the journey after a quiz on other levels like content marketing. How do you do that? 

Lindsay Kolinsky: So in Okendo, we have what we call the unified customer profile. So essentially all of the data that you're collecting from a quiz all those same questions that I just asked on a quiz, you can also collect and ask in a review. So similarly, we have what we call customer attributes.

While you're leaving the review, you can say, what kind of hair do you have? Where do you live? Again, all of these same questions, you can collect a different place. You can also collect it in a survey as well. So you can at the end of someone post purchase right there, you can ask them, all of these questions.

So essentially through all of these, different tools that we have. Then you'll get the unified customer profile where you basically have all this information one to one about a customer, their preferences, their needs, their demographics, events that have taken place just in how they use the tools.

, and then you can sync that to your ESP, your SMS platform of choice and use that for segmentation. You could do it for bigger segments. Again, if you're really strong in that personalization and that content engine. You can do more one to one personalized marketing, but really we're helping you aggregate and collect that zero party data so that in all of your other marketing campaigns, you have that really strong base of information about your customers.

Claus Lauter: Let's have a look, but on the technical side, how do you build your quiz, your survey? Is this the Shopify app and how many steps do you need to go through before you can set it live to the public? 

Lindsay Kolinsky: Yeah. So everything is built within the Okendo app. So you install Okendo on your store and then we have a quiz builder within the app.

So really easy. We have a number of question templates. We also have different layouts. So again, there's people to your point of an engaging quiz. Do you want to add a little icon or a photo or anything to make it more appealing? Not just, tech. So we have like a lot of customization options like CSS color options that you can make it look within your brand.

The last thing you want is for a place just to look like a pop up and ruin your site experience. So we really make sure that you can like brand it within it. Your brand in it, and it seems seamless to the customer. And then you can just set those logic. And it really builds the logic out for based on the question answers.

What products. You're going to deliver in that quiz. And then, of course, you can have multiple different types of quizzes. So again, if you're focusing on different product lines, it might be, easier to offer different types, which are lipstick shade versus, what foundation is right for you doing those as two separate quizzes.

 But we make it super easy. One of the things that a lot of the customers said when they were first getting on quizzes with just how fast and easy it was to use the builder. The other thing I think that we've done and made sure of is to make sure that we have, An in app test mode. So a lot of competitors make you push the quiz live and then it's really confusing for you to test every scenario.

We've made sure that you have the ability to test that and make sure all of your logic is working because I think that logic can be The most confusing part for building a quiz. And I think regardless of what platform you're using, it's just as a person, you're figuring out like, what are the answers?

What do I want to drive person to? You can make sure all of that logic is working very well before you even start the quiz. In terms of survey, very similar UX, obviously it's different it's not going to give you a product recommendation at the end. It's more of just that internal feedback.

But again, we use really similar UX between the 2 in terms of conditional logic. If you want to ask additional questions based on a response so we make sure that the user interface is really easy. 

Claus Lauter: You already gave some examples in regards of hair products. What are specific industries, verticals, niches that this works very well in?

Lindsay Kolinsky: Yeah, I would say definitely beauty. I think beauty is one, that's why Sephora is so great as an in store experience. People love to test and to see, and really be guided to. What products are going to work well for them. So again, hair, skin, cosmetics, all of that works really well.

 Home care. So things like candles and sense and I guess what I should say, it's really taking about those offline experiences that you get shopping in store and being able to convert them. That's where again, something like candles, you can can't smell it. Online, but we can help bring that experience there by taking all of your preferences.

 Also. At leisure clothes, shoe types. It's really endless as long as you can really figure out who the product is for and how can I. make questions to guide people to the right product. 

Claus Lauter: Would you create quizzes for, I don't know, specific holidays, like Mother's Day or something like that? Or would you just run them the whole year through?

Lindsay Kolinsky: we definitely recommend... Having a quiz that's evergreen something again that regardless of the time of year it's going to get people to the right product. But something we were thinking about for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, which could be like.

An interesting application is maybe to have a what gift. To buy someone take the quiz. And again, that data you're collecting would probably be a little bit less valuable because it would be data about the gift receiver, not necessarily the person that is taking the quiz, but it's still going to help guide them to the right product.

There's so much competition now that I could look on your site, get overwhelmed, go to the next site and get a gift for someone. But if you're helping me find out based on like what this person likes. All of these things like and again, it's that same application.

So if I know that they live in this type of atmosphere and they have these hair problems, okay, I'm just giving their information instead of my information. So it could be a really great thing for like gift tool to your point Mother's Day. So I think there's a lot of unique, ways that you can spin a quiz around for seasonal or for special occasions.

Makes total 

Claus Lauter: sense. One question I need to ask is a lot of people are concerned about their privacy. Data privacy is a big topic. Now I'm giving you all these details and some people might be concerned about doing this. How do you address 

Lindsay Kolinsky: this? Yeah, I think the reason that things like reviews and quizzes and surveys.

Work so well to combat those data privacy issues. Is that the customers understand why they're giving you their data and they're getting something in return. So it's not just a third party is crawling my cookies and someone sold that. And now I'm getting targeted an ad because I spoke about in my phone and heard thinking about it's not creepy in that sense.

 With reviews more often than not, before they bought the product, yeah. They were looking at the reviews and looking at people that were similar to them. So when you ask for the when they buy that product, you ask again for that review and return. They know why you're asking because they use that information for their purchasing decision.

 It's not weird for them. And then if you're offering them an incentive on top of that for the review they're getting something same with the quiz, And they're taking a quiz because they need help because they want to be guided on your site. They want more information.

They're not going to really be hesitant about giving clicking that button and being like, what are they going to do with it? They know what you're going to do with it. You're going to give them a recommendation. And then even with surveys to. Most of the time we offer or we recommend offering an incentive, whether that's a coupon potentially loyalty points or something in exchange for that information.

So usually that transparency of how it's being used and making sure what they're getting in return usually helps combat that. And again it makes it all the more important to have methods like this to collect that data, knowing that The I. O. S. Changes the Facebook changes. All this are making it even harder for everyone to collect it.

So that's another point of how we see Okendo and the idea of super fans really helping, businesses right now. It's about in a trustworthy way. Getting that information so that you can continue those long term efforts to build those relationships, your customers that are harder to obtain right now with a lot of the challenges of the market.

Claus Lauter: What I like on your platform that you basically delivering reviews, referrals, loyalty out of one hand. So it's not a bunch of different apps that potentially crush with each other or you can't get all the data into one place. So that's one big advantage. My question is, where do you start to get people into the funnel?

Do you start on the homepage to get them into a quiz funnel or do you start in your marketing already in your Facebook ads and your email marketing? How does that work? 

Lindsay Kolinsky: I would say do it all like again this is going to help drive conversion. It's great. I've seen really effective ads of take our quiz, that gets people excited.

But again, if I'm just searching organically and I land on your homepage. It's equally as important to market the quiz, let people know have a landing page or something that says, take the quiz now or to email even your existing customers and say, like, Hey, not sure, you know, what's my next take our quiz?

 So the more marketing you can do, especially around customer marketing programs, same for referrals as well. Our biggest recommendation is to have the referral on the post review widget. So after someone leaves you can set things for it. They leave a four or five star review. Thank you.

Automatically show them like we have a referral program, but it's also equally as important to remind them that referral program exists and to get people to do that. the effectiveness of these programs, right? They can absolutely run on their own and they will deliver results, but you're just going to amplify the results of these programs if you invest in them and really consider them part of your long term customer marketing strategy.

Claus Lauter: I think all these different ways to get your clients, your customers into superfans, like referrals, like reviews, like loyalty. So often you need to nudge them a little bit. You need to give them some kind of reward. Do you have some examples maybe from your customers on what kind of rewards they use to get people over the edge?

Lindsay Kolinsky: Yeah. So with reviews natively, so we offer Either dollar or percentage off discounts generated through Shopify coupon. So that's a really great way. Loyalty points as well. We are coming out with a loyalty program, and that's something that we are looking to natively integrate to ensure that for your reviews for everything else, you can refer a friend, you can get loyalty points to your point, bringing all those platforms together and making sure that they operate more efficiently.

Seamlessly and together as well. Seamlessly is so important. Rewarding people for a view with the quiz. Making sure the star rating show when you have those product recommendations at the end of the quiz. That's important as well. But yeah, I'd say We also have an integration with smile.

io for gift cards as well, or sorry, rise. ai for gift cards. So anything that you can do, but I think just having an incentive in general, you can even set thresholds. So again, you want to make sure that this isn't going to kill your margins, right? Like you don't want to give away a hundred dollars on your next order, but just a little nudge and the good thing oftentimes too, about the reward is that.

They usually made their first purchase or they're making their first purchase. They're going to come back again with referrals, it's if you give a reward to both the person that did the referral and the person that's being referred for that person that's already loyal to your brand.

They're incentivized to make a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th purchase with that and then you have the new person who's never tried it. Who's like, okay, my friend recommended it, but giving them that coupon is going to push them over the edge to try your product. And then again, it's a cycle of just making sure you're rewarding them.

, to your point, it's really just that balance of what's good for your business and also motivating enough to make them take that action, but motivating them will usually pay off in the long run. 

Claus Lauter: absolutely. Right. Look on the customer lifetime value, but I think you made a very valid point there also look into your actual margins for the first purchase that you're not losing too much money on acquiring a customer there.

Now, when it comes to the implementation to the setup, what's the onboarding process? What do I have to do there? And also on that one if I'm already using other apps, can I import my data? How does 

Lindsay Kolinsky: that work? Yeah. So we have a great customer success and customer support team. They'll make sure that everything that you need is imported over.

 Especially for reviews as well. No one wants to lose on another platform, they have thousands of reviews. They don't want to lose those. So we make sure that all of those are brought over. And then in terms of quizzes, usually you wouldn't really. Migrate a quiz. You would start fresh.

Think about that. But we can help migrate all of the data that you have again for reviews in particular is probably the most important will guide you through it and make sure it's part of onboarding. Like I said, we have an incredible team that will hold your hand through the whole process. Each product obviously will have a different level of onboarding how you get set up for each product.

 They have all the recommendations. We have an amazing help center. So we try to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get up, get running after they download the app quick up seeing revenue fast. 

Claus Lauter: Another important question. What's your pricing structure?

How much does Immersion need to calculate to get started? Yeah. 

Lindsay Kolinsky: So our pricing is based on order volume. So we have different tiers based on, how much monthly order volume you have. We do have annual pricing options, but are monthly as well. So you can obviously get a discount for going annual, but our kind of Philosophy is love not locked in.

So we know some of our competitors only do annual. We want to give merchants the option for whatever works best for them. And then our pricing is obviously by product by plan. So again, the plan is by order volume, but we do offer flexible bundled pricing so that everyone can get discounts for the more Okendo products they add.

 And our Things range from anywhere from about 19 a month for, a small SMB for just reviews and then all the way up to custom advanced pricing for really large enterprise brands. So we really want to make sure we have it being accessible everyone. 

Claus Lauter: That makes sense.

Cool. Before we come to the end of our coffee break today, is there anything that you want to leave or want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? 

Lindsay Kolinsky: The biggest thing right now in terms, I think we talked a little bit about the challenges, but we know the pain you're feeling competition is high operating costs are high and then consumer expectations are high.

So with Okendo, we really look. Again, to use those super fans to help you combat those challenges and make sure that you can grow in this crazy time in a single platform. Saving your team time and money and resources. That's what we're here for.

Claus Lauter: Okay. It is a crazy time, but e commerce is growing. Investing into e commerce is a good investment. Where can people find out more about you guys? 

Lindsay Kolinsky: Yeah, you can visit us at okendo. io to find out more information, or you can just find me on LinkedIn. Let's be more than happy to connect you with someone on our team as well.

Claus Lauter: Sounds great. I will put the links in the show notes. Then you just want to click away and say, thanks so much for giving us an overview of what you do. I think the quiz idea is a great one. I definitely will figure it out or try it out myself to see how it works. And that a lot of people will do so as well.

Thanks so much for your 

Lindsay Kolinsky: time today. Great. Thanks so much.