Interactive shopping isn’t new to the ILIA team. In fact, this 9-figure beauty brand has been driven by one core value since the very beginning: bringing a customer-first mindset in every way they build and innovate.
A clear example of ILIA's commitment to this value is its product quizzes on the ecommerce store.
Before exploring these quizzes, it’s important to know that the current versions on ILIA's website are quite different from the original…
The initial quiz was a single, custom-built Shade Finder that allowed users to select skin tones closest to theirs and receive a shade recommendation for a specific product. While this original quiz was simple, beautiful, and functional, it lacked one important feature: logic. And this became a big problem.
p.s. If you prefer to watch the video you can watch that here:
Cherene Aubert, VP of ecommerce and digital at ILIA Beauty, explained that with the original quiz, customers already needed to know what product they wanted before getting shade matched. This took out an important component of what a true consultative experience should feel like.
More specifically, the original quiz lacked
- Complexity and logic for hyper-personalized recommendations that make customers feel confident about their recommended shades.
- Direct integrations with ILIA’s marketing tech, limiting the use of quiz data for other campaigns.
These pain points were a big reason for ILIA to make some changes—but they also had to be made extremely fast. Why?
Cherene joined the ILIA team right before BFCM. Not only did she have the challenge of tackling one of the busiest sales events of the year, but the team was also deciding how to improve the website's shade finder experience for the launch of a new product: the Skin Rewind Complexion Sticks.
Talk about drinking from the firehose right away.
With a product launch and it being the most critical time of the year for the brand to drive revenue, Cherene had to relaunch ILIA’s quiz with little room for error.
For this project, she partnered with Octane AI to repower ILIA’s iconic Shade Finder quiz, as well as build two additional quizzes.
As a result, her team was able to build a waitlist of 55K shoppers for the new product launch. Take that in for a second… That’s 55K shoppers who have a high purchase intent and are ready to spend money with ILIA.
I’ll walk you through Cherene’s story and why she chose Octane AI over alternatives like Typeform or another custom-built quiz.
Cherene needed confidence that the new quiz would be effective for ILIA’s newest product debut
Everything comes back to consumer confidence…
ILIA launched its new Skin Rewind Complexion Sticks in March 2023, featuring 42 shade variants. With so many choices, Cherene knew online customers would have trouble figuring out which shade would be right for their skintone.
For the new product launch to go well, customers had to get skin matched. This was a necessary step to send shoppers personalized campaigns about the new product and to make them feel confident that the product would work well for them.
So, before going live with the product, the ILIA team built a teaser quiz. This allowed customers to get shade matched for the new product before it was even released. At the end of the quiz, potential shoppers were prompted with an email and SMS sign up to get notified first when the new product dropped.
Using this method, ILIA built a waitlist of 55K shoppers for the Complexion Sticks launch.
Then, once the product was launched, they followed up via email and SMS with their recommended shade for the complexion stick for each person on the waitlist. Not only did this build excitement, but the personalized touch got to the crux of the confidence problem right away.
The takeaway? The Complexion Sticks launch was an incredible success because ILIA mitigated the shade-matching barrier to conversion ahead of time. When you create a customer experience with care, customers tend to care back, increasing sales potential through a retained consumer base.
While we love a happy ending, the process wasn’t entirely peachy.
Cherene had to do a lot of work to make sure ILIA’s new quiz provided everything they needed while mitigating the current frustrations of their custom-built quiz. Thankfully, she wasn’t alone in the process.
Why ILIA Beauty Revamped Its Quiz with Octane AI
According to Cherene, the original ILIA quiz was missing three important features:
- A hyper-personalized wow factor.
- Straightforward integrations that enabled using quiz data for other projects.
- Simple maintenance that allows the brand to develop numerous quiz projects.
During her research for a solution, she questioned something every marketer asks themselves when deciding on new technology—should I build or buy it?
While custom-building may initially seem like the right move, Cherene admitted that numerous quizzes meant a heavy workload of custom analysis, manual maintenance, and reporting, on top of using developer resources, which were all issues the team was already facing.
With goals centered around the customer experience, providing valuable output, and speed to market, they opted for buying their quiz technology this time around.
“I spent a couple of months evaluating vendors. Octane AI was high on the list, as I knew its capabilities and integrations worked well with the rest of our marketing technology,” she said.
The bottom line was that ILIA wanted to create a consumer experience that felt custom, unique, and seamless to the brand: a task that Octane AI was up to. This was done by addressing the initial features Cherene had in mind:
1. Giving buyers confidence by making shade matching more simple
The ILIA team was gearing up for the launch of one of its most popular products to date: the skin tint, a complexion-based product.
“These products are hard to sell in DTC because most consumers want to go in-store and talk to an artist for help getting matched,” explained Cherene.
With so many shade options, how could you blame them? Even a subtle difference in tone can look very obviously wrong with someone’s complexion.
With the help of Octane AI, Cherene wanted the new Shade Finder to be more complex internally but easier for customers to engage with.
She wanted customers to get follow-up questions based on previous answers and narrow down which shade was truly right for their skin tone—beyond selecting photos of models that “look similar to the buyer.”
The ultimate goal was to give buyers a consultative experience, making them feel confident without shopping in-store.
2. Reducing manual work with a smarter quiz solution
Before Octane AI, the original quiz was custom-built. It required many custom tags in Google Tag Manager and extensive custom analysis of each quiz response.
On top of that, the original quiz called for manual maintenance and reporting—a common pitfall with custom-built quizzes—which took up precious hours from the team’s work on other projects.
The solution? Integrations were a big part of why Octane AI stood out to Cherene.
Instead of the tedious work that came with the previous quiz, data could seamlessly flow from Octane AI into Klaviyo, Google Analytics, and ILIA’s other tools. The team could also see the quiz's impact on revenue with Octane AI’s dashboard, which shows quiz engagement, conversions, AOV, and more.
3. Expanding from one to many by launching more quizzes
ILIA’s partnership with Octane AI simplified the maintenance of a single quiz. By saying goodbye to custom work and wasting hours on tedious tasks, they realized they could do so much more…
ILIA went from having a single global quiz to multiple quizzes on themes around new products, buyer problems, and personal shopping intentions. Who doesn’t love getting more with less?
Additionally, she wanted the new quizzes to reduce purchase barriers, increase website conversion, and integrate zero-party data for personalized marketing. 
Once she set her mind to Octane AI, Cherene was off to the races. Not only did they replace with original shade finder quiz, but the ILIA team launched three quizzes through Octane AI without having to have any internal bandwidth battles with the development team.
How ILIA’s quizzes work
There’s no doubt about it: Cherene treated this project with care. Every question, response, recommendation, and marketing follow-up was meticulously planned and executed.
Let’s be honest, this is no surprise if you already know Cherene.
ILIA’s original quiz was global, meaning the customer had to know what product they wanted before having their shade matched.
Now, ILIA provides various quizzes that serve different purposes. Their global quiz recommends which product and shade best suits a customer’s needs. Their other quizzes are product-specific for customers who know what product category they want to buy from but may need help making the final choice.
The upgraded quizzes use intense mapping logic. If a customer is matched to a specific shade in one product, the quiz will also map it to that shade from another product. This way, customers get shade matched to a suite of products and get related product recommendations.
“The priority is to help the customer, so it feels like they’re talking to a makeup artist,” Cherene said.
ILIA’s intense quiz logic
Let’s break down how ILIA solved the problem of their static quiz by partnering with Octane AI.
Right off the bat, ILIA prompts users to find their perfect shade by featuring its Shade Match tool on its main menu. 
The heading takes you to the start of the global quiz, prompting customers to select the photo closest to their skin tone and complexion. 
Of course, not everyone perfectly fits into one of the nine skin tone categories. So, ILIA asks the user to narrow it down and choose a more precise representation of their skin tone. 
On top of skin tone, it’s important to note how a customer's skin acts. The quiz follows by asking if your skin is dry, oily, or both.
Here is where the product selection starts kicking in.
Different makeup products often serve different purposes and cater to various skin-type needs. For instance, customers with sensitive skin may prioritize a medium-coverage product that prevents and conceals breakouts over a light-coverage product that prevents settling into wrinkles and fine lines.
This is where the quiz addresses the customer's needs by asking about their skincare concerns and the desired level of coverage.
You can’t forget SPF—a significant make-or-break for many beauty enthusiasts. 
At the end of the day, customers want makeup that makes them feel their most confident selves. It’s a no-brainer that the quiz asks how the customer wants to look after using the recommended product. 
The quiz gets even more granular data by asking about the customer’s birthday, a great opportunity to collect data to send personalized birthday messages to shoppers.
Of course, ILIA wants to stay in touch with happy customers.
The quiz follows with a prompt to send quiz results to customers’ inboxes, sign up for ILIA’s email newsletter, and sign up for text notifications about new product launches and sales.
Once all the questions are answered, the quiz presents the customer with their best-fitted product based on the quiz input. Right up front, they communicate the product name, coverage, finish, shade, and price with quick access to add to cart. 
It doesn’t stop there. ILIA’s global quiz provides more product recommendations in addition to the main highlighted product. But these aren’t just any products; the quiz maps the shade of the highlighted product to parallel shades of other complementary products—all to give the customer more options while shopping. 
The result of getting to know your customers
Now, after all of this effort in building new quizzes, launching new products, and collecting customer data, we promise the results were worth it for ILIA. Specifically, after implementing their new quiz project with Octane AI, the team saw:
- Time savings: With their new quiz, ILIA unlocked easier and quicker reporting. In contrast with their previous quiz, ILIA currently has an easy-access dashboard of all their quizzes with a drag-and-drop editor, requiring no manual maintenance or a request from developers.
- Higher AOV: Users who purchase from ILIA’s quiz have a higher AOV than users who don’t. This can be attributed to ILIA recommending related products and bundling recommendations of complementary items.
- Better personalization: ILIA can use the data from its quizzes to create more personalized customer experiences. For example, customers with oily skin can get email content and product recommendations that suit only their skin type.
The moral of the story is that when Cherene partnered with Octane AI, ILIA was able to implement a quiz that had what the initial ILIA quiz lacked.
“For businesses, getting a quiz set up is easy. Especially with a tool like Octane AI!”
- Cherene
How To Set up Your Own Quiz
Like what you see from ILIA? You can achieve the same results. It’s never been easier to build a quiz without having internal bandwidth battles.
If you want to add a product recommendation quiz to your store, we are here to help. You can get started right away or schedule a time. We'd love to chat about our offerings and learn more about your brand’s needs.
