How Jones Road Beauty Generated 800,000 Email Leads With Octane AI's Quiz

Introduction

 

Jones Road Beauty is a clean, minimalist beauty brand founded in 2020 by legendary makeup artist Bobbi Brown. As a digitally-native brand, Jones Road Beauty aims to recreate the personalized shopping experience of Bobbi Brown's brick-and-mortar stores online.

However, with a wide range of complexion products across different shades and undertones, customers struggled to determine which products and specific shades would work best for their unique skin tone and type. 

The friction shoppers experienced during the product selection process caused lower conversion rates.

To solve this challenge, Jones Road Beauty implemented personalized skin tone and skin type quizzes on their website using the Octane AI platform. 

The quizzes ask customers a series of thoughtful questions about their skin and its needs in order to recommend specific products and shades tailored to each individual.

"We know our product better than anybody else. Our customer might not. So we have to take that knowledge and find a way to incorporate that into our quiz," comments Jones Road Beauty's Joanne Coffey. 

By providing a personalized, consultative shopping experience 24/7 through quizzes, Jones Road Beauty successfully increased conversion rates and connected with customers on a deeper level, in the website experience and thereafter via email and SMS. 

The quiz is so important to the Jones Road Beauty marketing strategy that there’s an entire page dedicated to their quizzes – 7 of them to help with different product recommendations and shopper challenges: 

The Octane AI quiz has in fact driven 800k leads for Jones Road Beauty, 80% of their 1 million email subscribers! 

 

Joanne Coffey, Retention Marketing Manager at Jones Road Beauty, joined us for a deep dive into their quiz strategy.   

Here is a video recap where Joanne shares her comprehensive marketing strategy and how the quiz data ties in to her Klaviyo campaigns: 

 

The Problem: How To Guide Shoppers To The Right Product?

 

As a digital-first clean beauty brand, Jones Road Beauty lacked the critical in-person consultations that founder Bobbi Brown perfected at her legendary makeup counters.

Without personalized shade matching and product recommendations, customers struggled to find the right complexion products that worked for their unique skin online.

 

The Paradox of Choice for Beauty Products 

 

With a wide range of 12 lightweight foundation shades, 25 customizable face pencil shades, and specialized formulations for different skin types, it became incredibly overwhelming for customers to determine which products and specific shades were right for them. 

There were simply too many options without an expert guide.

This friction during the digital shopping journey caused Jones Road Beauty to miss out on sales opportunities and acquire first-time customers. It also lowered retention rates due to poor customer satisfaction.

It was clear Jones Road Beauty needed an innovative solution to replicate the expertise of in-store beauty consultants online and deliver tailored shade matching and product recommendations at scale.

This is where Joanne and Founder Bobbi Brown worked to meticulously create the quiz experience. 

 

The Search for a Solution

 

To deliver personalized shade matching and product recommendations online, Jones Road Beauty searched for a solution that could:

- Ask thoughtful questions to deeply understand each customer's skin tone, skin type, and needs.

- Recommend specific products and shades tailored to each individual Integrate seamlessly with their e-commerce platform

- Provide an easy-to-use interface to optimize and update the logic

The comprehensive solution was a product recommendation quiz. Specifically one like Octane AI’s quiz, that provides an intuitive user interface, design customizations to fit Jones Road Beauty’s branding, and one that could create product recommendations in a robust and scalable way. 

 

Enter The Octane AI Quiz

 

To deliver personalized shade matching and product recommendations at scale, Jones Road Beauty implemented a series of smart quizzes on their website using the Octane AI platform.

With Octane AI's intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Jones Road Beauty easily created in-depth quizzes that ask customers thoughtful questions about their skin tone, skin type, makeup preferences, and specific needs.

"When we think about our shopping experience online, we want to create it just like you're walking into a makeup store. Your first objection is going to be, 'Oh my gosh, what shade am I? What shade is going to work for me? What products are going to work for me?' And we create the quiz experience with these questions in mind, " Joanne says about creating the quiz. 

After answering the questions, the quizzes instantly recommend the best suited products and shades tailored to each individual shopper using advanced logic and conditioning.

Key capabilities of Octane AI's quizzes that addressed Jones Road Beauty's challenges:

- Branching quiz logic that delivered personalized question paths and recommendations based on each customer's unique responses.

- Real-time integration with Shopify to connect quiz responses to Jones Road Beauty's product catalogs and inventory.

- Interactive shade finder with image and swatch options for visual shade matching backed by logic.

- Powerful analytics to optimize quiz performance, completion rate, and leads based on real customer data.

- APIs to seamlessly pass quiz data to marketing platforms like Klaviyo.

With Octane AI's turnkey quizzes, Jones Road Beauty quickly launched an engaging, consultative experience that mirrored the expertise of their in-store artists at scale. The implementation process was smooth and intuitive, especially with Octane AI's dedicated customer support team.

Now, Jones Road Beauty could consistently capture zero-party data on customer skin profiles and needs to continually refine their quiz logic and tailor future recommendations. This ultimately led to higher conversion and retention thanks to personalized guidance throughout every touchpoint.

 

"We'll work very in depth with our product development team to make sure that the recommendations that we are providing are as accurate as possible. Our Founder, Bobbi Brown, was very involved in creating these quizzes and the recommendations....I would say that the conversion rates of our post quiz welcome flow is higher than our regular welcome flow." - Joanne Coffey

 

Seemingly simple questions that answer the customer's skin type proved to be hugely valuable in creating a personalized website experience, and allowing for customer data points to create segments with in Klaviyo. 

Joanne's Thoughts on Quizzes and Octane AI

 

On why a quiz is valuable in replicating the in-store brand experience, Joanne notes: "When we think about our experience online, we want to create it just like you're walking into a makeup store. A quiz is our next best option to give customers that ease of mind to help them know their shade and recommend products that are going to work for their skin type."

On why Joanne loves Octane AI and its industry expertise: "I feel like I'm always learning when I'm talking to the Octane team, which is always great. Their support team has been fantastic. When we look for usability, that's number one - we want to make sure that the SaaS company we integrate with is easy to use for our consumer."

On why a brand should test a quiz, Joanne comments: "If there are any brands out there that are thinking about creating a quiz, pretend like you're walking into a store and you're a sales associate. What are you going to ask that person who's just walking in the door? Take those questions and build your quiz off of that."

 

"The Octane AI team makes the most intuitive and user friendly quiz product. And also their support team has been fantastic, I always feel like I am learning something from them, which is exactly what you want from your software providers." - Joanne Coffey

 

The Jones Road Beauty Quiz Results

 

By implementing personalized quizzes with Octane AI, Jones Road Beauty saw impressive results.

The quiz is a key cornerstone of the Octane AI marketing strategy, where customers learn more about the products and the best product for their needs while Jones Road Beauty captures key data points about their customers in order to provide more personalized and relevant content. 

The in-depth quizzes exceeded expectations by consistently providing Jones Road Beauty's signature consultative guidance at scale. Customers appreciated the personalized shade and product recommendations, which led to more confidence during checkout.

This is the product recommendation page after the quiz, where customers can easily add recommended products directly to their cart, and see the cart: 

 

This tailored shopping experience successfully increased sales with higher conversion and retention rates. But more importantly, it strengthened customer relationships by making each person feel truly seen and understood.

 

Lessons Learned and Future Plans

 

Implementing personalized quizzes was a game-changer for realizing Jones Road Beauty's vision of delivering tailored guidance online at scale. 

The brand learned just how valuable zero-party data is for continually optimizing recommendations and connecting with customers across channels.

 

"If you want to get feedback on what your experience looks like from a consumer perspective, ask your consumer, ask your customers, ask some of your VIPs what their experience has been with your quiz." - Joanne Coffey

 

The data captured in the quiz not only allowed for the recommendation of the best product, but also create relevant educational content to accompany the recommendation. This is the product recommendation page, with educational content on how to use the product, and relevant upsells to increase Average Order Value: 

For any brand implementing quizzes, Joanne strongly recommends experiencing the customer experience and replicating that with a quiz. Jones Road Beauty has the unique benefit of having retail stores, so Joanne was able to have an in-person shopping experience that she translated into a quiz experience.

"If you want to get feedback on what your experience looks like from a consumer perspective, ask your consumer, ask your customers, ask some of your VIPs what their experience has been with your quiz," Joanne suggests.

But this can be replicated even if you don’t have a brick and mortar store: 

- Map out the conversation a customer would have with a sales associate of the brand to outline the ideal quiz questions and recommendations.
- Leverage quiz analytics to run A/B tests and optimize for higher completion rates.
- Integrate quiz data into your tech stack like email, CRM, and SMS to create a 360-degree view of each customer, like Klaviyo, Omnisend, Postscript and Attentive. 
- Take an iterative approach to improve quiz logic over time based on real user data.

 

Most importantly, Jones Road Beauty will continue capturing zero-party data through Octane AI's quizzes and integrating it across their customer communications via email and SMS.

This will allow them to keep providing their signature human touch across every step of the customer journey - deepening relationships and fueling business growth.

 

Wrapping Up

 

Jones Road Beauty needed to recreate founder Bobbi Brown’s in-store magic online in order to provide meaningful, personalized guidance to customers. 

Without it, confusion and lack of confidence during the shopping experience led to missed sales opportunities and poor retention.

By leveraging Octane AI’s robust quiz software, Jones Road Beauty was able to deliver tailored recommendations at scale by asking thoughtful questions to understand each customer’s skin profile and needs.

Jones Road Beauty successfully transformed their digital experience using Octane AI’s quizzes to consistently guide customers to the best products for their needs at every touchpoint. The zero-party data captured has allowed them to connect with customers on a deeper level across all channels.

Does your e-commerce brand struggle to provide the personalized guidance that keeps customers coming back?

Start capturing critical zero-party data to understand customers and fuel personalization with Octane AI’s powerful quizzes today. Book your demo today!