As an ecommerce seller, do you feel like your business lacks a personal touch?
Are you envious of small town mom-and-pop stores that know their customers by name, and can point them to what they want as soon as they walk through the front door?
Octane AI is a Shopify app for brands on Shopify that bridges this gap. It allows you to collect detailed information on your potential buyers and make personalized recommendations that are more likely to generate sales.
This Octane AI review takes you through the essentials of this Shopify app, and how it might be utilized to both offer an individualized shopping experience and grow your business along the way.
What is Octane AI? 🚀
Octane AI is a Shopify tool that creates quizzes for your customers.
Let’s say you run a brand that sells pet products. With a quiz built through Octane AI, you are able to ask visitors to your site whether they are a cat person or a dog person. Depending on how they answer, you can recommend specific products that are more likely to convert.
By collecting this zero-party data–which is opposed to increasingly less reliable and more expensive third-party data from the likes of Apple, Google, and Facebook–Octane AI enables you to focus your marketing efforts in a highly targeted manner.
How does Octane AI work? 🤔
With Octane AI, you design all aspects of the quizzes that your customers take. Depending on what you sell, and what info you need to make the ideal product recommendation, you are able to customize the elements of what is being asked.
You then proceed to collect valuable data such as email addresses and phone numbers. This makes it possible to fine-tune any follow-up email and SMS campaigns based on preferences that have already been indicated.
The quizzes you create can be embedded in advertisements, displayed on your site, and can even appear as pop-ups. Whatever point of contact you decide, the information collected– combined with the products that you put forward as a result–have the ability to increase conversions, boost average order values, and can lead to more cross-selling and upselling.
Let’s take the clean beauty brand Jones Road Beauty as an example. They used TikTok ads to ultimately drive traffic to an Octane AI quiz that asked customers to match their skin tone.
This tailor-made customer journey was highly effective. It increased their average order value from $60 to $90 dollars, with 15% of quiz-takers making a purchase. In one month they collected 36,000 net new email signups.
Talk about making an impact with your customers!
Octane AI Key Features 🧰
- Dynamic product recommendations. Octane AI offers a simplified method for establishing what gets suggested to customers. You can set up which product groups, tags, or collections should be included or excluded at the answer level. This allows your recommendations to scale as your Shopify store catalog grows, without having to go back and make additional adjustments.
- You can sell items directly in quizzes. Why wait until the quiz is done? With the feature to Add to Cart, you can convert customers into buyers when they are most engaged. This shortens the length from first impression to final purchase.
- You are able to provide content before or after the quiz. Through educational lists and other items like guides, you can offer direct value to your customers in exchange for their time. For example, if you operate a specialty food company, you could reward users at the end of the quiz with a free recipe. (Even better if the recipe has your products as ingredients!)
- Can track analytics. You are able to see detailed performance metrics of your quiz results. Statistics such as view count, completion rate, number of starts, and average time taken to answer are all broken down. This enables you to make improvements and maximize the effectiveness of the quizzes that you present.
Octane AI FAQs 🙋
What are some of the industries that might use quizzes?
Beauty, food and beverage, health, fashion, pets, and home goods are just some of the niches that might curate products in this way.
Are demos available?
Yes, you can schedule a demo on the Octane AI website to chat with their team and walk through the platform.
What are examples of other apps that can be integrated with Octane AI?
Recharge, Zapier, Alloy, and Facebook Messenger can all be integrated with Octane AI.
Octane AI Pros ✅
- Customization. You can adjust the color, style, and background of your quizzes. You can even embed GIFs and images for a highly visual experience. This makes it possible to make your brand’s mark known at all times.
- Integration with other apps. You can sync your data seamlessly. For example, you can segment customers and follow up with personalized email flows through an application like Klaviyo.
- Builds brand loyalty. Personalizing the shopping journey allows you to be more attentive to your customer’s desires. An ecom store that invites visitors to share details about themselves boosts customer lifetime value. It also makes it easier to assemble a customer loyalty program, for instance, or solicit product feedback.
Octane AI Cons ❌
- Potentially high drop-off rates. If the first question in your quiz is not extremely strong, you can face a large number of people refusing to proceed.
- Need heavy traffic. To get the most benefit out of having quizzes, you need an influx of visitors already. This means you will either need to rely on paid advertising or leverage your existing networks.
- Only ideal if you have a large product catalog. If you only sell one main product, it doesn’t make sense to have a quiz promoting certain products versus others. However, there might still be a use case for collecting general customer preferences if you intend to use this in follow-up marketing.
Octane AI Pricing 💰
Pricing depends on your store’s annual revenue and whether you opt for the regular subscription or Octane Plus.
Octane Plus contains advanced features such as a shareable quiz results page and A/B testing for pop-ups.
The cheapest option available–a regular Octane subscription for a store doing less than $1 million USD in annual revenue–starts at $50/month.
Free trials are available.
Final Thoughts 🕵️♀️
Octane AI is a solid no-code option for making specific product recommendations and acquiring valuable information for your business.
The ability to communicate with shoppers through personalized suggestions can be a powerful tool in your Shopify toolbox.
By creating quizzes centered around the products that you sell, and then leveraging the zero-party data that you gather, you are able to enhance the precision with which you promote your store’s offerings.
Simple in design but compelling in its capabilities, Octane AI might just be the thing that helps you understand what makes your customers tick.