This week's highlights: a discovery set quiz with credit-back rewards for a luxury fragrance house

TLDR: A guided perfume discovery set quiz with automatic credit-back rewards for a luxury fragrance house, email A/B tests that pick their own winner for a professional skincare distributor, and a swipe-to-rate photography game for a premium womenswear basics brand. Plus a UK launch, a booking funnel and two quietly useful dashboards.

Some fortnights have a theme, and this one was listening. Almost everything below is machinery for letting customers tell us something useful. Which four fragrances should they try first? Which product photos actually help them judge the fit? Which of two emails deserves the bigger audience?

The trick is acting on the answers without anyone lifting a finger. Credits that issue themselves, winning emails that send themselves, photo ratings that become a merchandising report overnight. Here is the rundown.

This week's highlights: a discovery set quiz with credit-back rewards for a luxury fragrance house

The thinking here is old fashioned in the best way. Before you ask someone to spend three figures on a bottle, let them fall in love with the scent first. We built a guided quiz for a luxury fragrance house that helps each visitor put together their own perfume discovery set, four 2.5ml sprays chosen from their answers about the scents they already wear, the moods they dress for and the notes they avoid.

The clever part happens after the box arrives. The programme watches orders quietly in the background, and when a discovery set customer returns for a full-size bottle it issues their credit back automatically. The set effectively costs nothing once they find their fragrance. No codes to remember, no support tickets, no awkward moment at the till. We wrote about Shopify store credit earlier this summer, and this is the same thinking pointed at perfume sampling.

The quiz also hands its results to the brand's email marketing platform. Follow-up emails know exactly which four scents someone is living with, so every nudge arrives informed rather than generic.

Behind the counter sits a full admin area. The team can review every quiz session and its answers, search the credit ledger, edit the questions, adjust the rules and export the lot to a spreadsheet. We finished the fortnight with a small checkout addition for 10ml travel sizes, a gentle second step between a 2.5ml sample and a full bottle.

We've built guided selling before, most recently a skincare quiz for a results-led clinical skincare brand. Fragrance is harder because you can't photograph a smell. That's exactly why a fragrance finder built on honest questions beats a wall of sixty bottles.

Under the hood: email A/B tests that pick their own winner

A professional skincare distributor sends campaign emails to a large trade audience. Like most teams, they had strong opinions about subject lines and no appetite for babysitting experiments. Their campaign tooling now runs every send as a proper A/B test on a 20/20/60 split. Variant A goes to 20% of the audience, variant B to another 20%, and the remaining 60% waits.

While the first two slices land, a scheduled job keeps score. It watches opens and clicks for each variant, waits for a sensible minimum sample, then sends the winner to the held-back 60% on its own. Nobody has to remember to check at 3pm. Nobody quietly picks their personal favourite.

Worth noting if you run campaigns yourself: the value isn't the split, it's codifying the decision. Write down the rule you'd apply anyway, the minimum sample and the metric that wins a tie, then let software apply it every time. Email A/B testing rarely fails at setup. It fails in the follow-through, which is precisely the part a machine does better.

Other work this fortnight

Our favourite oddball build belongs to a premium womenswear basics brand: a swipe-to-rate game where customers judge the brand's product photography. Like a photo and move on, or dislike it and say why, with reasons like "hard to judge the fit" and "size looks off". Every verdict earns entries into a monthly gift card draw, and the results feed an internal report showing which imagery convinces and which quietly costs sales. It's gamification marketing with an actual job to do. The same brand's reviews can now carry customer photos, and its site speed programme gained an isolated testing template, accessibility upgrades and structured data that puts star ratings into Google search results.

A beauty-tech skincare brand picked the UK as its next market, and we built the campaign furniture for the landing: promotional page templates carrying a free gift bundle and a 20% launch offer, plus a one-click newsletter opt-in page that takes a visitor from email to subscribed in a single tap.

And the family farm attraction we work with can now watch its booking funnel step by step on the weekly report. Every stage, from choosing a booking type to beginning checkout, is measured against Google Analytics, so the team can see precisely where families drop away. It's the newest layer on the experiences-commerce platform we wrote up earlier this year.

The quick wins

Two smaller pieces deserve a mention. A hair wellness brand's dashboard now compares average order value for customers who complete a consultation against those who skip it, which turns "we think the consultation works" into a number the team can watch move. And a speciality coffee roaster can now export invoices in bulk as PDFs through a background job with live progress counts, so a few hundred invoices no longer hold a browser tab hostage.

That's the fortnight: quizzes, verdicts, winners and funnels, all built so our clients' customers do more of the deciding. More next Tuesday.

Photo by Jane Thomson on Unsplash