How to Create a Quiz to Grow an Email List and Connect with Your Audience

You probably take quizzes on Facebook all the time, right – Because what girl can resist knowing what color reflects her soul, or what age she can pass for? #pink #nolonger22. These quizzes may seem sort of silly, but you can take this concept and create a quiz to grow an email list for your blog in a way that’s not just effective for getting subscribers – it’s a great way to help you understand your audience and be a better blogger.

Create a quiz to grow an email list you can nurture

Blogging goes so far beyond what happens on your website – there’s a whole other dimension created when you layer email marketing over it. Creating an Interact quiz will provide you with the type of information you need to know about your audience so that you can blog better for them and market the right information to them via email (because seriously… we all get enough email that we don’t want or need).

What are your readers struggling with? How can you best solve their problems? – These are important questions that you should know the answers to. But let’s face it, it’s rare that your audience will bother answering those types of questions for you. So instead, a quiz can be an entertaining way to get the information you need – without putting any pressure on them.

How to create a lead generation quiz

At first, it may sound kind of daunting – how the heck do you do this!? Do you need some crazy understanding of algorithms or psychology to make a quiz?

Answer: Nope! (and thank goodness, because I would suck at this)

You’re going to find that it’s actually easy to design an effective quiz that your audience hopefuls are going to enjoy taking. But just in case you feel like you need information on how to start, I’m going to share my tips and behind the scenes into my own quiz “Where are You on the Blogging Roadmap?”

Step 1: Brainstorming

I highly recommend that before you even consider the building of your quiz that you do some brainstorming to decide some pretty key things:

• What type of information do you need from a potential lead?
• How can you use this quiz to best serve them?
• What sort of answer or information will they get from this?
• What actions do you want them to take after the quiz?
• Ultimately, what’s your goal for them – how will you use the info?

Understanding these things is a critical component in mapping out a quiz that’s fun for them, but truly provides you with the insight you need as well as a way to use the information you’ve collected to nurture a relationship with them and further your business.

Here’s how you’ll get to a place where you can answer all of that…

Decide on your Quiz Topic

The first thing you want to do is to choose a quiz topic. This will set everything else about your quiz in motion, so really take your time here. Your topic should be something that makes sense for your audience… something they would want to know.

So if you’re blogging about fashion, it wouldn’t do you a lot of good to create a quiz called “What gardening tool represents you?” – you would want to choose to create a quiz someone interested in fashion would enjoy.

This is also a good time to be thinking about the tone of your quiz – is it something that will be funny and light-hearted, or is it meant to be serious and provide real information?

For my quiz, I chose to provide some real information – maybe even some tough love that someone might not want to hear. My quiz is meant to give the person taking it some insight as to where they are at in this whole blogging thing. More importantly, I wanted to be sure that they were getting results that mattered, paired with some essential next steps and things they should focus on if they want to see success.

Determine what the results should be

Before you think about what questions to ask, you should have a clear understanding of what the results are. While Interact makes it easy to map this all out and edit anything with a few clicks, I found it was helpful to decide what final answers would best help me segment my quiz takers so that someone getting Answer A was a very different member of my audience than someone who got Answer B.

Not to get ahead of ourselves here, but you want to be sure there’s a clear difference between these people so that you know what to do with them later in terms of email marketing. That should always be in the back of your mind.

Map out your goals

You’re going to be collecting a lot of new leads – what the heck do you want to do with them? It’s time to decide what your goal is here (and no, “grow my email list” isn’t really an answer). This quiz can certainly act as a lead magnet to grow your email list, but you should consider how you’ll connect with those people further once they’ve opted in.

For example, I wanted my quiz to attract bloggers who were interested in just how were they were doing as a blogger, where they were in their journey, and what the next steps would look like for them. My quiz segments these people into different categories so that they get the right kind of emails from me.

The 4 different Results correlate to 4 very different people – who are all at a different stage in their blogging journey. So my short term plan is to get them onto my email list and segment them accordingly, while the long term is to provide them with email sequences tailored to them.

I also saw this as an opportunity to segment people already on my list (and I’ll likely create other quizzes that will help me do the same).

Step 2: Choosing a Quiz Template

Interact has so many templates to choose from (like, over 200!) that fit all sorts of business types – and you can always take a template a step further by customizing the wording of the questions to suit the needs of your niche. You’re going to love this if you’re already feeling a bit overwhelmed – because they’ve really done the work for you.

Finding the right template

The fun really starts when you get to select the niches that best fit what your quiz is about. You can select one or multiple categories to search for the template that best fits your needs. For example, someone who blogs about parenting would choose the “Family & Parenting” category.

You’ll find that for your first quiz, a template is going to be easiest. There is an option to create a quiz from scratch, but having it all neatly laid out for you assures that you’ll get to see how it all works and get set up quickly.

There’s a few different types of quizzes you can choose from within each category:

1. Assessment: A fun way to test someone’s knowledge or placement without a literal scoring… “How much do you actually know about blogging?”
2. Personality: Provides a personality type based on the questions… “What kind of blogger are you?”
3. Scored: Each answer provides a score value that will total up to a score range at the end… “What’s your blogging IQ?”

I personally chose to start with a Blogging >> Personality template because it suited my needs for this particular goal. But I also found other templates that weren’t about blogging at all that definitely have a future in my plans.

Don’t be afraid to look a little outside of your niche – you never know what pre-made quizzes you could tailor to fit your needs!

Step 3: Beautifying the Cover Page

This is a vital step because it’s what will attract people and make them ultimately decide whether they will take this quiz or not. Put a little effort into it!

You can choose a different image for the cover by either uploading your own (I used a stock photo that fits my brand from HauteStock). Even better, Interact is integrated with Pixabay and you can search royalty free, commercial use images right there in the dashboard.

I also went the extra step to change the branding colors of the quiz so that it fit in with my own.

Step 4: Write out your questions

Hopefully you did the brainstorming work in Step 1 and you have a clear idea of the types of questions you want to ask and how those questions qualify a lead. But if you don’t, remember that the templates truly are excellent!

I used the already written questions myself and made little tweaks to the wording so that it made sense for me.

Step 5: Using quiz results

Again, going back to the first step… if you did the brainstorming, you should have a pretty good idea of what the results should look like for your quiz takers.

Because I chose a personality-based quiz, I got to make my results more personable with fun results like:

• There’s a Journey Ahead…
• You’re on an Adventure…
• On the Enchanted Path…

Decide where the results lead

You’ve gotten their attention. They’ve taken the quiz. Now what?

This is the fun part because now you get to tell the quiz taker what to do next based on whatever result they got. That could mean redirecting them to a custom page with different call to actions (CTA’s) or you can just use the pre-designed CTA at the bottom of the result page.

I figured if I was going to do this, I was going to go all out. Since Interact let’s you redirect to a different page, I used the free WordPress plugin Elementor to design some landing pages where the quiz taker would get their results, a valuable blog post, a step to focus on next, and a link to join my Facebook group.

If you decide to just use the regular quiz results that come with Interact, that’s fine too! It looks really nice on its own, and now you get to decide where to lead the quiz taker based on their results. You could send them all sorts of places…

• A relevant blog post
• Facebook group
• Courses
• Social media channels

Step 6: Email Integration

Once you’ve set up your quiz and you’re happy with it, you will need to integrate it with your email service provider (I’m using ConvertKit) so that quiz takers are being added to your list as leads. (Note: Email integration isn’t offered on the free plan)

Interact integrates with major email platforms including: ConvertKit, Mailerlite, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, and Kartra – and how you integrate will depend on which service you’re using.

Making the quiz work hard for you

You already know that you can segment quiz takers based on their results – I did that myself by essentially telling ConvertKit to tag people via an automation if they received a certain result so that I could further market to them based on those results.

But here’s where things get nuts (in the most awesome way). Interact takes it a step further by allowing you to segment based on individual answers.

If someone were to answer the question “Do you have a presence on the main social media platforms?” with anything other than what I consider to be the highest ranking answer, I have the ability to segment that person in my list so that I could talk to them more about that topic.

How freaking COOL is that!? It works really hard for you and you’re getting so much information from someone and such deep insight for free… from a quiz someone was willing to take.

Preparing your list for new leads

I highly recommend that you take time to map out what you want the quiz taker’s path to look like post-quiz before you integrate your email. Setting it all up beforehand was a huge help to me. It made organizing a lot less stressful and you’ll make your new audience feel more welcome and appreciated if you create a nurturing email sequence to follow their results.

Step 7: How to promote your quiz

You did all this work, but how do you get people to your quiz!? Interact handles quite a lot of the hard work for you by offering different ways that you can share your quiz:

• Popups
• Announcement Bar (great CTA above the fold)
• Landing page embed
• Direct linking (awesome for using in emails)
• Social Media Sharing
• Facebook Ads

While I don’t personally use pop ups, I love the idea of having an announcement bar option because it’s above the fold and on every page of my website. I chose to embed my quiz into a page on my website so that the URL was my own (if you direct link, it will have Interact branding).

You can do the same and share your link in social media – Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Step 8: Analytics

Ummm… Are you the kind of person who enjoys watching people bounce around your website? Asking for a friend…

If that’s you, you’ll enjoy Interact’s analytics because it provides analytics in such an easy to understand way. So if you’re like me, and you’re not particularly analytical, you’ll LOVE this because it actually makes a lot of sense.

See this funnel? It shows you how many people viewed the quiz at the top, how many people started the quiz, how many completed it, and how many people input their email address to get the results.

Understanding what it all means

If you are seeing a large number of people viewing you quiz but not taking it, you likely need to work on the cover page a bit more to entice people to get started.

If people are starting the quiz but not completing it, you can even see where most people are dropping off. Interact gives you a more advanced look at what’s going on behind the scenes by showing you where quiz takers decided to close the quiz. It could mean that the question was too complicated, or that your quiz is too long.

I have set up my quiz to allow people to get their results without inputting their email address, so my analytics shows that not everyone who has taken the quiz was turned into a lead. I made that decision because providing them with the results and my CTA was more important to me than capturing their email immediately. Offering something for nothing in return has always proven to be an effective marketing strategy for me, so that’s why I went this route.

Facebook Pixel + Google Analytics

You can take this all a step further by connecting your Interact quiz to your Facebook Pixel as well as your Google Analytics account. Interact makes this easy to do from their dashboard. This will come in especially handy if you plan to use your quiz as part of a Facebook ad.

What I really think about Interact Quizzes

Full disclosure… Interact approached me a whole year before I wrote this blog post. They’d been on my radar for a while as I’d seen other big name bloggers utilizing this strategy and I was interested in doing it myself. Unfortunately, some life circumstances prevented me from following through. I was so excited when they approached me again so that I could try their product in depth to see if it was right for my students.

 
I have a lot of email list growth tactics in place, but I feel like this is likely to be one of my most lucrative – especially since there’s so much opportunity for getting an in depth understanding of my audience. For example, all I really know about someone who would otherwise sign up for my free Start a Money Making Blog course is that they like free, and they want to start a blog (and even that’s not definite as some long-time bloggers have taken it just hoping for some free tips).

Interact quizzes let you really hone in on the pain points of your audience so that you can address them. That means instead of having to email your audience or do other useless “market research”, you get a very clear understanding of what they need help with so that you can be the person to provide that solution – in your blog posts, in your courses, in your ebooks or other premium offerings.

 

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