Not long ago, I launched a new set of digital marketing services for financial advisors. And, while I had already amassed a significant following among coaches and consultants, my email list was pretty anemic when it came to financial advisors. On top of that, I was only just beginning to understand the needs of this audience, so I had a good bit of work ahead of me.
The launch, fortunately, provided an opportunity to simultaneously address two very important needs:
1. Start building a list of financial advisors
2. Learn what I could about their interest in digital marketing
But how exactly was I going to attract the attention of financial advisors and get them to willingly provide me with the data I was after so I could market to them more effectively.
The answer, as it turned out, came in the form of an online quiz.
Quizzes are often overlooked as tools for collecting leads, but it turns out they are amazingly effective. In fact, according to Forbes, “quizzes currently offer some of the best return on investment that you can hope for in Internet marketing.” Not only can a quiz prompt someone to join your email list, but, if they are proud of the results they got, they might be encouraged to share the quiz with others in their circles… generating more traffic to your quiz and more subscribers for your list.
For my experiment, I chose to run a simple campaign using LinkedIn. Over the course of nearly 2 weeks, I sent messages to financial planners I was connected to on the social network asking them to answer 7 multiple choice questions that would take less than 90 seconds.
I had lots of takers.
In fact, even though I directly invited 68 people, I generated 107 page views and 15 new email subscribers. Sure those numbers don't sound huge, but this was a minimum viable funnel that I was testing without spending a single dollar on advertising.
Now, I have enough data to confidently put some money into a Facebook ad campaign, knowing that I can anticipate approximately 14% in conversions from my efforts.
How I Built My Online Quiz
Over the past few years, I've played with a number of different quiz builders (you can read about some of them here), but for the purpose of this campaign, I chose to use Interact, a cloud-based tool that makes the entire process seamless. Plus, their platform is super simple for anyone to use… even if you think you're not all that technically inclined.
There are four parts to building a quiz inside Interact:
1. Customizing the branding and look of your quiz
2. Building out the questions and answers
3. Integrating external tools (like your email autoresponder)
4. Embedding the quiz on your website (optional) and promoting it
Here's how I built my quiz, step-by-step:
Interact makes the whole process as simple as possible. While you can certainly start building your quiz from scratch, that would require that you've already mapped out your questions and have a clear strategy in place. For most of us, we're simply not that prepared.
So they've also got plenty of quiz template ready for you to use… and that's exactly what I did for my quiz.
The next step was to select my industry. These categories are pretty broad, so if you don't find an exact match, not to worry, it's just a starting place, after all. Besides, when you select an industry, it will help narrow down the range of templates to a more manageable (and relevant) list of options.
Quizzes come in three different types: Personality quizzes (which can be great for consumers – especially if you want the results to get shared among friends); scored quizzes, where each answer has an assigned value, and the overall tally places participants in a certain category; and assessment quizzes, which is a straight-forward multiple choice quiz with one correct answer per question.
Once I picked my quiz type (assessment), I was presented with a bunch of pre-written quiz templates that I could use “as is” or edit to speak to my audience. I ended up selecting one called something like “What's Your Digital Marketing IQ?”
The template was a good start, but knowing that I wanted to address financial advisors, I wanted to make some changes to both the title as well as some of the questions.
The folks at Interact make this very simple with their easy-to-use visual editor.
They also provide some helpful “best practices” guidelines to help quiz creators get the most out of their quizzes. For example, while the template I chose originally had 10 questions, they recommend using no more than 7 to ensure the majority of participants complete the quiz.
Another helpful suggestion is to include images alongside the text answers. These can be helpful visual cues to aid participants in selecting their answers with less friction, because images can break up the text and make the page easier to read.
Finally, Interact suggests including answers in groups of three, which seems to also have a positive impact on getting participants to swiftly move through the quiz process.
After I edited the questions, I moved on to adjusting the “results” pages. The quiz template I chose was set up with three different results which were divided up by the number of correct answers a participant got when they took the quiz.
The general text that came with them template worked just fine for me, but I wanted to adjust the “call-to-action” that followed. Interact gives you the ability to redirect participants to any page on the web after completing your quiz.
Of course, one of the smartest strategies behind using quizzes is to build your email list so you can continue to communicate with participants via an autoresponder campaign.
Interestingly, Interact recommends that you include the option for participants to “skip this step.” According to them, it results in better conversions, plus the trust you'll receive from those taking your quiz will be that much higher if they feel like it's okay if they aren't being forced to give you their email list in order to see their results.
And for anyone who didn't join my email list, I'm not too concerned, because I've also set up tracking codes on the page where I've posted the quiz, so I'm able to retarget them with Ads on Facebook or via AdWords if I want in the future.
Interact has integrations with just about every major email marketing platform out there. And, if the service you use isn't on their list of direct integrations, you can either connect to it via Zapier or download the new signups via a .csv file. So no matter how you slice it, you're covered when it come to extracting leads from their system.
And, just like the rest of the quiz creation process, connecting your email platform to Interact is super simple. All you need to do is select your platform from a list of options and then define which list (assuming you have multiple lists) you want participants to be added to based on the outcome of their quiz. This means you can segment participants into different lists depending on how they did or what their answers were (that's pretty powerful).
All in all, Interact is an easy-to-use, intuitive cloud-based tool that can be set up and deployed for all kinds of campaigns. It can work for both business and consumer audiences, and, when structured correctly, can generate a good amount of viral activity, helping bring tons of targeted traffic to you and your business.
While some of their premium features are only available with a paid subscription, you can get setup with a free account here and start running your own quizzes right away.