On June 20, 2014, Worth Global Style Network (WGSN) released a fun ten-question quiz called “What’s Your Customer Type?” By June 22nd — just 48 hours later — they had gained 233 new subscribers for their email list.
The success achieved by WGSN can be replicated by any business. Here’s a guide for how to do that, along with some real-life examples that don’t suck.
How to Create a Quiz to Generate Leads and Build Your Email List
Coming up with quiz topics. To get started, you’ll need an idea for your quiz. When coming up with concepts, here are the things to remember:
- Make the topic relevant. Being in sync with your readers is much more powerful than creating a quiz that appeals to the masses. For example, Faquier Now, a newspaper in Faquier County, Virginia (population 60,000), created an on-target quiz for its community. The result? A full 15% (more than 10,000) of the community members took the quiz.
- Make the topic fun. No business is too cool to be fun. I’ve seen law firms create enjoyable quizzes. You don’t have the right to deprive your audience of fun.
Writing the quiz questions. This is where you get to have a conversation with every single person who takes your quiz. It’s an opportunity to prime every visitor and prepare them to enter their contact information. Here are my top tips for writing quiz questions:
- Keep it short. 8-12 questions is the optimal amount — any more and you risk losing customers, any less and you don’t have enough time to make your quiz believable.
- Inject some personality. Pick a tone and use it to endear your readers. Be goofy, be oddball, whatever you have to do to establish a connection. A study found that people who feel comfortable are more willing to share personal information, so make people comfortable by sharing your personality.
Writing the quiz call to action. When it comes time to ask for an email address in return for showing the results of your quiz, it’s your time to shine. Follow these two steps to nail it.
- Keep it in context. A quiz provides you the unique opportunity to present an offer that makes perfect sense in context. For example, if your quiz is about losing weight, your call to action could say “Enter your email to get weekly weight-loss tips.”
- Make it compelling. You are already trading the quiz results for the quiz taker’s email address, but you can do even better by offering additional value. Even if it’s just a newsletter, pose it as a valuable product. For example, “Get weekly tips from industry experts.”
Writing the quiz results. After you’ve collected an email address from your quiz taker, you can ask that person share your quiz. That’s where the quiz results come in. Here’s how to create share-able results.
- Prepare for sharing. Don’t write embarrassing or strange things in your quiz results. Quiz traffic is primarily driven by social media, so sharing is what you need.
- Stay positive. Be honest, but be upbeat. Make sure your quiz results make the quiz taker look good so they’ll be more likely to share.
Three Examples of Using Quizzes to Build an Email List
Example 1. Skilledup uses a quiz to spice up content. Skilledup was receiving thousands of hits per week on an old piece of content that covers Microsoft Excel in depth. The problem? All that traffic only drove about 60 new email subscribers each month.
They introduced a quiz within the content and connected it up to their email list to collect leads before showing quiz takers how they did. The result was an increase from 60 to more than 700 new subscribers each month.
Example 2. Death Wish Coffee uses a quiz to provide product recommendations. Death Wish Coffee has created a cult following of people who crave the strongest, most delicious coffee in the world. They speak candidly and have a great brand personality.
They translated that candor into a quiz, asking people, “Do You Need a Death Wish?”
Example 3. Worth Global Style Network uses a quiz to help customers with their businesses. WGSN helps big fashion brands make data-based decisions — I really don’t know what that means exactly. What I do know is their customers are interested in topics related to market research.
That’s why WGSN created a quiz to help their customers discover who their customers were (customerception). It was a smash hit — while running for just a couple of days, it generated 233 new email subscribers and over 1300 total views.
When done right, quizzes can be a great tool for growing your email list. Just follow the simple steps above and you’ll be gaining tons of new subscribers in no time!
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Josh Haynam is co-founder at Interact, a place to create beautiful, lead-generating quizzes. Learn more about the new Interact-Mad Mimi integration here.