Creating a click-worthy quiz
“I need more downloadable PDFs that I might open once” — said no one ever.
If you’re looking for a way to grow your email list that’s fun, interactive and NOT just another downloadable guide destined for the PDF graveyard…
A quiz might just be the perfect lead magnet for you.
When created strategically, quizzes don’t just grow your email list either — they can show off your expertise, create a memorable user experience, qualify leads and segment your list.
Once you add in that quizzes are also highly sharable (the average quiz gets shared 1,900 times — something a downloadable guide or 10% can’t compete with), chances are you’re ready to create your own quiz like, right now…
But the key to a successful quiz (ie. not just surface-level Buzzfeed clickbait) is the strategy that goes into building it.
Take a look behind the scenes of the Brand Personality Quiz I recently created for another copywriter, Christy Wolf, to see what goes into creating a click-worthy quiz (and how you can DIY it).
Creating the quiz
Starting with the end in mind
Building a solid quiz isn’t as easy as it looks — so if you’re going to do it (or hire someone else to), you need to have an end goal that makes it worthwhile.
Ideally, a product or service to sell.
When Christy approached me to create the quiz for her, she was wanting to grow her email list ahead of a digital product launch.
Once you have an end goal in mind, the quiz creation process also becomes easier.
Coming up with the quiz concept
The quiz concept is actually broken up into 2 parts: the framework and the topic.
For Christy, a personality-based quiz was the obvious choice for the framework — it’s upbeat, fun and leaves the quiz taker feeling like she gets them.
(You can find out more about the different quiz frameworks over here).
But the internet is full of “What’s your brand personality?” quizzes, so we knew we needed a different spin on it.
With her intimate knowledge of wine varietals and connection to the industry, it seemed kinda obvious…
Once we had the framework and topic settled on, we narrowed the results down to 5 “personality types”, loosely based on the 12 archetypes.
From there, Christy was tasked with finding the ideal wine variety to match each personality. Within a few days, she had a list of 5 wines and an overview of each, and once I dug deeper into researching them it became clear how perfectly they matched each personality type.
Enticing people to take your quiz
Your quiz title and cover page copy has the tough job of enticing people to click through and take the quiz.
And although there’s limited space here, it’s super important that the headline, description and even the button copy get them clicking through.
We used this section to give them a peek at what their results will reveal — dialing up the curiosity factor to get that click.
Mapping out the Questions & Answers
The Q&As are one of the most overlooked aspects of a quiz, and by using them to create that fun, enjoyable experience from the very start...
The first step is deciding on how many questions to include — too many, and people will drop-off before finishing it, too little and the results won’t be as accurate.
Second, is figuring out what type of questions — how many will be tied to the actual result, how many will be extra questions that will give you insight into your audience.
For this quiz, we went with 10 questions in total — 8 that correlated to the results, and 2 that gave Christy and idea of their work style and how they handled client onboarding.
(pro tip: you can actually segment your list based on one of these non-correlated results)
Wherever possible, references and images were used to create a quiz-taking experience that was both on-brand and enjoyable — this encouraged people to keep going, hinted at the quality of the results pages to come and set expectations for their future interactions with Christy.
When coming up with quiz questions you want to think about what your audience will find relatable… everything from pop culture references (music, tv, film, memes, etc), lifestyle (hobbies, passions, how they spend their time), and daily struggles (what irritates them?).
This is a chance to show them that you get them, so don’t screw it up.
Getting their email address
Given that your quiz is designed to be a lead magnet, you’re going to want to capture users email addresses before handing over their results.
In Christy’s case, we used the opt-in copy to focus on the benefit to the user — they get instant access and a copy of their results in their inbox.
By reminding them of what’s on the other side, keeping input fields to a minimum (just name + email address) and wording the button copy from their point of view, it lowers the number of people who drop-off at this point.
Share-worthy results pages
Hate to break it to ya, but results pages like this…
Don’t just happen.
But they’re also the difference between an ok quiz and one that people share on Insta, bookmark (is that still a thing?) and refer to as “creepily accurate” ← literally how people described their results after taking Christy’s quiz.
In short: putting in the effort to build amazing results pages is totally worth it. And kinda non-negotiable.
For this quiz the results pages included:
An overview of their result
Strengths + weakness
A quick win
Food pairing tip
Quote
A playlist
And of course, a little about Christy
Knowing that they’d get an email with their result also allows us to end the page with an Instagram feed plugin.
And even though Interact has a sufficient built-in results page, they also allow you to redirect the results to a page on your website — which is exactly what we did with Christy’s quiz for a few reasons:
It gets the traffic over to her website (allowing for retargeting later on, and thanks main menu, meant the user could click around her website if they wanted)
It also meant we could create lengthy, beautiful on-brand results pages that made them feel more substantial.
And it allowed us to include that snazzy Spotify plugin for the playlist
Hooking it up to Mailchimp
As a lead magnet, the quiz is just the beginning.
Ideally, you want to be following it up with an email sequence that moves your quiz takers further down the funnel.
But at the very least, you want to be sending them an email with a copy of their result — this means they’ve got access to it long after they’ve closed the tab and it starts priming them to expect and open emails from you.
Once connected to your email platform (Mailchimp in this case), Interact makes it easy to tag and segment based on the quiz takers result and/or answers.
Making all O’ that work worthwhile
Once the quiz is up and running, you’ve hooked it up to your email list and you’ve got at least 1 email set to automagically send to quiz takers, it’s time to unleash your quiz on the world!
For best results, you need to consistently push traffic to your quiz — through social media, your website and/or paid traffic.
So far, Christy’s quiz has mainly been promoted on Instagram.
And with so many of the quiz takers keen to share their results on Insta Stories, the reach snowballed, growing Christy’s list by 103 subscribers in just the first 4 days.
(not to mention that 66.9% conversion rate 😏)
It’s also accessible via her main website navigation menu and her custom Instagram link page:
And because the quiz is an evergreen asset, it can continue to grow her list indefinitely.
Creating your own quiz lead magnet
Honesty time: creating your own quiz is going to take more work than your average lead magnet.
But that’s what makes it so worthwhile.
And as long as you continue to promote it, it’s a lead magnet that will continue to grow your email list.
Interact is my go-to quiz platform for myself and clients because they make getting a quiz up and running AND hooking it up to your email list simple.
Plus they even let you create your own quiz and trial it out for free - click the button below to get started 👇
This blog post contains affiliate links.