How to Create a Quiz for Lead Generation and Online Sales

As we saw before from the first segment of this two-part article, using a quiz for lead generation and a personalized shopping experience can help drive e-commerce sales. At least it did for the five different brands we highlighted.

However, it’s one thing to witness the success of others, but it’s another thing to actually take action and replicate that success.

Those five different examples demonstrated how quizzes were utilized along with different marketing strategies, but how does one go about making an effective quiz in the first place?

Let’s take a closer look at one of the brands highlighted in the previous article, Z Gallerie, and their quiz "What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?"

The following step by step guide will show you how to go about creating a similar quiz of your own; from the title to the questions, to the lead capture form and the results. We’ll discuss effective ways to promote your quiz through social media to increase its popularity and further drive online sales and generate leads.

Part I: Creating Your Lead Generating Quiz to Drive Sales

Z Gallerie provides and caters to an audience of professional and amateur interior designers alike. Having established a strong online presence and in brick and mortar locations across the United States, Z Gallerie executed on their quiz perfectly, asking "What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?"

By using quizzes to deliver personalized product recommendations, Z Gallerie was able to develop a deeper connection with their customer base to generate a massive success.

Concept Crafting & Title Choices

Every innovative content piece starts with an idea, right? Before we jump right into the quiz creation process, you’ll need a concept to wrap your quiz around. In Z Gallerie’s case, their quiz was based on what they were good at: interior design.

They modeled their questions after some of the basic concepts interior designers look for. So when it comes to your quiz, make it about something you have considerable knowledge on. Once you’ve got that figured out, here are a couple foundations you can build your quiz upon:

• The “Event” Based Quiz: This kind of a quiz revolves around the idea of an event or campaign. Taking this quiz is an added bonus to an on-going event that drives customer interaction. If you choose to go this route, think about tying it in with a contest or a giveaway to spur even more audience engagement. For example, if Halloween is approaching, you could have a spooky themed event that your quiz revolves around.

• The “Your Products” Based Quiz: If you don’t have some kind of promotional campaign going on at the moment, your best bet would be to go down the simpler route of creating a quiz based on what your brand sells. This places a deeper focus on your products, especially if you make your results personalized product recommendations. Z Gallerie used this method to place customers in “personality” categories that suggest suitable interior design recommendations based on your personality.

Crafting the Questions to Your Quiz

Now we’re onto the body of your quiz. This is where you establish your connection with the customer.

When formulating your questions, ask yourself how likely you might be to answer them. Here are some important ideas to keep in mind when coming up with your questions:

• Use Your Personality in the Questions - Let your personality shine in your quiz. When creating your questions, the quiz becomes a representation of your brand, so ask questions pertinent to the products you want to put an emphasis on in the results. Don’t be afraid to speak informally. You want to build trust with your quiz-takers by being you. Act as if you were speaking to someone in person.

• Use Images to Your Advantage - You’ll notice that a lot of the quizzes you encounter have images for questions. Pictures keep things relevant (assuming you chose relevant pictures to the quiz) and interesting at the same time. Using images also makes the quiz feel more like a game than some knowledge test on the internet. It lets people get comfortable and makes them more likely to opt-in at a later point. Because Z Gallerie has a deep focus on visual presentation, they made sure to use appropriate images that correlate to what you might find visually appealing.

• Keep Things Short and Simple - There’s a sweet spot when it comes to the number of questions you ask your quiz-taker. That sweet spot is between six and ten questions. As short as people’s attention spans are today, you need to ask as few questions as possible. Z Gallerie kept their quiz at a minimum of six questions, so they did an excellent job in keeping things simple and sweet.

Creating the Lead Capture Form for Your Quiz

As an online retailer, you want to generate leads to drive revenue in the future. This is where the lead capture form comes in handy. By increasing your email subscriber list, you can group potential customers together to target every week (or however often you send marketing messages) with brand new products or deals, thus increasing your chances of making sales.

The lead capture form’s placement in a quiz is crucial. Don’t put it right at the beginning, because that can scare people away. Don’t put it right at the end either because what incentive does anyone have to fill it out after they’ve gotten what they want? Gating it right before the results of a quiz makes it so that your quiz-taker must fill it out to advance.

Here are some guidelines to follow when creating your lead capture form:

• Give Your Customers a Valued Promise: Try to give your audience something more than just their results. Incentivize your lead capture with things like a giveaway entry to win free stuff, a free resource like an e-book or e-magazine, a weekly newsletter, coupons or discounts, or even just personalized advice. Birchbox’s incentive is their personalized message based on the quiz taker's sense of style.

• Be Honest With Your Marketing Strategy: We’re not trying to pull any fast ones on our audience by having them opt-in and not letting them know what they’re getting into. Be honest with your marketing strategy. Let your quiz-taker know that you’ll be emailing them with content pertaining to the quiz they just took, be it a one-time email or a weekly follow-up. Don’t leave your audience in the dark.

• Ask Only For What You Need: When using a lead capture form, only ask for information you’ll actually use. This could be a name and an email address at the most. Don’t ask for someone’s phone number if you aren’t going to call them. Birchbox’s lead capture only requires a first and last name along with an email address. Simple, yet effective.

Creating Results That Will Get Your Quiz Shared

The results of your quiz have as much impact as the questions. When you scroll through your social media feed, what are you more likely to come across? Someone posting about a quiz or someone posting their results? The answer should be the latter.

Here are some key factors to creating share-worthy results:

• Give Positive Comments Without Lying: It isn’t a bad idea to have fun with people’s egos and emotions to generate shares. Tell everyone how awesome they are. Focus on the good traits to evoke positive emotions. People are more willing to share something that says something positive about them. However, avoid telling your quiz-taker that they’re something they aren’t.

• Use Captivating Images for Your Results: When people post their results on social media networks, what’s the first thing you see? It’s usually an image, yes? When creating your results, include relative, attractive images that will encourage people to take notice of someone’s results when posted. Z Gallerie makes sure to include an image of a fully-furnished room in correlation with the personality style a quiz-taker gets.

• Capture Your Audience’s Interest With Something Short: The results to your quiz shouldn’t be the end of your interaction with the quiz-taker; it shouldn’t be a paragraph long either. Keep your results down to about 3-5 sentences. Make your results lead to something more, for instance, to your website, or a handful of recommended products. Z Gallerie’s results encourage you to click on a personalized link to your style with product recommendations tailored around it.

Part II: Distributing Your Quiz on Social Media

Now that we’ve finished the quiz creation process, let’s talk about quiz distribution. Facebook and Twitter make up a large representation of social media, so we’re going to target these two as the main sources of generating social traffic.

Sharing Results on Facebook and Twitter

1. Use a captivating image to represent your quiz.

2. Come up with an attention-grabbing headline.

3. Share both the image and the caption with a shortened link to track results.

Using Paid Advertising to Promote Your Quizzes

Promoting your quiz on Facebook is an intricate process on its own, but for time’s sake, here’s the gist of the more important things to note when it comes to using paid Facebook advertising:

• Select Your Target Audience - You can select your target audience through various categories such as location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. Each category can be narrowed down even further. For instance, if all of your stores are located in California, you can narrow down the Facebook ads to just that state.

• Create a Custom Audience - Creating a custom audience lets you work with an existing list you’ve uploaded onto Facebook. This audience will be similar to the list of current customers that you already have.

Part III: Following Up to Drive Revenue

After collecting leads, your job is to convert them into paying customers. Warm them up by keeping them interested through a series of marketing automation emails.

Let’s break it down into a four-step follow-up sequence:

1. The First Follow-Up: Thank You for Taking the Quiz

It’s imperative that you thank your audience for taking your quiz. It reminds them that they opted in and it helps to assert the name of your brand. If you forget this very first step, people won’t remember who you are and they’ll quickly write your email off as spam. There goes your chance. Don’t blow it!

2. The Second Follow-Up: Increase Interest Through Curiosity

A few days later, send your audience a list of other possible results that they could have gotten through your quiz. It piques their interest and encourages them to retake the quiz to see if they can get a different result. It’s the perfect natural transition from your “thank you” email to sending out other content.

3. The Third Follow-Up: Build Trust Through Experiences

After about a week, send out another email that highlights a customer case study or testimonial. Customer stories are perfect for building up trust, especially if you target people based on the result they got. This is the last step in convincing your leads to become paying customers.

4. The Fourth Follow-Up: Closing the Sale

After two weeks or so have passed, it’s time to finally convert your leads into customers. Use incentives like coupons, discounts or a webinar signup to close the deal. Give your audience a reason to buy into your brand.

The last time we were together, we looked over five different companies and how they used quizzes to personalize the shopping experience. This time around, we went through the steps to create your own quiz similar to the ones we’ve examined.

We went over title choices and the kind of quiz to create, followed by several key factors in crafting quiz questions. We then touched base on the basic guidelines for creating a lead capture, and most importantly, creating share-worthy results. It’s not enough just to make a quiz, so we also introduced several methods of distributing your quiz through social media. Lastly, we went over how you can follow-up on your leads through marketing automation.

With all of the information we’ve gone over today, you should be ready to create and promote your own quiz which—with the right amount of exposure and social traffic—can generate leads and increase online sales.

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