When is a Quiz the Perfect Opt-In for Your Audience?

Opt-ins are a big deal. Gone are the days when you could simply put a form on your website and proclaim ‘Sign up for my newsletter - I promise to send you awesome stuff’ because no matter how true that is no one really wants yet another email.

Quizzes have been used for gathering emails for quite awhile, but it’s only been in the last couple years that businesses really sat up and took notice of their potential power. A quiz that entertains, but whose results provide insights both to the quiz taker AND to the business for marketing purposes? Sounds like a slam dunk!

But are quizzes right for every business? No doubt that someone creative enough could come up with a valuable quiz idea for any business or industry, but there are some businesses where a quiz opt-in is a more natural fit. Let’s take a look!

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Different Product/Service Lines

If your business offers different products/services or different levels of service, a quiz is an awesome way to collect emails and segment your audience at the same time. For example, I offer both training and coaching and while they can overlap, there are some pretty distinct differences between entrepreneurs who need training versus those who need coaching (industry and business phase are the most obvious). You may have a product or service that is aimed at beginners and one that is aimed at those more advanced i.e. yoga, website design, or painting to name a few.

If I want to deliver unique emails or ads to these two separate groups of people, having them self identify which service they may be more likely to take advantage of by filling out a fun quiz is an incredible advantage. In a couple of months I will be rolling out a new service and I’ll be using quizzes to find out whether people fit into one of 3 categories of needs: consulting, project outsourcing, or tech support.

Your Audience Spends a Lot of Time Online

An online quiz isn’t going to do you much good if you’re marketing to an audience that doesn’t spend a significant amount of time online - especially on social media, where your quiz is likely to get the most exposure. Because yes, there are still segments of the population that don’t spend a ton of time browsing Instagram and Pinterest. I cannot imagine it myself, but I’ve been told that it’s true :)

And speaking of being online…

Your Business Has an Online Presence

I don’t mean that you are 100% an online business - I mean that you have at least the basics: a up-to-date website, an email list that you talk to on a regular basis, and a social media presence. If your audience or your customers have no way to contact you online or your business is very rooted in brick-and-mortar then it might look odd for you to have a quiz as an opt-in (maybe try a discount at the till in exchange for an email!). If you have all of the basics, as long as your quiz is related to your business it’s unlikely people are going to bat an eye when they see it.

You Need People to Self-Select Accurately in Order for Your Product/Service to be Effective

Humans can be really bad at judging their own skills and abilities - both under- and over-estimating. In a perfect world you could sit down with every single potential client, have a two hour discussion about their needs and wants, and then say “Here, this is what you need to buy”. In the real world you’ll have people who are so sure that they know what they need they will refuse the two hour discussion; you’ll have people who don’t have time for a two hour discussion; you’ll have people who just want their customer journey to exist without human interaction and go something like this: read-click-click-pay-done.

I have an online course where a small percentage of people purchased who have then not logged in to the course portal since the day they purchased - I know now that most of them were not at a place in business where they were prepared for the course topic. Are these people likely to give me glowing reviews and talk about how much I have helped them in business? No. They might as well have set their money on fire. If I had known more about them ahead of time, I could have chosen to send them a different promotion that would have benefitted them better.

Want to Make Your Own Quiz?

If you are looking to make your own quiz as an opt-in for your business, my recommendation is Interact*. It has features to fit a variety of business or quiz needs AND the support you get from the staff is outstanding - they will give you demos, they will help you figure out what your quiz topic will be, and they will point you towards a ton of resources (both internal and external) for help and inspiration.

Interact is 100% free to try so set aside some time for yourself to play around with the quiz settings and all of the possible integrations.

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