How to create the best quiz to engage your audience in real time
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I think I’m right saying that most of us are big fan of quizzes, being attracted by them like a magnet. At least I know I am. Every week, 3-4 quizzes attract my attention, whether I receive them by mail or pop up in front of my eyes on social media. “Do You Have Entrepreneurial Mindset?”, “What is Your Brand Voice?” or “Is Blogging Right for You” are just some of the titles that instantly catch my eyes.
Honestly, since quizzes are among the most shared content on the internet year after year, I have been thinking for some time to have my own quiz on my website. And this, for some good reasons:
Quizzes are fun, interactive and have high shareability rates. A BuzzSumo research reveals that in average a quiz is shared 1900 times and some of their quizzes have reached no less than 4 million shares.
84% of quizzes shared on social media are on Facebook. Email subscribers coming from quizzes will have follow up email open rates with up to 150% higher than other subscribers.
Quizzes are extremely versatile, and they can be adapted to virtually any brand, from ridiculous topics like “What type of cake are you?” to “Which is your statistics strength?
Provide insights and analytics. A quiz is useless if you do not have access to analytics, so, choose a quiz maker app that delivers analytics. Interact does that and in a glance, you have a detailed overview of your quiz results.
Extend your email list with qualified leads. With Interact the results of the quiz are delivered via mail, so this is a good way to build a properly segmented mailing list based on correct information.
So, how can I do this effectively? The answer was obvious: using a quiz maker app.
But which?
To get the best results, I approached the issue as I always do: I made a detailed research to find the best online quiz maker. After testing 4-5 quiz maker apps and playing around, the answer was Interact. Let me explain you why.
Even if I learned to use some more complicated software during the time, I’m not exactly a tech nerd. But in a way or another, I always manage to find my way and deal with new apps, even if they look tricky at the beginning. Anyway, I always appreciate intuitive and friendly user apps, that don’t consume uselessly my time for solving different small details.
And Interact is exactly what I was looking for – an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that lets you test your quiz in a few minutes – if you want to use a pre-made template. Sure, you can be as creative and elaborate as you want and spend hours, days or weeks for crafting a quiz completely from scratch, but in the end you should choose the best solution for your needs.
As I run an online marketing blog, I want to achieve two goals by using the quizzes:
Increase my subscribers list
Asses the marketing knowledge of my site’s visitors and based on the results, find out in which type of digital marketing personality fits each of them. As I provide content marketing strategy services and content writing services, these information will be extremely helpful when deciding to target my future campaigns, create freebies, paid products or write blogs.
Since I was testing several options I choose the simplest path for the beginning: start with a Personality Quiz and use one of the existing templates. My test has the nicest result and my quiz came alive in about 25-30 minutes (sure I polished and styled it after this, according to my own brand). And you can see my quiz live on my website, in the announcement bar, as a pop-up or by checking below.
For the second goal (assess the marketing knowledge of my site’s visitors), I decided to create an assessment quiz from scratch, publish both of them and compare the results in terms of subscribers, leads and customers. I will let you know in a future blog post which are the conclusions.
Now, let’s go back to the basics. As I said before, for my first quiz I decided to use an existing template, and this, for a few very good reasons:
First, Interact has over 200 quiz templates grouped in 37 categories, built and made to attract your target audience and convert the quiz takers into subscribers, leads and even buyers.
Once you chose a template, you can easily edit the it from the beginning to the end, add you own branding, change any part of it, from questions to images.
And the most important one (maybe I should have begun with this one), it saves you many hours of work.
So, how to make an interactive quiz?
Here are the exact steps I followed to create the “What Type of Digital Marketer Are you?” quiz with Interact.
You can get started too, with a 14 days free trial.
I simply love Interact because assembling a quiz is extremely easy. Let’s hope the success of this quiz as lead magnet will be spectacular too, just for the set to be complete.
First, open an Interact account.
Choose Create Quiz.
You have 2 options either create a quiz from scratch either choose an existing template that corresponds to your niche, templates that are conceived by experts and designed with conversion in mind. If you choose the option to create the quiz from scratch the path is a bit longer.
Decide which is the goal of your quiz
Do you want to provide more information about your area of expertise /business/services? Do you want to find out more about your audience or about your prospects? - set up the aim you want to achieve with your quiz and write it down.
Determine which are the final options of your quiz
Outline which are the results that the quiz takers should obtain. This step is important as it helps you reverse and establish the questions that you will insert in the quiz.
For example, the goal of my quiz using an Interact template (excepting the increase of my subscribers list) was to assess the marketing knowledge of my site’s visitors and based on the results, find out in which type of digital marketing personality fits each of them.
Decide on the type of quiz you want to use
In terms of quizzes, Interact and other builders provide several options:
Personality quizzes – this type of quizzes assigns the quiz takers into categories. If you are interested to have in your email list a certain type of customers, like creatives or lifestyle addicts, this is the best type of quiz to choose. My example with types of digital marketers is such an example. The output of the quiz is to assign the quiz takers in five personalities – content marketing moguls, smooth savvy social media streamers, quintessential marketing genius, email marketing mega machines and mass media movie makers. Knowing that will provide me with information on what type of posts I should write to help them better.
Assessment quizzes – this type is knowledge based. The output of the quiz is identifying the knowledge level of your quiz takers. Based on this information, you can decide better what type of services or products they might be interested in.
Scored quizzes – this is also a knowledge-based quiz, but displays the results, shows how many answers were responded correctly. Something like “What’s your emotional IQ” is a scored quiz.
Choose a template
After deciding if you want to use a pre-made template or built a choosing the industries I was interested in and the type of my quiz, the next step was choosing a template that fits my goals the best.
Design the cover page for your quiz
In this section you add the title of your quiz, a cover image – one that you upload or that you identify within Interact base, a sub headline describing your quiz, a call to action. Here you can also add your own branding elements - change the colors, choose fonts and insert your logo (for premium accounts).
Here is mine.
The flexibility and ease of use are the two things I like the most at the Interact interface. You can start with the stage you want, save, go back, jump to another section, as your ideas come. You can even create the quiz directly in the Interact interface without preliminary training, but you will spend more time in the app.
Craft the results of your quiz.
As you have already written them insert the results of your quiz into Interact interface is a breeze. This section works in the same simple manner as the cover page.
Create or change and insert the questions.
This is the funniest part, being the wizard behind the scenes that writes the questions. As you know the purpose and the final options, you just have to create the content in between, meaning the questions, the answers for each question and the connections between them to get the final version of your quiz.
It’s important to find the right balance: to have not too many and not too few questions, in general a quiz having 6-9 questions is considered best option. Also, the quiz must take maximum 2 minutes to complete, after all we are busy persons.
In terms of styling the questions of your quiz, you have the option to add text answers or image answers and of course each question deserves its own catchy cover image.
Set up the opt-ins and sharing on social media.
Set “Enable lead capture and data collection for my quiz” on.
Determine the details you want to collect. I think the name and email are enough, the fewer the better. Also, I consider appropriate to offer the possibility to skip this step. Click Update.
You have the possibility to offer an incentive to those finishing your quiz to encourage them to subscribe. For example, to my test quiz I offer for the “Content Marketing Mogul”, “Smooth Savvy Social Streamer” and “Quintessential Marketing Genius” results a free social media strategy template, and for the results “Email Marketing Mega Machines” a list of 14 Crazy Simple Ways To Grow You Email List and for “Mass Media Movie Mavens” results a link to my blog post The Art of Storytelling – Create your Brand Story.
Integrate with your email service provider. MailerLite in my case. Just follow the guidance and it will be made in seconds.
Set up a new form in your email service provider to collect your subscribers from the quiz.
Again, you have two options at your disposal, either you can direct all subscribers to a single funnel or you can personalize and make a different funnel for different results. I have four, function of the results and freebie.
Ensure the name and email address are pointing to the right list in your email service provider interface.
Test the Integration to be sure there are no ugly surprises.
Embed your quiz
How to Embed Your Quiz
To promote your quiz you can embed it on your website, on a landing page or share it as a social media post. In my case, I preferred to place it first in the announcement bar, in blog posts that are related to digital marketing and as popup for certain pages.
To do this, you have to choose between the options like “use as popup on your website”, “use as announcement bar on your website”, “get direct link” and so on. According to your preferences, click on the option and follow the instructions. Is good to know that Interact has specific guidelines for embedding quizzes on every platform, you just need to click yours and follow the instructions.
And voila, this is how my quiz looks on my website.
Final thoughts
Interact has several advantages that cannot be ignored like:
Possibility to create polls and giveaways
Mobile responsive
Multiple options to promote your quiz on your site like: pop-up, announcement bar, direct link, direct share, embedded inside blogs
Analytics
Using Facebook pixel to retarget
Add new subscribers to a sequence
Possibility to set delays “don’t show again for x period of time”
And also, some cons to consider: impossibility to split test, impossibility to tag subscribers and recurring fees.
It’s a good idea before starting to create your first quiz and choosing a multiple choice quiz maker to study a bit these best practices based on a wide experience gathered while creating over 40,000 quizzes and generating more than 5 million leads.
Find bellow some best practices and tips to help you obtain better results for your multiple-choice quizzes:
The call to action button “take quiz” performs better if it’s orange or blue
Aim for minimalism, keep the completion time under 2 minutes and number of questions between 6 and 9
The best options are questions with either 3 or 6 answer variants.
Offer the option to skip sign up to get the results, because there is no use to have unqualified leads on your list and because of GDPR
Insert a call to action in the results of the quiz to entice quiz takers to subscribe
Turn your best performing content into a quiz
Quizzes get most shares on Facebook, so profit on
Questions should be easy enough to have high scores otherwise shareability will descend
76% of shares are realized by people scoring in the top 20%. 45% of shares come from people obtaining the highest score. 12% of shares are from scores of under 69%. So, the better the score obtained rise the chances to share the results.
Create quizzes on trending topics
Inject your own personality in your quiz
Use images and text combined for the questions
Use images that worth sharing
Pay huge attention to your title, it is the cornerstone piece of content on which depends the click through. 80% of users decide to click based on the title
Offer incentives to strengthen leads capturing process
Inform your audience that they are subscribing to your newsletter
Share your quiz on Facebook and Twitter, in Facebook groups, on Pinterest and as lead magnet on Instagram
Share image together with caption and a shortened link for tracking the results
Eventually use Facebook ads to increase reach
After reading this post you should be by ready to adventure in creating your own quiz. Sign up for an account with Interact and get started!
