Marketing maestro Merilyn Beretta shares how her quiz marketing funnel has generated a jaw-dropping 86% opt-in rate for her ‘Lead Your Day’ online learning academy. It demonstrates how a great product matched up with an insightful quiz helped grow her revenue by 500% – boom!
Check out her website at https://merilyn.com.
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Transcript
Mike 0:02
Welcome, everybody to this episode of “The Quiz Makers” podcast. And I am really flattered and honored to have as our guest today, Merilyn (I’m going mispronounce your name, but it’s just a cool name that I have to try it) Beretta.
You’re a happy customer of riddle and obviously really big into quizzes and marketing. And, frankly, you do so much in the entrepreneurial space, I think it’s better just to let you introduce yourself.
Merilyn 0:33
Sure. And as you can tell by my Australian accent, I’m not Italian… I married into an Italian family years ago. And yes, those guys are listening and it’s spelt like the gun. Guys think that’s really cool, but girls have no idea. They think it’s a ham, which is actually a ham brand.
Anyway, so back to the question. Yes, I have a personal brand – I’m a coach and a trainer. As an educator at heart, I have an education and coaching business for women entrepreneurs.
Mike 1:09
Fantastic and when did you start the business? And then it kind of a segue, how did that get you into quiz marketing?
Merilyn 1:16
Well, interesting enough, I did years and years decades and decades in corporate and various roles.
Then I moved home after living in England for many years – and I moved home to Australia. I was still self employed with number of clients but more of a consulting role doing different things from brand architecture to strategic director, marketing… I was a bit of a sort of a Jill of all trades.
So when I had in my heart to start my own brand, I always wanted to teach online and reach a wider audience. In the past, I was that sort of person that was thrown into businesses to sort of fix things? So when we started online with zero, literally zero audience, what do you do?
I actually started late – I was a little bit older and I only started just about just over three years ago. So not long at all. And I started with creating some online courses. And it’s interesting that I started right from the start with quizzes.
So I learned how to do quizzes, with customer segments, buckets and different categories, which was right up my alley, because for decades I have taught personality profiling.
I think it was the training and learning development person in me, but I’d always naturally categorize people – not to stereotype them, but to understand them.
Mike 2:57
Imagining which broad buckets they fell into…
Merilyn 3:00
Yes. And so I knew I wanted to start some sort of quiz because I thought that they were really cool and fun to do. I actually stumbled across the careers quiz that I’ve got now – I actually started with sort of a course on life direction.
I spent a lot of time doing surveys online and so I have hundreds of thousands of data points. And I actually discovered that the core motivation of what entrepreneurial direction to take fell into four buckets or categories.
So I looked at them and I thought, “Oh my gosh, they relate completely to the person to the broad personality types I’ve been teaching for decades!”.
So it morphed into what I’ve got now – which is my “Wow archetype”. I’m a bit tongue in cheek – I love being a little bit corny, but it’s memorable and everyone loves it. So my “Wow archetype” really focuses on the four core motives of different personalities.
I use it as an icebreaker but I also use it to actually target the different results. It really does work to categorize my people like that and we have a lot of fun with it.
Mike 4:19
With four archetypes or segments, that actually lends itself to personality tests because there are four broad areas that you can say “Here’s a broad area, I think you fall into…”
Merilyn 4:32
And what people love about mine is it’s easy to remember. You know, you’ve got Myers Briggs but you can never remember what you’re are – is it ENJFPQ or something like that? You never remember what you are yourself so I created this specifically for entrepreneurs. Even though I target women, men love it as well.
I focus on entrepreneurs because I found a lot of the personality profiles out there were written by corporate male middle management for other employees, so a lot of the questions were geared around that.
So I made something different that was people have just raved over. So yeah, it’s been a lot of fun and really successful, but I haven’t made the most of it yet. I still need to. It’s only been almost a year since it went live. And I switched to Riddle.com and it’s just taken off even more.
Mike 5:25
Well, we love to hear that!
Actually, that was one of the things we love doing at Riddle; both my co-founder Boris and I lead all the support – and one day, you and I got into this really good chat.
We saw what you’re doing and thought “Oh my God, we need to get you on this podcast!” because you share what you’ve learned.
The thing that really caught my attention – I loved the the business idea in terms of getting a broader range of entrepreneurs to think “Hey, I can do it too!” – which is brilliant. There’s so much of start up – I’m a white middle class dude with certain advantages, but your helping other people who might not even have that on the radar to consider that option… that’s, that’s really cool.
So you crafted a quiz – and I’m going to let you say the number because you’ve done a frankly ridiculous job of efficiency.
But I’m going to set the stage. So for all of our listeners, quizzes are brilliant for lead generation – that is probably why you’re listening to this podcast.
Now, average lead generation placements on the web, like those little pop ups that say, “Sign up for our newsletter” – they get around 2% opt-in rates, which is okay.
You know, quizzes in general get around 10%.
But for Riddle quizzes, the way we’ve designed our software architecture, we say anywhere from 25 to 35% is really good. And again, that’s 17-18 times better than the average.
Okay, Merylin. You’ve been running your quiz. What is your success rate for opt ins on your quiz?
Merilyn 6:57
Well, 86% percent. So of people that actually start the quiz 86% finish and fill in the form. For people who land on the page and view the quiz – 68%.
Mike 7:10
Yes. So both of those numbers are flat out phenomenal. So, people who just land on your site might not you know, 68% start and then finish.
If you’re driving traffic from ads, and they click on the ad, then 86% of all your quiz takers. So I guess from a revenue perspective, and this is still early days, but is this working out for you from an ROI perspective?
Merilyn 7:41
Well, absolutely. I mean, in the last I got 5X my income, like when I had my consultancy you know.
If you want to talk real numbers, I had my consultancy but make online income. I think the first year I made $25,000 or something, and that was from zero audience.
No one knew me and I wasn’t a celebrity. I think the second year, I got $123,000. So, and this year I’ve already beat that.
Mike 8:19
That’s with the pandemic and everything else!
Merilyn 8:22
Yes, that’s even with the pandemic. So the ads are performing phenomenally well. The click through rates are high plus the amount of shares and likes. It’s just really phenomenal. And it’s due to people feeling understood.
So I’m getting people emailing me saying, Oh, my gosh, you know, no one’s ever said that before. And there are a lot of people when you’re looking at starting a business, they say, “Look for what you’re passionate about!”
But not everyone resonates with that word. I found that it’s only sort of one of the four personalities that really resonates with that word. Whereas if you say to other people, “What what have you got a heart for?” Or especially, “What do you feel peaceful around?”
People go, “Oh, my goodness, that completely answered it for me. People have been telling me to go after what I’m passionate about. I can’t answer that question because I don’t actually feel strong passion. But I know what makes me feel peaceful.”
Or if there’s a vision maker, they might say “I don’t care about passion, but I know what I’ve got a vision for! Okay, so that’s very interesting.”
Mike 9:29
Yes. So in essence, this is for more for our listeners, but in a personality test, you’re asking a series of questions, and get a result based on your overall answers.
So how many questions is your quiz, Merilyn?
Merilyn 9:39
I think this 25 so it’s a little bit longer than normally normal, but it’s an actual fact I was using someone else before riddle, but I had less and now I’ve added more and I’m actually getting a high quality lead because of it.
Mike 9:55
So this is actually another lessons. So this is brilliant. I love these types of chats. So our general guidelines for people starting out is around six to 10 questions. But there’s always a caveat. And you did it, where if you find that dedicated audience who aren’t just looking for light and fluffy entertainment, but are like this is going to really make an impact on my life, they will put the time in and then by putting that time in there even that much more likely to fill in the lead. So yeah, 25 questions. I’m not surprised. We have seen upwards of 100 that might be a bit excessive.
Merilyn 10:32
Yeah, I but I’m really pleased, considering I have that many questions. And I’ve still got 86% who finished it? I’m pretty. I’m pretty pleased with it. Now I’m talking to you. I’m going flip. I need to do something on the back end of that. So yeah, I have to I have to sell something at the back of it or do something a little bit more constructive at the end, but it’s been a really busy year, as you can imagine, you know, it’s just trying to scale and take on new staff and deal with that. It’s just been phenomenal. And I just the amount of people who want to take the businesses online, because I do help people get online. So it’s just been a huge
Mike 11:11
full on know what I mean. So as a product guy, you’ve got obviously a good product, it’s fitting the right niche. So people are loving it, you now have a marketing channel to attract and get people excited about it. So yeah, if you’re doing everything, this is brilliant. So I’m going to just ask a couple of quick fire questions about the guy now. So we had 25 questions. Are they all text? Or did you use images in your questions?
Merilyn 11:37
They are all text. Unfortunately, I sat there and I thought I would love to put images on all these but it was really tricky to perhaps visualize some of the concepts. I do want to go though. I know you mentioned to put some maybe a picture at the front and things like that, which I do need to add to it. But no, it’s a boring written test.
Mike 11:59
No, no, but this The SWOT there are broad guidelines, but 86% is working don’t change anything. If it’s working cool. Okay, how many answer options per question? Full. See that perfect. That’s kind of what I figured. And I guess in your lead generation form, because again, this one of the weaknesses we see from many of our users, they’ll ask 10, 15 fields. What do you have? What do you ask? And what is your call to action on your lead form?
Merilyn 12:31
Oh, just first name, female. That’s it. So what I do is I give them a, so I send them at the end to four landing pages that I’ve set up depending on the photos. And what I love about riddle is it gives people that percentage of all four, whereas that’s what it was struggling before I wanted people to be able to see. And I haven’t I haven’t worked out the techie stuff of being able to transfer those four things onto their email that’s like, I probably need a coder or something, dude. That, but it’s, it’s got the four things there and then their top result they get. So basically it comes up with a landing page, it gives them a little brief paragraph where you are congratulating, you are a vision maker dedicated. If you would like to report it, just a one line, if you’d like to report, give me your name and email. And that’s it. Not much at all. It goes through and then they get a thank you page, which may on a video explaining a little bit more. And then they get this very substantial report that people are shocked at the quality about and then all I’ve got at the moment is a two email sequence there. It’s very and I direct them to my podcast. So yeah, yeah. Where I teach a little bit more on it. So yeah, it’s very, very simple, but it’s, it’s no pressure. I really wanted it to not be a speak sales thing. But you know, with the right offer on the right way of doing it, it definitely will work on the back end because it’s built up so much trust. When people feel that they’re, oh my gosh, you’ve got me. And I probably only have had a half a dozen in those thousands of leads that have sort of said, Oh, no, that’s, you know, that’s not me. I don’t like the questions, which is, you know, pretty good. That’s not No,
Mike 14:19
that’s actually amazing and the fact that so I am asking all these questions, but it’s working for you. It’s a nice kind of warm like cold to warm funnel exercise. Or just, hey, this is what I do. Yeah. Not not flogging a product. Oh, x now, you know this limited time off. Yeah. Yeah. is a really good for that. What would you what one piece of advice would you give to to someone else starting in the quiz marketing space?
Merilyn 14:46
Oh, very good question. What would I say?
It depends. Know what you want the quiz for because if it’s for really just entertainment or a bit of fun and that’s okay. But if you’re wanting to doing it for some, if you only do it for some serious segmentation. Know your audience like know who they are. And if you can give them some insight about themselves that they may not know, or you can highlight something that they love about themselves, and you pointed out, then even better. So what I’ve done with mine is, and this is what I don’t like about a lot of personality quizzes is they sort of said, this is you This is the hardwired and these are all your weaknesses, whereas I’ve pulled out a strength. And I’ve given hope to people saying, yes, you could be an entrepreneur with that personality. And so I’ve given them a sort of a positive spin on something that they’re probably expecting to be negative.
Mike 15:44
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s perfect, because we will always recommend that with our personality test of like, hey, that is the tone of the message is important. It’s not just a bit of encouragement, but you also say maybe like, oh, there are some things to be carried away. This personality, there’s really good at this business. But be careful because sometimes, yeah, so like Steve Jobs, for example, you know, visionary, but your manic attention to detail can be a distraction. So you drop it off and people go, Okay, one good tip we give to our listeners also is to not sound completely definitive on the results. So absolutely,
Merilyn 16:23
yes, yes. We think Can you maybe this? Yeah.
Mike 16:29
Okay. Well, thank you, Merilyn, this has been awesome. I could talk to you for hours and hours. We have a very critical, very important question to ask to end on. And it’s kind of a tradition here at the quiz makers. So the pandemic 2020 in general is a bit crazy. So along those lines, what is your one pet peeve and it could be business. It can be just life in general. What drives you up the wall?
Merilyn 17:01
I was going to be boring and say, you know, hard sell or selling to me before you even know me. Because in that industry that is kind of annoying. I also hate the word can I have more than one? I hate the word hustle. I hat the word skyrocket. I hate crush it, you know, and it’s like they’re great for guys. But for girls, we don’t we already know how to hustle. We’ve been working. We’ve been hustling since we were born. So it’s kind of like a false idea. There’s so there really gets my goat. But I would say – you’re gonna have to edit these long pause out. – I would say, I would say Marmite.
Mike 17:55
Wow. Controversial from an Australian
Merilyn 17:59
mine. All right. I love I have to be an Vegemite girl.
Mike 18:06
Wow. Okay for all of you Brits out here I apologize for the sheer offensiveness of like Marmite versus Vegemite is a classic classic debate for anyone who likes so yeasty spreads. Alright, so we’ve got business and now we’ve got Vegemite, Marmite. barilla isn’t an awesome we try and keep our podcast nice and short and punchy. This one got away from us just because you’re so interesting and has such it’s a pleasure. Thank you so much. Continued Good luck on your quiz and your business.
Merilyn 18:40
Thank you. Thank you, Mike.