Fact. Quizzes rock at marketing – they’re the most shared content around, and have phenomenal lead generation opt-in rates of up to 35-40%. But why? Boris and Mike break down the marketing do’s and don’ts behind making your own successful quiz.
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Transcript
Boris 0:03
Hello, and welcome to another episode of “The Quiz Makers” podcast. Today I’m talking to my co-founder Mike again. Hello, Mike.
Mike 0:13
Hey, Boris.
Boris 0:14
And we’re going to chat about quiz marketing 101… the basics about how to use quizzes for marketing that we’ve learned in the past six years since we started Riddle.com. So Mike, give me a high-level overview – you’ve been in the frontlines talking to a lot of customers in our customer support, and helping them learn how to use quizzes for marketing.
Mike 0:40
Yes, we really love the whole customer support-first culture at Riddle, which means we get to answer lots of questions.
This means we get to learn what our community is doing, which is really really insightful. In terms of quiz marketing – there’s there’s a couple use cases. There’s quizzes for lead generation – “I want to collect email and grow my marketing list”.
There’s also the pure engagement play – “I just want to get people to take my quiz, use it, maybe share it socially”. That’s all fine.
But there’s a third one, which is also quite interesting. (And they can all be linked together. It’s not an either or situation.) But there is a way to recommend products, or to segment your audience to present the right offer – at the right time – to the right person.
So for example, at the end of a quiz, “Hey, based on your results, we think you should buy product X” or “We think this is your type of medical issue and here’s a coupon off your first prescription”. So these are the three broad use cases.
Boris 1:51
Okay. Let’s talk product recommendations. I’ve always been a fan of Wired Magazine; I’ve been reading it since it came into print. They always had on the back pages a product finder, sometimes a really funny product finder, sometimes useful ones that guide you down like a decision tree.
And we we added that to riddle, not originally for that purpose, we actually added it for something completely different, right? Now we have a different name for that, but that can be used quite well right for product finding. How does that work?
Mike 2:30
So if there’s one thing that we’ve learned is that our community will take whatever tools we offer, and be super imaginative in applying them to marketing.
In this case, we had a branching logic function built into a quiz. So instead of the same list of questions to everybody, we said, okay, let’s qualify and show different questions to each user based on their answers. For example, this is more of a marketing approach.
But if you’re a real estate agent, you can create a quiz “What’s your dream house?” And question one could say like, “Do you have kids?” And if they say yes, then the next question might be okay, well “How many kids?” with answers like I have one child to four children.
Next, if someone says four children, the follow up question could be “Okay, do you want to live in a suburbs or out in the country?” Because look, city living with four kids is probably going to be really expensive. So again, you keep asking and segmenting all the way down.
And then at the end of it, they will receive a custom result – “We recommend these houses based on your criteria” with images, links, and so on.
Someone who answered the other way. He’s like, “Hey, I don’t have kids and I love living in the city.” Okay, here’s some apartments we have for you, or here is a small studio or whatever. But again, different questions to different users always gets a much more granular and relevant outcome.
Boris 3:55
Right. And I think the funny backstory to this idea which isn’t really a quiz, right? It’s it’s more a path you lead someone down, like these decision trees in magazines, right. So which cellphone should you buy?
Mike 4:09
Right? Well, there’s that. But they’re also like the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books back in the day. Right? So remember those? Did you ever read those, Boris?
Boris 4:16
Absolutely.
Mike 4:18
Yeah. So you know, the end of every page, you have a choice. And then based on your choice, you guide you through the story,
Boris 4:25
Kill the dragon or run away. If you say, kill the dragon – “Uh-oh, you don’t have to right weapons.” So the story is over.
Mike 4:31
Yeah. Buy the sports car, or buy the more responsible minivan.
Boris 4:37
Yep, absolutely. So that works really well for marketing. And then you touched on the obvious, which is lead generation. And I think there’s some facts about quiz lead gen that most people don’t don’t realize, which is how well it actually works. They’re shocked sometimes by how many leads a quiz can generate, right?
Mike 4:59
And the statistics are awesome. So, you know, like when you’re casually browsing the web, and you come across someone’s blog. There’s almost always at some point a pop up that says, “Oh, don’t go – sign up for my newsletter!” And that’s kind of painful from a value proposition – “A newsletter, is that really worth giving up my email address?”
I have to really, really like what that person saying. Otherwise, I’ll just remember and come back. So the statistic we’ve heard is from Sumo.com – they know their online marketing up and down. It’s that 2% is the average opt-in rate for email collection forms across the internet.
But for us, I think it’s 35 to 40% – is what we see from really well done quizzes.
Boris 5:52
Right. So we should probably mention that we don’t track this, but we hear it from our users, right? Right, in case someone’s concerned about privacy. And GDPR.
We don’t know this about your quiz until you tell us – but people are so shocked often that they contact us and ask Is this for real? Or am I a complete outlier?
We’re like, “Oh, you’re only getting 27% – you’re not doing everything right. Let us help you.” Right?
Mike 6:22
Well, we’ve actually had I’ve seen people ask us, they go “Wow, we’re getting 15% opt in rates. This is awesome!”
And of course to you and I, Boris, we’re think, well, that’s that’s not bad, but we could do better. So we normally help them with, you know, optimizing the quiz or lead form, etc.
But yeah, 35 to 40% is a good target to shoot for. Sotic is one of our, our sports publishers or sports agencies, and they did a case study with us where one of their top professional sporting clients in the UK got a 55% opt in rate. And obviously the client was exceptionally happy because that just blew every other metric out of the water.
Boris 7:12
Yeah. And that totally pay for whatever you’re paying for quiz builder – be it Riddle or some other quiz creator out there. Okay, so we had lead gen, we briefly covered the product finder. And lastly, there’s just a very targeted call to action button, right? Also a very highly effective tool to add to a quiz, right?
Mike 7:40
Yeah, it’s a low friction. It’s a low friction way of getting in front of your customers and presenting special offers or targeted discounts based on their quiz results. If you look at most quiz makers, they will ask the questions – then they will give the option for a lead form before the users’ results.
But some people they like to gate the results of the quiz before that before you move on to like, “Give me your email or no results for you.”
We don’t really favor that, but that is an option. However, call to action buttons are different. You ask questions. Maybe you have a lead form, maybe you don’t. But then you get to the the quiz results. And let’s say it’s like a cybersecurity analysis. If you’re an IT company, and you’re saying, “Hey, take this quiz, and let’s see how vulnerable you are cybersecurity-wise as a business.”
And at the end, people who are high risk, you have a call to action button in the results. So they read their results, you’ve established your professional expertise and value proposition – and they’re thinking “Wow, they know what they’re talking about.”
Then there’s a button saying hey, save 25% on our cyber security overview. So yeah, that’s kind of cool.
But again, it’s not intrusive – people can choose to click it or not. So we see about 20%-25% clicking or opt in rates there, which again, is phenomenal for online marketing. But for someone who knew their stuff, their security risks are quite low, then you would show a different button, say maybe, “Hey, get one free month to our cybersecurity monitoring service”. There’s different different call to actions, different products based on their needs.
Boris 9:33
And then these work really, really well because they’re tailored to the actual results. As we know, one of the really cool things about quizzes personality tests is people take them because they’re genuinely interested in themselves and not helping you as a marketer do market research, right?
So if if you did a let’s say questionnaire and you call it “A cyber security assessment” and you had a section of 10 true or false questions. Not a lot of people sit through that and answer that, right?
But what if you do a fun and engaging quiz, and it’s a cybersecurity quiz, and the questions are not just true or false but situational? You know, they put you into situations where, “An email with this subject line arrives, what do you do?” Or “There’s this email from PayPal asking you to call and give us the password. How do you react?”
That’s much more interesting to answer than if you had a questionnaire that just says, “How often do you click on links and emails? From a lot to not a lot, you know? Yeah, it’s just gets boring. So they do it for themselves, not as a marketing exercise. And at the end, they get a result.
If the quiz is done well, that result actually matches their personality (in this case, your security, consciousness). And then they get a result that matches that. That’s why you see these high click rates on quizzes and personality tests.
Mike 11:13
Yeah, and they’re and they’re essentially a top of funnel exercise. So people are browsing, they come across your website, maybe you drive traffic from Facebook or LinkedIn. But you just said, “Hey, this is some content.” And basically, people start taking it learning a bit more about you.
But that’s what the lead form and all the other stuff then takes them further down the purchase funnel. You know, maybe a lot of people are just browsing, but a good percentage of them will find that valuable and sign up for your marketing list. Then you can again, start that whole marketing process to convert them to a paying customer.
Boris 11:47
Right. And you even have the the option with Riddle now to not show them the result on the website, actually, but to send their results in an email to them. So that that’s a much stronger call to action t- “Enter your email so we can email you your report” than saying “Enter your email so I can send you message you don’t care about”.
Mike 12:09
Yes. And actually the other part about this again ties back into a lot of your other marketing assets. Instead of just a relatively short quiz result, because most quizzes are kind of bite-sized pieces of content, you can really go into greater depth and detail in an email report by using our email builder from Riddle.
But there’s lots of ways you could actually make a customized report saying, “Hi <first name> on question one, you answered “XXX”. So I’m going to show you an explanation. If they answered a different option, you show a different explanation. It’s fully automated, but it gives a nice personalized result. But again, that’s just another way to show value to the user.
Boris 12:52
Absolutely. And you know, as you said in the beginning, you get a lot of questions in customer support. We always ask “If you have an idea or a marketing problem, please hit us up in chat in real-time and just ask us and we’d be happy to brainstorm with you. Before we end, I’d love to hear – what was what was one of the funnier customer support questions you’ve received over the years?
Mike 13:28
I think I know we’ve both had our share of really insightful, but also very funny questions. This one happened about six months ago. So riddle, you know, offers quizzes, personality tests, and it has a free trial.
A lot of teachers will often find us and say, “Hey, this is some really cool content I can get my students involved with.” Normally the best way is when teachers just create the quiz and then give it to their students.
But the more exciting way is when the students are asked to create their own quizzes. And what was funny is that I got a message on our support chat. And we’re super fast at Riddle so I instantly answered, “How can I help?”
And this anonymous person was asking, “I need some help with an American history quiz.”
Okay, now bear in mind, I used to be a history teacher. So that’s an unusual and not really a business-related question. Okay, so I started helping him.
But as I was typing my response, another message came – then another and another. So I think I had four or five, very same thing. “Can you help me? Can you help me? Can you help me?”
It turns out there was one class of junior high kids, and they all wanted me to create their homework. And so I said, “Um, no, I’m not going to go for that because I used to be a history teacher, guys. I know what it’s like, so do your homework.”
Of course, being teenagers, they signed off with a bunch of silly, funny, and random GIFs. So that just made my day. Helping a teacher out.
Boris 15:01
I hope the teacher gave him extra credit for being creative and asking for help.
Mike 15:07
They WERE using online resources.
Boris 15:09
Absolutely. Smart kids. All right. Well, thank you so much, Mike.
Really insightful info on how to use quizzes for marketing. I love to chat more about one of these topics, maybe how to do more targeting and segmenting using emails and additional quiz links that you can put into emails. There’s a lot of things you can do – and we’ll catch up on that in the next episode when we talk again.
Mike 15:35
Perfect. I love our weekly chats. Thank you so much.
Boris 15:38
Have a good one. Bye, Mike.