How to Grow Your List With Quizzes

Presented live on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

When you hear about the kinds of results quizzes can generate, it’s hard NOT to want a piece of the opportunity.. But, what should YOUR quiz be about? Because you don’t want to waste your time on a quiz no one will take. And you don’t want to fill your list with subscribers who just want the quiz results and nothing more.

In this tutorial, we are bringing in “the queen of quizzes” herself Chanti Zak to walk you through her most beloved little tricks, secrets and techniques for quiz magic, aka:

>> How to come up with quiz topics
>> How to tell good ideas from bad
>> How to structure your quiz so you get more leads

TRANSCRIPT:

Joanna: Chanti, you are here today to talk to us. This is the beginning of our two-part series. Can you call it a series if there’s only two parts to the session?

Chanti: Yeah, yeah for sure.

Joanna: Yeah, it’s a series.

Chanti: It’s allowed.

Joanna: It’s just a limited series.

Chanti: Yeah.

Joanna: Yeah, but we’re going to be talking about quizzes and you are known as the queen of quizzes. And you didn’t even give yourself that name. Someone else gave that to you, so well done on that. But yeah, we’re really stoked to hear you talk a bit about… Well this is supposed to be… It’s the second Tuesday of the month. It’s the beginners class on something. So what you have for us is beginners plus, in my opinion. So we went through this of course in advance and there’s a lot of incredible stuff. I’m going to stop talking because I just remembered how much you have in there.

Chanti: I know.

Joanna: So hand it over to you, Chanti, welcome.

Chanti: There’s so much to cover. I could talk about this topic for hours.

Joanna: Yes.

Chanti: So I’m going to try to just smush it all together and give you some resources at the end, if you want to learn more.

Joanna: Dig it.

Chanti: I am so excited to be here and seeing all of you in the comments from all over the world is really heartening and amazing. So thank you for being here. I’ll just share my screen. Let’s do this.

Joanna: Cool, let’s dig in.

Chanti: Okay.

Joanna: You’ve got one tab, you win.

Chanti: Oh, the rest are hidden. I just didn’t want you to see all the tabs.

Joanna: Love it.

Chanti: The embarrassing amount. Cool, can you see my notes?

Joanna: We can see your slide.

Chanti: Perfect.

Joanna: Cool.

Chanti: All right. Okay, so this is like Joanna said, The Getting Started Guide to Lead Generation Quizzes. This is sort of what I call the foundation of what you need to get up and running and get started and create a quiz that is quite honestly, a whole lot better than most quizzes on the internet. So you might be wondering like who is this chick? Who is she to teach me about quizzes? Hello, I’m Chanti. I have built a multi six figure business teaching and creating quizzes for clients.

And I just wanted to show you a few results here. This is what’s possible. And yeah, you do not need 100,000 leads to have a super impactful quiz. Even just a handful a week is a game changer. So I’m going to tell you what my favorite quizzes are and I want you to tell me in the comments what yours are. So my favorites are the IE9 Enneagram Assessment, which is a really hard core enneagram test and it’s amazing. And the love languages quiz, those are my faves.

Joanna: Oh, love languages.

Chanti: Yeah.

Joanna: I loved every quiz. And like those ridiculous magazines when we were kids. Those are… Yeah.

Chanti: Yeah.

Joanna: Yeah, they were amazing. And I know you already wrote a post about that previously, but yeah, I’m just listening to what people are saying. But anyway, I won’t keep talking.

Chanti: I know someone just asked if I was 17, no, I’m not 17. I’m a 17 year old quiz lover at heart though. So that is a thing. But yeah, do not worry, don’t be intimidated by those hundreds of thousands of leads. I just want you to know that you can trust me and that’s what’s possible with a quiz. So here’s what I want for you from today’s presentation. The first thing is I really want you as a business owner, as a copywriter, whoever you are, whatever you do, to have more than enough leads to grow your business and charge what your work is really worth or attract more people to buy your products, your courses, whatever it is.

And number two, if you are a copywriter, I would like to show you a little glimpse at a potential service that you could offer that your clients might just gobble up and definitely crack their wallets open for. So I would love to know sort of where you stand when it comes to your knowledge of using quizzes for lead generation. So are you like what quizzes solely exist to tell me when I’ll get engaged based on my Chipotle order, which is a real quiz or B, you know you can build your list using quizzes, but you never done it. C, you’ve tried it, but maybe the results weren’t amazing. Or D, you’re a total lead-generation quiz fan all the way and it’s your jam.

Joanna: Oh my goodness, we’re getting so many B’s, It’s crazy. We have one or two C’s, B’s and A’s, but B’s all over the place.

Chanti: Yeah, the B’s are lighting up the board, so cool. So first off, I think it’s really important to kind of go high level and talk about what’s possible with a quiz. So you saw a little glimpse before, but I want to share like some firsthand results because a lot of people wonder like, can I sell high ticket? Will quizzes work in a more serious industry? There’s so many questions there. So the answer is yes, you can use quizzes to sell high ticket coaching or services. You can use your quiz as your top of funnel lead magnet for a specific launch. You can use a quiz as part of your funnel to encourage people to take action and get off the fence. So it’s kind of middle of the funnel. You can use a quiz to sell more products like Jo shouted out, Primally Pure in the email, who added $100,000 of deodorant sales thanks to their quiz. And you can use your quiz to segment new leads. So those are just a few examples of what is possible.

I want you to Michelle Tanner, get excited and let’s talk about what we’re going to cover in this tutorial. So first off we’re going to talk about why quizzes work so well compared to other types of lead magnets. So we’re going to dig into a little bit of the psychology behind them, the power of specificity, generating insights and data, interactive marketing. Just a brief summary of all the things and we’re going to talk about how you can get started using quizzes for either your own business or your clients. And I’m going to touch on a few quiz faux pas and how to avoid the quiz quicksand, I call it, and never ever get stuck in that subpar, kind of lame like BuzzFeed shallow quiz category. And not all quizzes are lead generation quizzes. I think it’s important to say that, if you’re just getting into this, you might think, well, what about those BuzzFeed quizzes and Playbuzz and the ones on the New York Times?

That’s what we’ve been given mostly as a model for what a quiz looks like online. But the big difference here is that BuzzFeed does not care about getting leads. They care about driving traffic. So the more sensationalist the headline, the better. And they do not need to give you those meaty, validating, really valuable quiz results that we would want to create when we’re asking for someone’s email. So for those of us creating lead generation quizzes is a different story. We need to give people more than they bargained for and make it really worthwhile for them to hand over their emails. Okay, so a little bit about the psychology behind why quizzes convert better than corn dogs at the fair. Who here misses the fair, by the way? I don’t know if we’re going to have a summer fair.

So I’d love to know out of these topics which you are most interested in, endangered red pandas are pretty interesting, B, yourself. Okay, cool. Seeing lots of B’s. All right, yeah. If you answered B, then you are among the majority of people whose favorite topic is drum roll, themselves. We humans are a little bit self-obsessed. We have this thirst for learning more about ourselves and the world around us, that’s pretty insatiable, it never goes away. And that’s why quizzes are so irresistible. They feed our egos and when done right, they make us feel like the person on the other side of the screen really gets us. Their quizzes harness the power of specificity because they take a different approach from the typical one size fits all style of lead magnet. And if you’re a student of Joanna’s or a copywriter, or a marketer, then you probably already know, that the more specific your messaging, the more your audience trusts you and the more you will sell.

So by now you might be wondering, okay, okay, this quiz stuff is pretty cool, but where does this fit in my business? Or my biz, I’m sorry if you hate that word. Now I have this super meta quiz that you can check out after the tutorial that it’ll tell you what type of quiz you should create. But here is a quick rundown. So I wanted to just briefly talk about personality quizzes versus assessment type quizzes versus score based. Those are sort of the three main types. Now, personality quizzes are my personal favorite because everyone loves learning about themselves. And for the purpose of today’s tutorial, we are going to talk about quizzes mainly through the lens of creating a personality style quiz. So those are the ones where users will typically end up with a type, a formula, a blueprint, or in other words like something actionable that isn’t just a score that tells them where they stand.

So depending on your business goals, you’ll likely want to create a quiz in either one of these subtypes. So the signature quiz, this serves as paying your primary lead magnet, and it is appealing to your whole entire audience. A launch quiz is, its primary purpose is to attract targeted leads who would be a good fit for your offers, services, course, membership, that stuff. And then the e-commerce quiz is, if you’re specifically selling products and you can have an e-commerce quiz that is also a personality quiz, they can fit together. And the beauty of the e-commerce quiz is they really help people avoid that decision fatigue and analysis paralysis that is so common with selling products. So how do you get started? Once you’ve figured out your quiz type, what happens next? There’s one rule that I really want you to keep in mind.

This is the most important rule of quiz club, you totally made up club. And it’s that you’ve got to reverse engineer. Most people create their quiz without really thinking about the big end goal, not like the results end goal, but the, what impact is this going to have on my business and on my sales end goal? So they choose topics like, if your business was a parks and recs character, who would it be? Which is fun, but your goal is to be fun and effective. So you need to think about the bigger picture of how your quiz fits into your overall business or that of your clients. So really looking at what are you selling on the other end and how does this connect with it?

Okay, so to do that, you’re going to want to start with your goals, which sounds obvious. But get clear on what you want your quiz to do. Do you want it to fuel a specific launch? Do you want to sell more products? Do you just want to finally grow your email list and build an audience? Those are really important questions. Yeah, and we talked a little bit about the signature quiz and the launch quiz. And you can sort of see from these like how these goals would play into, also what type of quiz you want to create. So once you’ve done that, you’re going to map it out. And this is where you… I just like to doodle, okay, this quiz is the beginning of the customer journey. What’s going to happen after and sort of create a visual map of how this is going to fit into the bigger picture.

And what you need to know about making your quiz come to life and creating it is that this is a bigger endeavor than mostly lead magnets. I mean, you can create a free guide pretty quickly and easily, whereas a quiz, it’s definitely, it takes more time, but it also has a much bigger impact. So I want you to keep in mind that you should probably be setting aside 12 hours, not all at once, setting aside some time blocks to build out your quiz. And if you are creating quizzes for clients, think about that, charge accordingly. It’s probably going to take even longer. And yeah, like 500 bucks isn’t going to cut it. So much time and research and copy goes into a high performing quiz. Okay, so let’s dig into choosing a quiz topic and finding your hook.

So every single time I write my headlines, I kind of hear Joanna’s voice in my head and it goes a little something like this. If you’ve got an hour to write something, spend 80% of that time on your headlines and your quiz topic is no different. You really want to spend a lot of time on this and challenge yourself to come up with at least 10 different ideas before choosing the best or better yet coming up with top three or top four and then going in, pulling your audience, if you have that capability. So here’s the recipe for a compelling quiz hook. It’s like one part problem solver, one part ego boost and two parts curiosity inducing. I want to take a look at this example from one of my clients, who after launching this quiz added 2000 organic leads and 20K in additional sales in the first month.

So this title is pretty intriguing, right? Is my brand a bad ass old fashioned or is it a fun loving margarita, I need to know. They’re catering to quiz takers’ ego by promising to share what it is that sets them apart, and who doesn’t want to know that, in addition to solving a problem by giving specific strategies that will ensure you are the top choice in your industry. So you can see how the curiosity is layered in here and that’s really important when it comes to choosing a hook for your quiz because the more curiosity inducing it is, the more irresistible.

Okay, so it is time to write those results, the above and beyond framework for creating deliciously shareable results. It really comes down to asking these questions before you even get started. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but if you ask yourself these questions, you will automatically go above and beyond 95% of the quizzes on the internet. Because when you’re clear on these things and you plant these seeds in your results, your audience will read that and think, okay, this person obviously has a spy cam in my house. They completely understand me. So I have some of these questions in the resources that I’ll share at the end and I can also share my slides, if any of you want.

Okay, so there are some essential sections that your quiz results need to have. The first is what I call the ego booster section and this is where you’re affirming someone’s type, you’re talking to them about who they are, about what their strengths are, about what makes them special, basically. And really you’re making them feel good before you dig in to how they can improve or whatever the topic or angle of your quiz is. So when you start with that positive ego boosting section, you really draw people in and then you can promise them sort of a trail to solving the problem that your quiz promised to solve. And that’s where your action steps come in. So part of creating a really valuable quiz that stands out in the sea of BuzzFeed quizzes is giving people some actionable strategies that they can apply to improve their life and make their situation better. And it doesn’t have to be a massive thing, even just three simple action steps that people can take after they walk away from their screen can be really powerful.

The third essential is actually introducing your brand or yourself. This is really important because it’s so easy for people to say yes to taking a quiz online that they can completely forget that they ever signed up for your email list from said quiz. And then when you pop up in their inbox, they have no idea who you are because they just took a quiz. If you didn’t introduce yourself, then there’s a disconnect. So the introduction is also a place where you can share a bit of social proof, tell them why you are the expert and how you know this stuff. And then the fourth essential is at the end of your quiz result, you also want to tell your reader what is going to happen next. Don’t just leave them hanging.

This is just the beginning of your journey together and you are going to help them in a whole lot of other ways. So if you’ve got a cool email series coming at them, tell them that. If you want to invite them to a webinar, do it. If you’ve got the perfect product based on their responses, send them there. Tell them what is going to happen next. Okay, so when in doubt, keep this matrix in mind when you go to create those quiz results. The first thing is you want to be hyper specific. So that’s where understanding your audience comes into play. And I’m sure there’s Tutorial Tuesdays on customer research and knowing your peeps.

Joanna: No, there’s nothing on that, no, no.

Chanti: So I’m not going to go..

. Joanna: No luck with that.

Chanti: Nothing at all. You don’t need to know them, just..

Joanna: Nah.

Chanti: Yeah, so get as specific as possible and that just comes down to doing the research. First off, authority building. So I touched a little bit on that when I said you need to include an introduction, but in that introduction, make sure you share why you know your stuff. Where have you been featured? What amazing results have you created? Why do you care about what you do? Share a bit of your story and create some authority right off the bat so that when you do pop up in people’s inbox, they’re like, oh yeah, I need to open that. I need to learn from this person. Valuable is pretty straight forward. You want people to get their quiz result and go, I need to print this off. This is so good. I need to take action on what they’re telling me here. Do not hold back.

And then emotional, this is where quizzes become really powerful because you’re asking people questions about themselves. You can echo back what you know about them and you can use that emotional language. You have a hall pass here, so go for it because that is where a bond is really created with your audience. Okay, let’s dig into the types of questions. I know this is going by really fast, so I’m going to go quickly. The first is you need those engagement style questions. So these are the fun, entertaining type questions that kind of grease the wheels and keep people moving forward. You still want them to be relevant to your topic though. So asking what Spice Girl they would be if you’ve got a quiz on finding the perfect style of glasses, I don’t know, maybe it would work.

And then the second type of question is the segmentation questions. So these are the questions that you will base who gets what results on, basically. So you don’t have to tie your results to every single question. And then the information collector questions. So the primary purpose of these types of questions is to better understand your audience and your quiz takers. So I want you to think about, what do I really want to ask these people? What do I need to know about them? And that might be what they struggle with, what they’re most interested in, what they want the most, those types of things. And when you have those, you can use them to curate more relevant content, better courses, whatever it is. So your questions can also do two or three of those things at once, absolutely.

And I’m not going to go through this entire example because we’re short on time, but this is just an example of a question that kind of does all three. So it segments, it’s fun, and it tells us about the people taking this quiz. The Cardinal rule though of lead generation quizzes is to just lead with generosity. Most quizzes fall flat and they take more than they give. So here’s the quiz quicksand, real quick. Do not make people work too hard. Keep your questions light and positive or as much as possible, intersperse the more serious questions with the fun ones, make kind of a question sandwich. And don’t ask too many questions, more than 10, your quiz takers will start to drop off. Lastly, you don’t want to be too wordy. Use images, use gifs, use quotes. And remember, white space is your friend.

And three hot tips that’ll give you an instant edge. Make people feel good, more importantly, make them feel understood, so don’t skip that ego booster section and use personality to your advantage. A quiz is like a free pass to have a lot of personality within your content. And not sure how to write with personality, probably a Tutorial Tuesday for that too. Lastly, you want to give your readers a reason to share and that really just comes down to giving them a whole lot of value and making your quiz results positive because nobody wants to share that they suck at life.

Joanna: Okay, Chanti, thank you so much everybody. If you can please follow Chanti, go get all of that great information from her. She knows everything there is to know about grading quizzes that work today. Ange just chatted that once again, so head on over there. Chanti, thank you so much for coming in and presenting this to us.

Chanti: Thank you so much. I’m sorry I couldn’t get some more questions.

Joanna: No, all good. Hopefully everybody will be able to ask you separately. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We’ll see you for the second part of this training next Tuesday, same time, same place. Ange thanks as well, and we will have the replay posted shortly. Thanks everybody. Have a good one, stay safe.

Chanti: Bye.

Joanna: Bye.