So as an email marketer, I’m always looking for ways to grow my list.

Obviously, you have lead magnets, ebooks, webinars, etc…

All that stuff works great.

But for a long time, I’ve been wanting to experiment with a new type of lead generation method that has the potential to make your email list really explode.

I’m talking about quizzes.

Now, people might have mixed opinions about lead gen quizzes.

But here’s what I do know…

The internet (and more specifically social media) is where thinking goes to die.

Think about it this way…

If you had to read a 250-page book on a technical topic related to your job or business… OR… take a quiz that revealed what type of Sangria you are… I think you’d take that quiz ten times out of ten. The quiz is more fun. It doesn’t really require you to think real hard. And when you find a quiz that piques your curiosity… it’s really hard to ignore.

On top of that, there’s another reason why these things work so well…

We Always Want To Learn More About Ourselves

Billion dollar companies like 23 & Me and Ancestry has been built off people’s desires to learn more about themselves.

Gary Halbert profitably mailed 700 MILLION letters for his coat-of-arms business because… PEOPLE LIKE LEARNING ABOUT THEMSELVES.

Buzzfeed literally built a media empire by creating quizzes that go viral.

Quizzes work well.

They’re short.

They’re fun.

And people like to share them with other people who are usually just like them.

Which is great for you – as a marketer or business owner – because our whole goal is to find as many people as possible who might be interested in buying our stuff.

Now, listen…

Creating a quiz might take a little bit of testing and tweaking and optimizing as you go. But if you create a quiz that’s hot… you can literally add thousands of new subscribers to your list in a very short amount of time.

I have not done that myself – yet.

But I’m writing this article to document my experiments with these things… and this will definitely not be my last article on this topic.

For the meantime, I created my first quiz to test out this really cool quiz-making software called Interact.

(There are a few others out there, but Interact seems to have the best features and the greatest ease of use… which is why I ended up going with them.)

So let me show you how this thing works and how I created my first lead gen quiz to grow my email list.

How I Chose My Quiz Topic

This part was actually a little hard for me.

Mainly, because I had soooo many ideas.

There are so many ways you can take your quiz. There’s personality quizzes, assessments and even scorecard quizzes that test people’s knowledge.

I have a lot of ideas I wanna test in the future.

But for this first quiz… I wanted to make something really fun and something that would make ME curious if I ever saw it out in the wild.

So I settled on…

What Character from Mad Men Are you?

Here’s why I chose this topic:

  1. Mad Men is my favorite show of all time. I’ve watched it 5x through. And I plan on starting Round 6 soon.
  2. I think people who like Mad Men tend to either work in advertising/marketing… or have an affinity toward those that industry.
  3. I knew not everyone is going to become a lead. But the people who DO like Mad Men and who have their own business would probably REALLY end up liking me… because we obviously have very similar interests. That might be a small number of people who take the quiz… but those few people might end up becoming fans (and buyers) for life.
  4. I was kind of curious myself which character I’m most like. So I knew if I wanted to know, there’s probably other people who might want to know as well.

I mapped out my questions on a piece of paper.

I basically wrote down a few categories that could be used to differentiate the answers. Obviously, drink choice would be a good question. What type of clients they’d like to pitch to if they did work in advertising. A lot of questions that identified people’s preferences.

There were four options for each answer.

But there were five possible characters. So the answers were mapped based on what percentage of answers correlated with a specific character’s preferences.

It’s not hard to do.

All you have to do is go in and create a simple logic flow for each question in your quiz.

There wasn’t really any particular problem I was trying to solve with this quiz.

I really just wanted to get people curious.

Again, I knew that if people liked Mad Men and they took the quiz… they might want to learn more about me because we have at least one shared interest.

Choosing A Template vs Starting From Scratch

I choose to start from scratch with this quiz.

I’m sure I could have used one of the many awesome templates that Interact has. But at the end of the day, I thought it might be quicker to just build it from scratch exactly how I wanted it.

The cool thing is, you have a few options when you are starting from scratch that makes the quiz logic pretty simple:

You can choose to do an assessment, a scored quiz or a personality quiz.

I chose personality… as I really wanted people to see which character from Mad Men they were and that seemed to make the most sense.

Keep it simple, right?

That’s the other cool thing about Interact.

It walks you through step by step. So it’s kind of idiot-proof, which is nice for people who are technically challenged like me.

The Super-Important Cover Page

When you’re making your cover page, my advice is to keep it simple.

Obviously, make it intriguing. But don’t clutter this up.

Good headline. Interesting picture. And a strong CTA that tells them exactly what they should do now.

Here’s mine:

The thing I like about this picture is that it focuses on a lot of different characters. So I really think that ratcheted up the curiosity.

Another cool thing about Interact.

You have a lot of options for where you can use this quiz.

So you can send people a direct link, embed it on a website… or even use it in a Facebook ad.

 

This makes it super easy to embed. And of course… it’s almost idiot-proof.

Choosing Your Questions

So, now we’re onto the fun part: choosing your questions.

I knew I wanted to stay between 5-8 questions for this first one. I wanted it to be simple and quick.

Here’s an example of one of the questions I used:

There’s nothing “marketing” related to any of this, as you can see.

It’s strictly focused on matching the person taking the quiz with the character they identify most with.

I wanted to use simple, multiple-choice questions that people could click through quickly.

Revealing Their Results

After people went through all six questions, they got an option to either join my email list, or to see their results.

Now, you’ll notice a few things about this step in the process.

First, I wanted to offer my brand new book Make It Rain: The Secret to Generating Massive Paydays From Your Email List to people who made it through the quiz.

I figured ONLY people who had email lists would join my list. After all… those were the only people I wanted, anyway. If they don’t have a list, they won’t be much use to me.

But I also allowed people to skip this step.

I really don’t want them on my list if they don’t want to be there.

I would rather have quality subscribers… rather than a big list of people who don’t like my stuff.

(So I’d recommend keeping that skip button in there.)

Here’s an example of one of the possible results:

I’ll probably go in and add more meat to this section at some point.

But for now, I just wanted to give people their answer.

At the bottom, you’ll see they can share the quiz… which some people will do. And that’s basically free advertising and free lead gen for you.

At this point in the process, being that I’m testing all this out… I wanted to see if I can get some share traffic.

But in the future, I will go back and add in a specific CTA for either a product, resource or even to book a call with me.

I’ll have to build that out, but you can segment people based on their results and send them super-targetted offers at the end of these quizzes… which is really cool.

Connecting Interact and ConvertKit

I use ConvertKit as my email software. And I highly recommend you do too. Because it’s awesome.

And it’s super easy to link with Interact.

All I had to do was enter my ConvertKit API keys in Interact and it automatically linked everything up.

The only thing I had to do after that was to choose which results linked to which actions in ConvertKit.

So for instance, if someone ended up with Don as their result, and they entered their email… they’d be added to my main email opt-in.

I didn’t do a ton of segmentation here.

But in the future, I’ll probably go back and add in some tags for each specific result.

Where To Put Your Quiz

For now, I’m going to link my quiz in some articles as a fun way to continue to the conversation.

As I test and optimize, I’ll probably build a permanent button somewhere on my site for it.

And as I come up with new ideas, I’ll probably test out some Facebook ads to cold traffic.

If you’d like to take my quiz, click here to try it out: What Character From Mad Men Are You?

Final Thoughts

I think people are going to like the quiz.

Obviously, I’m kind of biased.

But as I put more people through this, I’ll find ways to tweak and optimize the process.

The challenging part about this whole process is figuring out your big idea. And I realize I’ll probably have to test out a few of them before I get to a definitive winner.

But it’ll be worth it when I find that one quiz that ends up bringing me a few thousand new subs.

If you’re looking to grow your list… and you want a fun new way for people to engage with you, I’d recommend you start a free trial of Interact.

The amount of new subscribers you’ll get from a quiz will far outweigh the tiny investment for this awesome tool.

And if you end up creating your own quiz, and have any questions… leave a comment below and let me know how what you need help with.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top
Make it Rain Book

Sign up to get my FREE book on how to generate massive paydays with email