However, it’s one thing to witness the success of others, but it’s another thing to actually take action and replicate that success.

Those five different examples demonstrated how quizzes were utilized along with different marketing strategies, but how does one go about making an effective quiz in the first place?

Let’s take a closer look at one of the brands highlighted in the previous article, Z Gallerie, and their quiz “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?”

The following step by step guide will show you how to go about creating a similar quiz of your own; from the title to the questions, to the lead capture form and the results. We’ll discuss effective ways to promote your quiz through social media to increase its popularity and further drive online sales and generate leads.

Part I: Creating Your Lead Generating Quiz to Drive Sales

Z Gallerie provides and caters to an audience of professional and amateur interior designers alike. Having established a strong online presence and in brick and mortar locations across the United States, Z Gallerie executed on their quiz perfectly, asking “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?”

By using quizzes to deliver personalized product recommendations, Z Gallerie was able to develop a deeper connection with their customer base to generate a massive success.

Concept Crafting & Title Choices

Every innovative content piece starts with an idea, right? Before we jump right into the quiz creation process, you’ll need a concept to wrap your quiz around. In Z Gallerie’s case, their quiz was based on what they were good at: interior design.

They modeled their questions after some of the basic concepts interior designers look for. So when it comes to your quiz, make it about something you have considerable knowledge on. Once you’ve got that figured out, here are a couple foundations you can build your quiz upon:

• The “Event” Based Quiz: This kind of a quiz revolves around the idea of an event or campaign. Taking this quiz is an added bonus to an on-going event that drives customer interaction. If you choose to go this route, think about tying it in with a contest or a giveaway to spur even more audience engagement. For example, if Halloween is approaching, you could have a spooky themed event that your quiz revolves around.

• The “Your Products” Based Quiz: If you don’t have some kind of promotional campaign going on at the moment, your best bet would be to go down the simpler route of creating a quiz based on what your brand sells. This places a deeper focus on your products, especially if you make your results personalized product recommendations. Z Gallerie used this method to place customers in “personality” categories that suggest suitable interior design recommendations based on your personality.

Crafting the Questions to Your Quiz

Now we’re onto the body of your quiz. This is where you establish your connection with the customer.

When formulating your questions, ask yourself how likely you might be to answer them. Here are some important ideas to keep in mind when coming up with your questions:

• Use Your Personality in the Questions – Let your personality shine in your quiz. When creating your questions, the quiz becomes a representation of your brand, so ask questions pertinent to the products you want to put an emphasis on in the results. Don’t be afraid to speak informally. You want to build trust with your quiz-takers by being you. Act as if you were speaking to someone in person.

• Use Images to Your Advantage – You’ll notice that a lot of the quizzes you encounter have images for questions. Pictures keep things relevant (assuming you chose relevant pictures to the quiz) and interesting at the same time. Using images also makes the quiz feel more like a game than some knowledge test on the internet. It lets people get comfortable and makes them more likely to opt-in at a later point. Because Z Gallerie has a deep focus on visual presentation, they made sure to use appropriate images that correlate to what you might find visually appealing.

• Keep Things Short and Simple – There’s a sweet spot when it comes to the number of questions you ask your quiz-taker. That sweet spot is between six and ten questions. As short as people’s attention spans are today, you need to ask as few questions as possible. Z Gallerie kept their quiz at a minimum of six questions, so they did an excellent job in keeping things simple and sweet.

Creating the Lead Capture Form for Your Quiz

As an online retailer, you want to generate leads to drive revenue in the future. This is where the lead capture form comes in handy. By increasing your email subscriber list, you can group potential customers together to target every week (or however often you send marketing messages) with brand new products or deals, thus increasing your chances of making sales.

The lead capture form’s placement in a quiz is crucial. Don’t put it right at the beginning, because that can scare people away. Don’t put it right at the end either because what incentive does anyone have to fill it out after they’ve gotten what they want? Gating it right before the results of a quiz makes it so that your quiz-taker must fill it out to advance.

Here are some guidelines to follow when creating your lead capture form:

• Give Your Customers a Valued Promise: Try to give your audience something more than just their results. Incentivize your lead capture with things like a giveaway entry to win free stuff, a free resource like an e-book or e-magazine, a weekly newsletter, coupons or discounts, or even just personalized advice. Birchbox’s incentive is their personalized message based on the quiz taker’s sense of style.

• Be Honest With Your Marketing Strategy: We’re not trying to pull any fast ones on our audience by having them opt-in and not letting them know what they’re getting into. Be honest with your marketing strategy. Let your quiz-taker know that you’ll be emailing them with content pertaining to the quiz they just took, be it a one-time email or a weekly follow-up. Don’t leave your audience in the dark.

• Ask Only For What You Need: When using a lead capture form, only ask for information you’ll actually use. This could be a name and an email address at the most. Don’t ask for someone’s phone number if you aren’t going to call them. Birchbox’s lead capture only requires a first and last name along with an email address. Simple, yet effective.

Creating Results That Will Get Your Quiz Shared

The results of your quiz have as much impact as the questions. When you scroll through your social media feed, what are you more likely to come across? Someone posting about a quiz or someone posting their results? The answer should be the latter.

Here are some key factors to creating share-worthy results:

• Give Positive Comments Without Lying: It isn’t a bad idea to have fun with people’s egos and emotions to generate shares. Tell everyone how awesome they are. Focus on the good traits to evoke positive emotions. People are more willing to share something that says something positive about them. However, avoid telling your quiz-taker that they’re something they aren’t.

• Use Captivating Images for Your Results: When people post their results on social media networks, what’s the first thing you see? It’s usually an image, yes? When creating your results, include relative, attractive images that will encourage people to take notice of someone’s results when posted. Z Gallerie makes sure to include an image of a fully-furnished room in correlation with the personality style a quiz-taker gets.

• Capture Your Audience’s Interest With Something Short: The results to your quiz shouldn’t be the end of your interaction with the quiz-taker; it shouldn’t be a paragraph long either. Keep your results down to about 3-5 sentences. Make your results lead to something more, for instance, to your website, or a handful of recommended products. Z Gallerie’s results encourage you to click on a personalized link to your style with product recommendations tailored around it.

Part II: Distributing Your Quiz on Social Media

Now that we’ve finished the quiz creation process, let’s talk about quiz distribution. Facebook and Twitter make up a large representation of social media, so we’re going to target these two as the main sources of generating social traffic.

Sharing Results on Facebook and Twitter

1. Use a captivating image to represent your quiz.

2. Come up with an attention-grabbing headline.

3. Share both the image and the caption with a shortened link to track results.

Using Paid Advertising to Promote Your Quizzes

Promoting your quiz on Facebook is an intricate process on its own, but for time’s sake, here’s the gist of the more important things to note when it comes to using paid Facebook advertising:

• Select Your Target Audience – You can select your target audience through various categories such as location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. Each category can be narrowed down even further. For instance, if all of your stores are located in California, you can narrow down the Facebook ads to just that state.

• Create a Custom Audience – Creating a custom audience lets you work with an existing list you’ve uploaded onto Facebook. This audience will be similar to the list of current customers that you already have.

Part III: Following Up to Drive Revenue

After collecting leads, your job is to convert them into paying customers. Warm them up by keeping them interested through a series of marketing automation emails.

Let’s break it down into a four-step follow-up sequence:

1. The First Follow-Up: Thank You for Taking the Quiz

It’s imperative that you thank your audience for taking your quiz. It reminds them that they opted in and it helps to assert the name of your brand. If you forget this very first step, people won’t remember who you are and they’ll quickly write your email off as spam. There goes your chance. Don’t blow it!

2. The Second Follow-Up: Increase Interest Through Curiosity

A few days later, send your audience a list of other possible results that they could have gotten through your quiz. It piques their interest and encourages them to retake the quiz to see if they can get a different result. It’s the perfect natural transition from your “thank you” email to sending out other content.

3. The Third Follow-Up: Build Trust Through Experiences

After about a week, send out another email that highlights a customer case study or testimonial. Customer stories are perfect for building up trust, especially if you target people based on the result they got. This is the last step in convincing your leads to become paying customers.

4. The Fourth Follow-Up: Closing the Sale

After two weeks or so have passed, it’s time to finally convert your leads into customers. Use incentives like coupons, discounts or a webinar signup to close the deal. Give your audience a reason to buy into your brand.

The last time we were together, we looked over five different companies and how they used quizzes to personalize the shopping experience. This time around, we went through the steps to create your own quiz similar to the ones we’ve examined.

We went over title choices and the kind of quiz to create, followed by several key factors in crafting quiz questions. We then touched base on the basic guidelines for creating a lead capture, and most importantly, creating share-worthy results. It’s not enough just to make a quiz, so we also introduced several methods of distributing your quiz through social media. Lastly, we went over how you can follow-up on your leads through marketing automation.

With all of the information we’ve gone over today, you should be ready to create and promote your own quiz which—with the right amount of exposure and social traffic—can generate leads and increase online sales.

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Online sales have seen a growth rate of 10 times more than offline sales, but with store owners and sales people physically cut out of the equation, how can you offer the same personalized recommendations you would at your physical store?

Marketing automation, while helpful, is a bit too static and impersonal, not to mention boring. What if you could personalize the online shopping experience with interactive content that you’ve come to recognize as a staple of social media?

“I Got Peridot! What Kind Of Gem Are You?”

Quizzes have become a viral sensation over the past few years if Buzzfeed hasn’t made that obvious already. Marketers are beginning to use quizzes as an effective method of generating leads, segmenting their database and increasing e-commerce sales. And quite frankly, you might want to consider it, too.

I’ve personally been a part of the making of more than 25,000 quizzes at Interact and have learned a lot about what makes an effective piece for generating sales and driving leads. Today, I’ll answer the questions I presented above with five examples that illustrate how you can use quizzes to personalize the online shopping experience and help drive online sales for your company.

1. How Z Gallerie Personalized Their Product Line Through Quizzes

Z Gallerie is a company that provides their customers with creative products procured from all over the world. They attend to both professional and amateur interior designers alike with a strong online presence and locations across the United States. Z Gallerie created the quiz “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?” to personalize their product line and to generate leads.

The purpose of Z Gallerie’s quiz is to provide a personalized experience for every potential and current customer that visits their website. After answering several questions, Z Gallerie collects contact information through a lead-capture form which allows them to follow up in a personal way with the help of marketing automation.

After filling out the lead capture form, Z Gallerie gives you your “Style Personality” with a link to learn more about it. Clicking the link brings you to a personalized page with product recommendations based carefully on the answers you chose on the quiz.

With the help of their personality quiz, Z Gallerie was able to deliver a very personalized shopping experience that brings in a considerable amount of leads per day. This personalized approach keeps customers engaged and allows the brand to suggest products custom-fit for their personal preferences. This gives Z Gallerie an opportunity to establish a connection with customers that can convert them into repeat purchasers in the future.

Here’s how you can deploy this strategy for your brand: Create a quiz with personalized results for each customer so that you can recommend products tailored to their preferences. This can be done by either recommending a single product or by assigning people a “personality” that corresponds to a group of products. Follow up with marketing automation to keep your customers interested and engaged.

2. How Birchbox Differentiated Their Products Using A Personality Quiz

Birchbox specializes in a monthly delivery of personalized product samples along with original content and an exciting online shop. Birchbox created the quiz “Find Your Face Mask Soul Mate in One Minute” to give personalized recommendations on which facemask customer should purchase.

What distinguishes Birchbox’s strategy from Z Gallerie’s is their execution. Although Birchbox practiced the same tactic of creating a quiz that suggests products based on personal preferences, they used theirs to differentiate similar products, most of which were variants of facemasks.

While Birchbox did not use their quiz to generate leads, they used it to place an emphasis on the most suitable face mask for their customers. The quiz made a personal connection with Birchbox’s customers by offering products catered specifically to them. Personalized experiences like this encourage the growth of a relationship between customer and retailer.

Here’s how you can emulate this method: Create a personality quiz with results based on your customer’s personal preferences. From there, recommend the most suitable product, as personalized suggestions convert better than generalized ones.

3. How BioLite Used A Quiz To Raise Awareness And Promote Their Product Line

BioLite’s strategy is surprisingly simple. They created a quiz to help raise awareness on power outage and lack-of-power preparedness. After the taking their quiz and getting the results, regardless of how prepared consumers may be, BioLite still recommends products that may be useful in similar situations.

With the use of a lead capture form, BioLite asked quiz-takers if they would like to submit their contact information to receive updates on environmentally friendly products and as an entry into their giveaway as an incentive. The form brought in 4,852 leads.

Here’s what you can do to replicate this strategy: Create a quiz that makes people think about situations that would require them to use products that you offer. It will encourage customers to make purchases based on their ability to rationalize the need for said products in various scenarios.

4. How The Elephant Pants Used Quizzes To Fund Their Kickstarter Campaign

Before establishing themselves as the successful company they are today, The Elephant Pants relied on the support of fundraising through a Kickstarter campaign. By creating the quiz “Which Pair of Elephant Pants Are You?” and linking it to their Kickstarter, The Elephant Pants were able to generate enough leads to fund their launch.

Just like the previous examples that we’ve taken a look at so far, The Elephant Pants also used their quiz to deliver personalized results that recommended a particular kind of product to customers—in this case, a specific kind of Elephant Pants.

The Elephant Pants provided a link at the end of the results of the quiz to help fund their Kickstarter. It also opted potential customers in to their email newsletter to keep them updated with any new developments.

By the end of their campaign, The Elephant Pants Kickstarter raised over $8,500 through their quiz, which was enough to help the retail startup to get off the ground.

Here’s how you can recreate this type of success: Create a quiz that recommends possible products that would encourage customers to fund a new product line, or new business altogether. When it takes off, you’ll have already established a loyal customer base from your humble beginnings.

5. How Aaron Brothers Uses Quizzes To Convert Leads Into Local Purchasers

Aaron Brothers (Michael’s) specializes in offering their customers merchandise in the form of custom framing, art supplies, and home decor. With a dedicated focus on art, they created a quiz to generate leads with an emphasis on targeting location.

The quiz, entitled “What’s Your Color?”, is entertaining, shareable content made with the sole purpose of generating leads based on location. Quizzes that categorize quiz-takers into personalities are heavily favored on social media, so the shares are frequent. It’s generated over 500 leads and has been the most successful part of Aaron Brothers’ campaign.

Here’s how you can paint the same picture: Use an entertaining quiz to collect leads earmarked by location so you can sell more seasonal and regionally-favored products offline by suggesting the nearest physical store location.

Many retailers are making the leap to online marketing, but the shopping experience isn’t quite the same as walking into a typical department store. Retailers want to emulate the same personalized customer service that they provide in person, and quizzes help bridge that gap.

Use a personality quiz to create personalized product recommendations as the end result. Or, use the same kind of quiz to differentiate between products or to encourage the funding of a product that’s in development. No matter how you use your quiz for retail, it will still have the innate ability to generate leads for your brand.

So get out there, be creative and make your mark in the world of e-commerce with the Internet’s next irresistible quiz.

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