It’s no secret that one of the most popular (and powerful) lead-generation methods is the quiz. To your clients, it’s a fun way to waste a bit of time and maybe discover something new about yourself. But in the backend, when done right, you can make a lead generating quiz that attracts, collects, qualifies, segments, and converts your clients. All with one little quiz! It’s amazing.
Since I’m talking in general to online service providers, my advice is going to be in the context of using a quiz to get clients, but that’s definitely not the only thing it can do. For example, if you have a B2C business (selling directly to consumers, not business owners) and want to collect leads, create interest, or spread awareness about your product, a quiz can be a GREAT way to do that.
For example, I just started my own B2C business Chronic Illness Entrepreneurs that I plan to monetize with affiliate marketing and products, and we decided to make a lead generating quiz for it during our launch (check it out here)! It’s a unique and fun way to engage your audience, and it’s so easy to market.
How to Make a Lead Generating Quiz for Free
The example quiz that I just linked to above was actually created with the Thrive Quiz Builder, which has a one-time cost of $67. I highly recommend using this software if you are thinking about utilizing quizzes in your marketing, because it has so many awesome features.
But, that being said, I still have a tutorial for you that outlines exactly how to make a lead generating quiz for free!
Instead of using Thrive Quiz Builder, we will be using PlayBuzz. You can see an example of a quiz that I created using this tutorial on my B2B site The VA Collective: Do You Have What it Takes to Be a Virtual Assistant?
Conceptualizing Your Quiz
Before we get started with the tech setup of your quiz, you need to have a plan in place. You can’t just go into it willy-nilly without a goal or outline!
Choosing a Goal for Your Quiz
First things first, let’s talk about the three types of quiz goals:
- Lead Generation
- Lead Qualification
- Lead Segmentation
Depending on your business, as well as what type of quiz you are creating, the quiz you make could potentially accomplish one, 
two, or even all three of these goals. Since you guys are mostly online service providers, today we’re going to be focusing on using the quiz mostly for qualification and segmentation purposes.
Lead qualification is the process of figuring out whether your lead is (a) a potential client or (b) not a potential client.
Lead segmentation is the process of splitting your qualified leads into different categories. Lead segmentation works well if you have multiple types of products or services that you sell, or if you have multiple types of clients that you sell to.
Choosing a Topic for Your Quiz
Once you’ve decided what the goal of your quiz is going to be, it’s time to choose a specific topic for your quiz. The best way to do this is to spend time observing your ideal client.
Questions you might ask yourself during this part of the process could include:
- What do my potential clients have trouble with?
- What are my potential clients’ big goals in their businesses?
- What motivates my potential clients?
- What questions do my potential clients seem to ask over and over again?
- How do I help my clients?
- What problem do I solve for my potential clients?
- Why would a potential client take the jump to hire me?
The main goal during this time of observation is to find a problem that your clients have that you can solve for them with your services. You may already know exactly what this problem is if you’re actively spending a lot of time with your potential clients, or have in the past.
Once you know exactly how you help clients with your paid services, it’s time to figure out how to give them part of the answer for free.
Today, we’re going to focus on how you can give them part of that answer with your quiz.
So, for example, if you are a wedding planner, the problem that you solve for your clients might be the overwhelm and stress that comes with planning a wedding by yourself. Now that you know how you solve their problem, you need to figure out a way to get them part of the way there for free. This will inspire trust and respect in your potential clients, and make them eager to receive more help from you.
One way you could give them part of the answer for free would be to create a quiz: What Color Scheme Should I Use in My Wedding? As a wedding planner, you may have found that one of the biggest things that causes that overwhelm and stress in your clients is figuring out the design aspect of the wedding.
If you can make a lead-generating quiz that gives them an easy answer for that one small piece of their problem, you can use that as a springboard to then sell them on your paid services, which ultimately will relieve all of their stress.
Creating Your Quiz: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
Now that you have the concept of your quiz ready to go, it’s time to ramp up and actually make that lead-generating quiz for your business.
Even though we’re now into the true tutorial part of this blog post, there’s still a little bit of conceptualizing and strategizing that’s going to go on through the process. So, no matter whether you are using Playbuzz, Thrive Quiz Builder, or something else, the tutorial will still help you figure out exactly how you’re going to design the process for your potential clients.
Choosing the Type of Quiz
With Playbuzz, you have a bunch of options for different types of things to create (not all of them are actually quizzes), and Thrive Quiz Builder gives you a total of four options.
In my opinion, the best options that Playbuzz has are: personality quiz, trivia, and gallery quiz. Their names are pretty self-explanatory, with the gallery quiz just being a more visual version of the trivia type. Playbuzz describes that option as “A visually stimulating twist on the trivia quiz, in the gallery format you choose the right answers out of a bank of images.”
The ones that I personally like the best from Thrive Quiz Builder are Percentage and Category. Category is simply their version of what you would think of as a personality quiz (i.e. What Type of Bridezilla Are You?), whereas the Percentage type gives people results on a scale of 0-100 (i.e. How Stressed Out Does Wedding Planning Make You?).
Choosing a type of quiz totally depends on what your goal is and who your clients are. The most popular and easiest type to create is probably the personality/category quiz, and that’s what most people think of when they hear the word “quiz.”
Going along with our example business, the quiz idea we came up with (What Color Scheme Should I Use in My Wedding?) is going to be a great choice for a personality/category type of quiz.
Conceptualizing Your Quiz Results
Once you’ve chosen the type of quiz and the title, the next step is going to be to set up the results of the quiz. Depending on what type of quiz you’re making, this might not be necessary (for example, the percentage type of quiz does not require results, since the person is simply awarded a number).
But with the personality type of quiz, this part of the process is really important.
You can pretty much have as many results to the quiz as you’d like, but having more than 5 or 6 results can get complicated. I recommend that you start out with 3-5 results.
Regardless of how many you have, you definitely should have no less than 3. The reason behind this being that the whole point of the quiz, besides to get people on your email list, is to qualify and segment them.
In order to do that, your first three results should represent:
- Your Ideal Client
- Not Your Ideal Client Yet
- Will Never Be an Ideal Client
The first three results are for qualification purposes. The result identifies whether or not the person taking the quiz is a potential client. If you’d like to go ahead and add in additional results, the best way to do this would be to use the extra results to start segmenting.
Here’s what segmenting with results would look like:
- Your Ideal Client, Type A
- Your Ideal Client, Type B
- Not Your Ideal Client Yet
- Will Never Be an Ideal Client
In the context of our wedding planning example (What Color Scheme Should I Use in My Wedding?), here’s what some example result categories might be:
- Your Ideal Client, Type A (needs small planning package)
- Your Ideal Client, Type B (needs large planning package or custom service)
- Not Your Ideal Client Yet (does not have a date set)
- Will Never Be an Ideal Client (focused solely on DIY-ing her wedding or already has a planner)
Once you know how many results you will have, it’s time to create the actual result. So, for example, here are some possible results we could have for our wedding planning example:
- Elegant Color Scheme (Ideal Client, Type A)
- Bold Color Scheme (Ideal Client, Type B)
- Limitless Possibilities (Not Your ideal Client Yet)
- Trendy Color Scheme (Will Never Be an Ideal Client)
Conceptualizing Your Quiz Questions
Once you have the results nailed down, the next step when you want to make a lead generating quiz is to come up with the individual questions you will ask your potential clients.
This is probably the most crucial part of the process, because you are going to have to subtly try to sway them into answering a certain way, depending on what your results are. You want them to be forthcoming with certain types of answers to that you can correctly identifying what type of potential client they are.
I would recommend creating at least 5 questions, because you want the person taking the quiz to have a good experience. If they don’t feel like the quiz is trying hard enough to help them, they won’t be open to possibly hiring you. On the other hand, you’ll probably want to have a maximum of 20 questions, because you don’t want to bore or overwhelm them either.
The easiest way to set it up when you’re doing a personality type quiz is to have 1 answer that corresponds with each result. So, for example, if you have 4 results, each question should have 4 possible answers that each individually correlate to one of the results.
But, if you want to get fancy, you definitely don’t have to do it that way, as you can use weighted answers to help you get around this.
Weighted answers work a little differently depending on the quiz software you’re using, but it’s fairly easy to figure out. Basically, instead of each answer exactly corresponding with one result, you can weight the answer so that it corresponds with multiple results.
This is helpful for two different types of situations.
The first one being, if you want to have a question with fewer possible answers than the number of results. The screenshot above shows you what this would look like, with the “no” answer weighted heavily towards one result, and the “yes” answer being less important and weighted equally to the other three results. (Or, in the case of Thrive Quiz Builder where you have to single out one result, I’ve chosen to have it correspond with the Ideal Client, Type A result at a low weight).
The second situation where you might want to use weighted answers is if the answers could possibly lead to more than one result. For example, if I had a question like “what’s your favorite color?” The response of “pink” could lead to multiple possible results. It’s not obvious from that one answer which category of potential client they belong in (without the help of the other questions in the quiz). So, for that response, I could choose to either give that answer a higher weight towards Elegant or equally weight it between all four responses.
Giving the Quiz Taker Their Results
This part of the process is where the free version, Playbuzz, starts to fail us. While you can set up the quiz as perfectly as you need to, there is no way to require your quiz takers to input their email address anywhere. The best that you can do is to place an opt-in form somewhere next to your quiz and encourage them to sign up in the description of the result.
On the other side of things, the quiz results part of the process is where Thrive Quiz Builder starts to shine.
You have the option of requiring someone to enter in their email address before they are able to view results. Or, you could show them their results and then encourage them to sign up to get more specific details about the result. You can add social sharing buttons, completely customize the design, and even segment your email list subscribers based on their result.
The segmenting email list subscribers is something that I think is so cool. Basically, Thrive Quiz Builder allows you to display a different opt-in form depending on what result the quiz taker is about to receive. Then, it automatically displays that opt-in form before the person is allowed to see their results.
So, when you then go and connect it to your email service provider (I use ActiveCampaign), you can tag the person as, for example, “Color Scheme Quiz Result: Ideal Client, Type A.” This will allow you to then create an automation sequence to send them a personalized results email based on their result and send them follow-up emails that sell them on your services.
Following Up Via Email
Once someone opts-in and receives their result, you should immediately follow up with a welcome email that talks about their result. Go into more detail about the result they were given, introduce yourself, and encourage them to share the quiz with their friends.
If you’re using Playbuzz, the key to doing this correctly is to include some sort of downloadable PDF with a similar title to the quiz, and then go into detail about all of the results within that one PDF. Just be very vague in the emails you send and don’t refer to specific results. The PDF you send them can have a separate section or page for each type of result. That way the person can flip through and find their result, read about it, and also check out the other results as well.
I prefer using Thrive Quiz Builder, though, because you can just send off a normal email to the quiz taker and simply personalize it based on their result. Here’s an example of what I would do, using the wedding planner idea:
After that initial email, follow up with them at least once a week with a sales sequence that will ultimately work to sell them on hiring you.
The cool thing is that you can actually do this same thing even if they did not receive an “ideal client” result.
For example, if the person taking the quiz isn’t engaged yet or hasn’t set a date, that just means that they are not an ideal client yet. The fact that they are interested in the topic means they might be on the verge of becoming your ideal client, so now is the best time to prime them!
Send them blog posts about how to let your friends and family know you’re engaged, the first 5 steps to take after you have a ring on your finger, etc. This will serve to get them ready to purchase from you in the future, and keep them engaged and active until they are at that point.
Even if they received the “not an ideal client” result, there is still something that you can do here. If you don’t think that they are a great fit for you, perhaps you can sell them on a side service you offer (like honeymoon planning or thank you card design) or they might be a great candidate for a product/service that you’re an affiliate for.
Use the questions in your quiz to try and pinpoint exactly what you can sell to the person who is taking the quiz, regardless of whether or not they are a perfect potential client for you.
Ready to make use of this powerful tool? GRAB THRIVE QUIZ BUILDER NOW!
