How to Create a Quiz That Will Impress Your Audience (And Help Your Business Grow)

Last updated: May 25, 2021

Have you heard a story of a million dollar quiz? You know, how a company spent a couple of days creating an online quiz that later brought them one million in revenue.

Cool, huh?

Also, very unlikely to happen to you.

Because the average conversion rate of an online quiz is 5%, 1 subscriber out of 20 people. And your small business has neither the traffic nor social followers, nor the money to get it in front of enough people to get the ball rolling.

Yet, if you use content marketing to grow your business, you absolutely should make your own interactive online quiz. Here’s why.

I created a 20-question online quiz that told people their websites suck

…and this is what happened next

They say the best quizzes are short, simple and positive.

Which makes sense. More people will finish a short and simple quiz, and more people will share the results if they are positive.

Unless you don’t want more people but the right people, and the right people won’t care for “What type of a blogger super-hero are you?” kind of stuff.

I write for business owners who are serious about improving their websites and appreciate straightforward actionable feedback.

That’s why I created an online quiz with 20 questions and results that could make you cry called “How good is your homepage?” (you can take this quiz here, if you dare).

What? I can’t tell you your website is great when it obviously isn’t, and it’s time you faced the truth.

How do you think it performed?

If I was into the typical “let’s stuff as many people as possible in a sales funnel” approach, I would say it failed miserably.

It didn’t go viral, and after 3 weeks it brought me whooping 9 new subscribers.

Good thing I’m more into reverse funnel paying individual attention to every single person who engages with me and my website.

From all my existing subscribers, 14% completed the quiz and 1 in 3 also downloaded the detailed results. They got ultra-actionable tips on improving their websites and I, a lot of detailed information about their pain points (hello, new shiny content ideas!).

The new subscribers also didn’t disappoint. They turned out to be serious people with serious websites who seem to be almost twice as engaged as my average subscriber (based on 4 newsletters they’ve got from me so far).

Some of them even took time to tell me in person they appreciate my advice.

The engagement from my existing subscribers and the positive feedback reassured me that the quiz was a good fit for my ideal audience, and that I just needed to up my promotion game.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you.

What can an online quiz do for your business?

…and how to create one that does the magic

Setting your “quizpectations” right

You must have heard that quizzes are the best when it comes to growing your email list.

But you should take it with a grain of salt, because:

The average conversion rate of quizzes is poor.

An average conversion rate of an online quiz is 5%.

If someone tells you the conversion rate of their quiz is substantially more than that, ask them how many conversions they had in general and laugh at anything below 200 sing-ups.

Which means you’ll get 1 subscriber from 20 people who complete your quiz.

Which means you need 2000 quiz completions to get 100 new subscribers.

Which is a lot of people for your small business website, isn’t it?

Even if your quiz goes viral, it may attract many poor quality leads.

People who’ll give you their email address just because they are curious what blogger personality type the are, won’t be automatically interested in receiving your weekly emails. They may not even remember who you are when they get your newsletter next week and delete it without opening.

So, those 2000 people for 100 new subscribers?

Make it a couple of thousands more if you want 100 subscribers who’ll also open your emails.

“Well, this sucks! Why would I bother with a quiz at all then?”

For many reasons, these 5 being the main of them:

5 ways an online quiz could be better than a well-researched blog post

A quiz tailored for your target audience:

• Is fast-to-create but still high-quality content for your blog and/or newsletter. You don’t even need to come up with new ideas. Just take an old post and create a quiz based on it.
• Has a potential of higher engagement when shared on social (according to stats, 82% of people who see a quiz in their timeline will take it).
• Gives you valuable insights on your ideal audience.
• Gives you many new content ideas.
• Is a long-term lead magnet attracting quality subscribers, although at a slower pace.

Just take my non-viral quiz, for example.

I now have about 100 answers around a small business website’s design, UX and copy. I know exactly how people are messing up their websites, and can offer ultra-specific and helpful advice.

Note: This screenshot shows not all the answers but only the answers within a particular quiz version. Whenever I changed something in my quiz and published a new version, the quiz builder I used automatically created a new quiz version and collected the stats separately. All the past stats were preserved, of course.

I created my quiz using Interact quiz builder, and they capture many relevant stats (more on this in a minute).

I also sent the quiz as one of my weekly newsletters and am planing to include it in my welcome email sequences for the new subscribers who didn’t take the quiz yet.

Plus, it’s now my main lead magnet on the homepage (I needed something more fun than a free download).

How to make a quiz for your website that will attract your dream prospects

Ok, let’s talk concrete actionable steps. Follow these six steps to create your own online quiz your audience will love.

Step #1: Define your goals

Before you get to creating a quiz, you need to decide what you’d like to achieve with it.

In my case, I wanted a lead magnet that:

• is more fun than yet another ebook or a free download
• provides valuable insights about my audience that will help me create helpful content
• puts only people on my email list who are serious about improving their websites.

So now you see why I needed the 20 quiz questions.

But you are not me, and if you are better off with a 5-question quiz with a sugar-sweet feedback, go for it.

Step #2: Select a type of quiz

If you create a quiz using Interact, it will offer you three different types of quizzes to choose from:

Every quiz type comes with some templates and type-specific in-built features. For example, a possibility to display the correct answer on the spot in an assessment quiz or assigning grades to the possible answers in a scored quiz.

You can either start creating a quiz from scratch or select from a number of templates – a short ready-to-use quizzes sorted by industry that you can also customize.

But regardless of what types of quizzes a tool offers, here’s how you decide what kind of quiz will fit your goals best.

#1: Entertaining, reach oriented

In Interact: Personality quiz

“I’d like to entertain people with some light content around my topic. I hope the quiz will get lots of shares to help me get my name out and grow my email list.”

Examples:

• What type of blogger / copywriter / photographer are you?
• What does your writing style / brand colors say about your personality?
• What type of cake / marketing super-hero / extinct animal are you?

#2. Impressive, aiming for quality leads

In Interact: Assessment quiz or Scored quiz

“I’d like to get new subscribers who also fit my ideal audience profile. But even if someone doesn’t subscribe, they should receive helpful information from their quiz results (I’m hoping to at least make an impression)”.

Examples:

• How good is your homepage?
• What should your brand’s colors be?
• Is blogging right for your business?

#3. Educational, helpful

In Interact: Assessment quiz or Scored quiz

“I don’t care if anyone subscribes. With my quiz, I want to give valuable advice to my existing subscribers / whoever comes across it”.

Examples:

• How much do you know about SEO / copywriting / content marketing?
• How many of these common spelling mistakes do you make?
• Do you know which of these vegetables contain protein?

Step #3: Maximize the chances for your quiz to succeed

Great, you’ve decided what you want to achieve with your quiz. This brings us to another important question:

How to make your quiz actually achieve these goals?

These three metrics will tell you how well is your quiz performing:

• How many people started taking it?
• How many people completed it?
• How many people opted in (if you are collecting emails)?

The greater these numbers, the better. Here’s how you can maximize them:

• Give your quiz an engaging title that also sets the expectations right from the start. More people will take your quiz with the right expectations, which will minimize the number of drop-offs.
• Show progress once people start taking the quiz.
• Include images that help understand what the quiz is about / hold people’s attention longer.
• Keep the number of possible answers to the minimum.
• Make the questions and answers succinct and to the point.
• Make sure it’s fast and looks great on mobile (Interact took care of this one for me, as the speed and interface of their quizzes on mobile is superb).
• Make the benefit of opting it crystal clear and valuable to your target audience.

Here’s an example of a question from my quiz:

Step #4: Decide how to collect the emails

So, you plotted and designed your quiz. But we still have one ultra-important question unanswered:

How should you collect the email addresses?

On one hand, as a business owner, you’d like to grow your list. So, not showing any quiz results unless people subscribe seems like good option.

On the other hand, imagine yourself in your prospect’s shoes. You took time to go through a quiz only to find out you need to sign up to get you results.

How would you feel?

I decided to offer at least some helpful information openly and told people if their homepage did well or not right away. Additionally, I offered the detailed results and additional tips in exchange for an email address.

And this approach seems to work, as the average conversion rate across all four result pages is currently 31.8% (based on 116 conversions).

I had to spend some extra effort on my result pages though.

I could have done the result pages within Interact interface integrating it with MailerLite with just a couple of clicks. But their built-in option doesn’t allow to partially display the results on the same page as the opt-in. I could only either completely gate the results or allow people to skip the opt-in entirely.

Luckily, Interact offers an option to manually add custom result pages. The only drawback was that now Interact couldn’t collect the opt-in statistics to put on their pretty graphs. I could still see the opt-in stats in MailerLite though.

Step #5: Get your quiz in front of as many people as possible

This is a tricky part. Remember the one million quiz story? It was a major company who used paid promotion to get the ball rolling.

Do you have extra cash? Then the paid promotion (Facebook ads, for example) is a great option.

Otherwise (or additionally):

• Feature the quiz on your homepage.
• Send it to your existing subscribers and ask them to share it.
• Put it in your sidebar making sure it’s the only “sparkling thing” that draws your visitors’ attention (and isn’t buried among a gazillion of images and colorful elements).
• Feature it at the end of the relevant blog posts.
• Include it in your welcome email sequence (but make sure not to send it to the new subscribers that you got via the quiz).
• Make it a pinned post on your social networks.
• Share it regularly on social.

Step #6: Analyze results

It’s important to analyze your results from the start and improve your quiz if you notice a problem.

I absolutely adore Interact’s analytics feature (unfortunately, not available within a free plan).

Not only do they show you the general numbers for “started the quiz” / “completed the quiz” / “signed up*”,

* –  only if you use the built-in results pages and not the custom results pages outside the quiz interface. Also “Views” is not accurate as you can’t exclude your IP and it will count your views as well.

…but you can also see where people are dropping off:

Plus, you can see the stats for every answer:

…and the results overview:

I’m happy with my 20-questions quiz. I’m now running a couple of A/B tests to figure out the best way to feature it on my website and will up my promotion game.

I also have a couple of older posts that are a perfect quiz material and may even create a quiz library my readers can use for self-evaluation.

Final words of wisdom

Every bloody article on the topic will tell you you need to stand out to win the content marketing game.

Yet, you don’t need to start a video channel or a podcast, or God know what else that only the businesses owners with extra cash, time or corresponding levels of extroversion can do to cut through the noise.

Just make a quiz.

Not many people do it, and even fewer do it properly.

I used Interact (they also have a free plan), but you can use any other quiz maker. Many of them are easy to use, don’t require any coding skills and allow you to embed your quiz on your website using a plugin.

It’s fast to make, it stands out on a website and on social, and you can even base it on an older blog post.

If you make it helpful, you’ll impress your prospects and gain new subscribers who will remember your name.

And if you design your quiz questions strategically, it will give you invaluable insights on your target audience and many new content ideas.

Or do you know any other content type that can help you achieve all of these things at once?

Exactly!