Erin McGoff, founder of Advice With Erin, created a quiz for her audience and within six months it brought in 140,000+ subscribers to her newsletter. Erin’s quiz is excellent, and it’s not alone in being a quiz that creates dramatic list growth of highly engaged subscribers. Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin and her team said that quizzes are one of their top drivers of list growth and subscribers who come through their quizzes are highly engaged.
On average, high quality quizzes convert to email subscribers at a rate of 40.8%. When we started Interact back in 2013, we were blown away by how engaging a well positioned quiz could be. Now, with over 1 Billion quizzes served through the Interact platform, the numbers have held steady for more than a decade.
But some things have changed over time. And in this article I want to highlight the great work that Erin did on her quiz because it represents the new standard in quality for building an email list using a quiz.
Start with What Your Audience Cares About
The first and most important aspect of creating a list building quiz is to make it about a topic your audience really cares about. Erin told me on our podcast that her audience cares to know if they are in the right career, and many people in her audience have this pervasive feeling that their career just isn’t quite “right” and it’s something that has been persistent, with millions of people asking her the same question over and over again about being in the right career.
I recently analyzed data from 40 million quiz views to see which “hooks” got the most clicks. Here’s that report. In a nutshell it all boils down to what your audience actually cares about. Nothing else matters for the concept and messaging of your quiz idea.
Ask connecting questions
The right quiz questions build connection because they make people feel seen, but also signal that you understand them well enough to be super helpful to them. Here’s a write-up on quiz questions, but the general guide here is that you want to ask the exact questions in the exact way you would to a real person in real life in order to find them a helpful answer to the thing they care about, which is what your quiz is about. The right number of quiz questions to ask for basic logic quizzes is 13, and for branching logic is 7.
Offer additional value when you ask for the email address at the end of your quiz
Asking for someone’s email is a whole new level. You can’t assume that people want to join your email list just because they wanted to take your quiz. Yes, they are primed and more likely to join your list if they have taken your quiz, but you still want to offer additional value if they choose to join your email list. With Interact, your leads can go straight to your email list of choice, we directly integrate with top newsletter softwares like Beehiiv, Kit, Flodesk, Mailchimp, and more – full list here. Oh, and please leave the opt-in optional. It’s better for everyone to give your quiz takers a choice, it makes them feel empowered, and it starts the relationship off on the right foot. No one wants to be coerced into giving up their email address just because they have a sunk cost of time from taking your quiz. Give them a good reason to opt-in, then let them make a choice.
Educate and reassure in your quiz results
Your quiz results should be connecting, educational, and geared towards conversion. You want to make your quiz takers feel safe with their result, not judged. Then you want to provide personalized education to them based on their particular outcome. Then, the conversion piece, which is a further action the quiz taker can follow based on their result, comes as a helpful piece of advice rather than a sales pitch.
Follow up with more immediate value
There is an inverse relationship between how long something takes and perceived value. So follow up right away through email, and give lots of value. You can segment leads through Interact into your email software, so you can give personalized value right away.
Should you make a quiz for email list growth?
I’ll give you a straight answer, because Interact is a subscription service and if you build your quiz on Interact and it doesn’t work out for you, you will cancel and it’s not a good experience for either of us. So I would say build a quiz if two things are true.
- You have an engaged audience: Meaning you have people who already engage with your content, send you DM’s, ask you questions, read your content, watch your content, listen to your content. Quizzes are a great conversion tool to move people onto your email list, not so great as an audience-building tool. They rarely put you in front of new people unless you already have an engaged audience who then shares your quiz with their friends. So quizzes don’t take you from 0 to 1 but they can be helpful in taking you from 1 to 100.
- You know exactly what your audience cares about. The whole concept of a quiz will fall flat unless you know with precise detail what your audience cares about. You need to be spot-on with this or else all your hard work with your quiz will be a huge nothing burger.
Hopefully that’s helpful. I want to save you time (and money) on a quiz subscription unless you feel confident about those two things being in place. If they are in place, then run, don’t walk, to create your quiz, it can change the trajectory of your business forever, and I’m saying that with 100’s of people in mind who I know personally have seen their businesses altered dramatically for the better after implementing a quiz.
FAQ on Email List Building Quizzes
Common questions that come up when people are thinking about implementing a quiz for email list growth.
How do I promote my quiz and get my audience to take my quiz?
Add a link or button prominently on your website and in your link in bio. These are the places where people take your quiz when they click on your website or link in bio to learn more about you, the quiz is a great way to build that first level of connection when people are curious to learn more about you. Promote your quiz explicitly through creative social media posts about the quiz. Promote the quiz through partnerships and PR by partnering with relevant media publications in your space. Full details on promotion are here.
Are there particular industries where list building quizzes work the best?
There aren’t particular industries where quizzes work best, but there are particular types of audiences who respond best to quizzes. The type of audience that responds well to quizzes is the introspective type that wants to work on themselves. In cases where people in your audience want quick answers and instant solutions, quizzes typically don’t perform well because there are faster ways to getting what they want than by taking a whole quiz. Quizzes work really well when you have an audience of curious self-learners who desire to grow as people.