So you’ve built a following on Instagram. Your audience is highly engaged with you – commenting, reacting, DM’ing you, it’s great. But there’s this nagging feeling of uncertainty about what would happen if the algorithm were to shift tomorrow and instead of 1000’s of reactions it dropped to 10’s. That’s not a good feeling.
One way Instagram creators are negating this issue is by using quizzes to generate leads and get people onto their email lists where they own the communication medium by having direct access to people’s inboxes. Quizzes are a highly effective medium for conversion, with an average conversion rate of 85% for Instagram quizzes. But, there are a specific set of steps that must be followed for your Instagram Quiz to be a success. Here they are.
Step 1: Start with the top question your followers ask you in your DMs.
This is the question that people DM you the most. The thing that people want a personal response from you about. It has to be something that has some nuance but not too much. In this guide I’m going to demonstrate using Advice With Erin’s Career Aptitude Quiz because she was gracious enough to share her methodology with us and share the lead generation numbers, so we know it’s a great quiz.
What Erin said on the Interact Podcast is that she got the idea for her quiz based on the DMs that people were sending her over a number of years. Everyone had the same general question which was “Am I in the Right Career?” It was such a pervasive question that it prompted Erin to create a Career Quiz to help people find the answer.
Step 2: Tabulate your answers to the top question based on your experience.
Analyze your conversations with people in your DMs. Look at how you respond to them when they ask you the question that’s the heart of your quiz. I chose the word “Tabulate” because it really is like a counting method, where you look at the whole set of answers you typically give people and then rank them by category or general similarity so you can create groups of answers. Typically quizzes have somewhere between 4-8 different outcomes, and there’s a pretty set method for creating the quiz results to maximize engagement and conversion after the quiz taker completes the quiz.
Step 3: Ask questions to figure out which answer is right for each person.
Question asking is an art and science. The art piece is how you ask questions that get people to answer, we have data on that. The science piece is asking questions that help you accurately predict which quiz result is right for the person taking the quiz. Most Instagram quizzes use personality quiz logic to give a reading at the end. It’s very simple and straightforward. For more advanced cases you can use branching logic, which lets you specify every specific route through a quiz so you can be super precise with what you show people at the end.
Which one you choose and how you create your questions depends on what you actually need in order to give people an answer to the question posed by your quiz. The top Instagram quizzes are simply an automated version of the conversations happening in your DMs that people ask you all the time. Stick to that as your north star to maximize the success of conversions to your email list.
Step 4: Ask quiz takers for their email as a trade for more detailed help with their question.
The best way to maximize conversions at the end of your quiz is by asking people if they want additional help with the question that brought them to your quiz in the first place as a trade for giving you their email address. If you do that, and it’s a compelling offer, then you can leave the opt-in form optional, which keeps your list health strong, and still convert 85% of people who reach this form on average.
Interact quizzes integrate directly with the top email softwares people use, Kit, Flodesk, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, Beehiiv, Mailchimp, and more. See the full list here. You can also segment your new leads based on which quiz result they get and based on how they answer particular questions so you can send unique follow-ups to people or add them to segments or lists so you can let certain groups of people know when you have new products or offers that are relevant to them without having to email your whole list every time.
Step 5: Promote your quiz as a post or reel and add it as an option to your link in bio.
Promote your quiz using your normal style of post. You can focus on the question presented by the quiz, or you can highlight the different results of your quiz, prompting people to take your quiz and find out which one applies to them. You can also add your quiz to your Link in Bio so people can take it when they click on your link.
How well do Instagram Quizzes Convert Leads?
People often want to know how well quizzes convert to leads with traffic from Instagram. So I ran an analysis to see what the average conversion rate is for top quizzes that are promoted primarily on Instagram.
70% Start Rate: Of the people who click on a link to start a quiz from Instagram, either from a Link in Bio or from a ManyChat automation, 7/10 will start the quiz on average.
77% Completion Rate: Of the people who start a quiz after originating from Instagram, 7.7/10 finish taking the quiz, spending approximately 3 minutes on average engaging with the quiz.
85% Opt-in Rate: Of the people who complete a quiz after clicking on it from Instagram, 85% opt in to become a lead, even though 50% of the quizzes in our study have a skip option available. Meaning that people are actively choosing to opt in, rather than just opting in because they have to.
