How to use Quizzes for your Marketing Strategy
Just think about it: would you rather read a long guide to choosing wines or play a one-minute quiz to define your favorite wines? The quiz option is more appealing because it takes less time and has that element of interactivity.
Although quizzes may look silly, they’re actually an amazing marketing tool. A quiz is much more engaging compared to most content types, and it can generate leads faster.
Just think about it: would you rather read a long guide to choosing wines or play a one-minute quiz to define your favorite wines? The quiz option is more appealing because it takes less time and has that element of interactivity.
In this post, we’re gonna be looking at five major ways to use quizzes in marketing strategies.
1. Increase Website Engagement
People land on a web page, browse it for eight seconds and leave. That’s called the bounce rate, and it’s one of the biggest problems in ecommerce. A high bounce rate of 50% and higher - meaning that 50% of visitors leave almost immediately - is a sign for Google that the website isn’t delivering, content-wise.
Quizzes can help to increase engagement and make people stay longer. A fascinating quiz can capture the attention of a visitor anywhere between 30 seconds and a few minutes, making them stay. Besides, a quiz can encourage you to browse more pages by displaying them in results (product or blog pages.)
2. Build an Email List
Quizzes can help with lead generation. It’s very simple: ask for an email just before displaying quiz results—for example, to keep the user updated on a similar topic or send the results to them directly.
This strategy can be powerful for relevant omnichannel marketing. Take this quiz from Bright Cellars below as an example. It offers the taker to provide contact information to view wine matches based on their answers.
This way, the business can collect hundreds of emails on autopilot, as quizzes run automatically.
Source: Bright Cellars
To get as many emails as possible, the quiz must be engaging and interesting for the visitors. Marketers recommend using the insights and findings from customer research to define topics and questions your target customers might find worthy of their attention and time (and email!).
3. Increase Sales
That’s right.
Quizzes aren’t just for having silly fun or studying something along with flashcards. When done well, quizzes can help ecommerce stores sell. Look no further than the Bright Cellars’ quiz we saw in the previous section.
Throughout the quiz, the user answers seven questions about their preferences in wine, tea, and food—that’s how one defines what kind of wine a person should like. Since Bright Cellars is—yes, you guessed that right—an online wine shop, the creators of the quiz turned the results into a product page.
Here’s how it looks like. Based on the answers, Bright Cellars recommended Syrah, a type of wine that goes well with the user’s food preferences. There’s a “checkout” button to finish the purchase and even a discount timer to induce a sense of urgency.
Source: Bright Cellars
Another cool thing about this quiz results page is the “Don’t like Syrah?” button. It reduces hesitation and makes the product even more personalized by giving extra product options.
If a customer clicks this button, the website automatically switches to another product and characteristics without leaving the page. That’s an excellent move to keep the customer focused on making the sale and going the extra mile to help them find the best product.
4. Write Better Blog Content
Coming up with engaging blog topics to promote a business can be quite challenging. Keyword research can help, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. After all, the best input about content creation always comes from customers.
Quizzes can be a tool to get that input. Each question is an opportunity to learn something about your target customers’ preferences and interests, which can give ideas for content.
Take this tea drinker quiz from Art of Tea as an example. This question asks the customer about their preferred tea drinking time. Let’s choose the second answer about morning.
Source: Art of Tea
Now, let’s head back to Art of Tea’s blog to find some content around this specific answer. The company surely have analyzed the results and found that many people like us prefer morning to sip the delicious drink.
What do you know, finding the related content on Art of Tea’s blog is easy.
Here are just a couple of blog articles around the “drinking tea in the morning” theme. They even have links to the same teas, along with an explanation of why they are perfect for that time of day.
This article talks about the tea for the morning commute. One thing: it mentions the Bright Eyed tea as one of the recommendations.
Source: Art of Tea
This next article gives a review of morning teas for students. It also mentions Bright Eyed as one of the good options to try.
Source: Art of Tea
This way, the business is driving traffic to product pages. The blog educates customers and makes them more confident in buying, while product pages do the rest.
If you decide to give quizzes a try, study the results for potential content topics. You’ll be able to produce more relevant and useful content for your customers and build a reputation as an expert in your niche.
5. Re-Engage Passive Customers
Quizzes are interactive and engaging, so they can help activate the customers who haven’t been interacting with your content for a while.
Livestrong.com, for example, has recently used this quiz in the weekly newsletter. The headline is quite eye-catching and relevant (three out of five Americans feel lonely, according to recent surveys).
Source: Livestrong.com newsletter
You, too, can create a product-related quiz to share with customers and re-engage them. Like Livestrong.com, try to mention the time commitment in advance to help customers manage their expectations (“Take this two-minute questionnaire...”)
Share quizzes via as many marketing channels as possible to re-engage more customers. The must-do channels are email newsletters and social media.
Quizzes for Marketing: Final Thoughts
Quizzes aren’t just for fun or exploration - they’re a legit way to collect leads, increase website engagement, build email lists, and sell more. When done right, a quiz can make a lot of difference for a digital marketing strategy regardless of the niche.