How to Increase Conversion Rates with a Lead Generation Quiz

When your website visitors leave without purchasing anything or subscribing to your email list, chances are they won’t visit you again.

So how can you ensure they feel engaged and have a reason to come back?

A lead generation quiz can help you achieve that (and so much more!).

What is a lead generation quiz?

At their core, lead generation quizzes are simple – they consist of a series of questions and multiple-choice answers. When your visitors go through the quiz, they self-diagnose their current situation.

Here is an example of a quiz by Birchbox, monthly beauty subscription service:

Using those answers, you can provide your customers with the next best course of action for the moment.

In the case of ecommerce quizzes, for example, the results will involve some sort of curation of products.

The quiz itself can evaluate several things depending on the type of products you offer. Here are some of the most popular directions:

• 🏄 Lifestyle
• 💇 Hair, body type or face shape
• 👗 Style preferences
• 🏋 Fitness level
• 💡 The current pain point that your products can relieve

… and there is much more!

At their best, ecommerce quizzes are fun and engaging. At their worst, they still provide a curated experience for your online shoppers.

In other words, there is no reason not to try lead quizzes.

Why are lead quizzes effective for ecommerce marketing?

When done right, quizzes are a powerful marketing tool for your ecommerce store. They can both help you gain new email subscribers and convert subscribers into buyers.

Let’s see how exactly they work.

Convert more website visitors into email subscribers

The goal of your ecommerce website should be to retain as many clients as possible. If they don’t buy right away, preferably they should sign up for your email list.

Otherwise, there is a high probability they’ll never visit your store again.

Although there are many ways to collect email addresses from your website visitors, lead quizzes are the most engaging one.

When taking a quiz, visitors are no longer just passive viewers of your site – they’re directly interacting with your brand by answering your questions.

If you can make this experience a positive one, this can increase brand loyalty.

Remove analysis paralysis

If you have a ton of products displayed on your home page – especially awesome ones – visitors can get overwhelmed.

As a result, they may end up buying nothing – being stuck in analysis paralysis and unable to make a choice.

That’s right. Sometimes, having too many options is not so great!

With quizzes, making a choice becomes easier for customers.

Instead of showing your visitors every single product you have, you can curate a list of products based on their quiz results. This means they will only be seeing products that are relevant to them instead of having to sift through the stuff they most likely won’t want.

Obtain valuable data about your subscribers

Thanks to the analytics available in most quiz creation tools, you get a powerful source of data for every subscriber who takes it.

Yes, you will know their specific result, and that’s already pretty sweet, but most tools will also allow you to break down quiz results by specific answers, too.

This means you can add any type of data point you want on your lead generation quiz. Do you need to know age groups for your buyers? Ask them about their age!

So while quizzes can create short-term gain by engaging new visitors and providing them with curated products, their true power lies in the long-term. This leads to my next point…

Supercharge your email marketing

Now equipped with so many data points, you’ll be able to create ultra-targeted email campaigns.

Most lead quiz creation tools allow you to ask for email addresses before giving the results. That means you can map your subscribers’ answers to your email marketing tool.

Let’s say, you’re planning a flash sale. You could send an email that contains specific items that you know your subscribers will like based on their quiz results – instead of blasting everyone with the same products.

And as you probably already know, the more targeted your emails are, the more likely your subscribers will click through and start shopping.

How to write your own lead generation quiz

Let’s break down what makes a quiz effective and how you can write one for your own ecommerce store, section by section 📝

1. Create an enticing landing page

The landing page is the first piece of content your visitors will see before they decide to take your quiz.

Capture their attention with an enticing promise and don’t overwhelm them with unneeded information.

Most lead generation quizzes have their own squeeze pages, but if you decide to host it on your home page, the same principles apply – keep it simple and give a promise.

Below is Function of Beauty. Their entire website experience starts with the quiz because they offer a custom hair solution. Their promise? You’ll get a set of shampoo and a conditioner that is as unique as you.

But you don’t have to redo your entire website and business model to accommodate a quiz like Function of Beauty did.

For instance, Zenni Optical embedded their quiz on their Face Shape page:

The quiz itself has its own landing page, too. This one has a clear promise – you’ll find your most flattering glasses once you’re done.

2. Craft entertaining questions

Each question in your quiz has one core mission – convince your quiz takers to continue to the next question.

Your questions provide the opportunity to express your own voice or your client’s voice to create unique content that entertains or fascinates the target audience.

Every question needs at least one purpose:

• Provide insight on the quiz taker
• Entertain and boost engagement
• Categorize the quiz taker

If your question accomplishes none of the above, either change it or skip it.

For example, Zenni Optical uses a fun quiz to increase brand awareness and website traffic.

This question is meant both to entertain (via the use of fun GIFs) and get insight into the quiz taker’s potential style of glasses.

Adding images or gifs to your questions is a good idea to break up the text, too.

3. Write insightful results

The results are, without a doubt, the heart of your quiz. They are your chance to prove to your visitors that you get them and that you can help them move from where they are now to where they need to be.

Each result page can contain three possible sections depending on your goals:

1. Insight on the quiz taker’s current situation, whether this is their best feature or their biggest struggle.
2. The biggest roadblock or pain point that they need to improve or overcome.
3. The first step towards achieving their goal – this should be actionable advice they can act upon right away, or a list of curated products that are right for them.

Note that no matter what, Step 3 is a must! If you leave your quiz takers with nothing to do, they may not take action at all.

You can keep your results page short and simple, but the more in-depth you go, the more likely you’re going to strike a nerve with your new leads.

For example, let’s bring back Function of Beauty. Once you finish their simple quiz, you’re directed to your custom shampoo and condition, and you are given the option to choose additional custom products before you continue.

When you continue, you’re automatically directed to the checkout page.

It’s simple, it’s friction-free, and it serves their purpose. Sometimes that’s all you need!

In other cases, some brands prefer to give a form of guidance before directing their leads to a shopping page. Below is one of the results page for Zenni Optical:

Once you click Shop Now, you’re presented with more info about your face shape and a curated set of products specifically for your result.

Zenni also has another quiz to help you choose the best style for your glasses – I mentioned it earlier in this post. Notice how the results for this one are more detailed and less product-oriented:

Still, as you can see, they include a link so that you can start shopping looks based on your style.

4. Create targeted email sequences

You can do an amazing job on the quiz itself, but the money is in the follow-up.

Now that you have the rich data that comes from taking a quiz, you can follow up with your new leads using targeted email sequences. This is your chance to warm them up and nurture them to know, like, and trust your brand.

This is always a great opportunity to follow up with curated products that may be right for them depending on the answers they gave.

You can create a short sequence of three to five emails, or go all out with a 30-day, once-a-day mega sequence.

It all depends on what you want to accomplish and what type of relationship you want to build with your future buyers.

However, you should use your new lead insight to funnel people to relevant products instead of sending the same sales sequence to every new lead.

Here are a few starting points:

• Go deeper into their results with insights that weren’t provided on the results page
• Give them a relevant offer, like a coupon off a curated item you think they might enjoy
• Drip curated content from your blog or podcast
• Share relevant stories, either from yourself (or your customers), or success stories/product reviews

In other words, keep the content relevant to each person’s results and answers.

How to drive traffic to your lead quiz

Even with the best-written quiz and email sequences, your quiz won’t work if no one sees it.

If your main website is already getting tons of organic traffic, make the quiz easy to reach. That doesn’t mean you have to redo the entire website to make the quiz central – you can just add a banner and footer without changing anything else.

If you don’t want to embed the quiz on your site, you can use Getsitecontrol popups, slide-ins, or floating bars to bring attention to it.