Using a quiz to grow your email list fast (using Interact quiz builder)
Have you done all the things to grow your email list: you’ve made a lead magnet or free opt-in, blasted about it on social media, blogged your little heart out … and still crickets? Are you so tired of hearing people say “the money is in the list”, but you’ve tried anything and everything to grow your own email list with little to no results? Girl, I got you! Today I’m going to teach you how to use a quiz to grow your email list fast, specifically using the Interact quiz builder.
I’ve had multiple questions over the past few weeks about my experience with using a quiz to grow my business (I’ve had 928 people through my quiz to date!), so I’m going to pull back the curtain on everything quizzes and share how I came up with the idea for mine, how I built it and it went live in just over 30 days, and exactly how much that little quiz has made me in actual income (because it’s made me thousands, and it can be tracked directly back to my quiz!).
Keep reading because I’m sharing my income results at the end, plus tons of ideas for how you can use a quiz in your health and wellness business (i.e. topics for quizzes).
Full disclosure: the software that I used to build my quiz is called Interact, and the links throughout this post are affiliate links. I rarely use affiliate links, but when I do, they’re for services and apps that I’ve tried, tested, and personally use, absolutely love, and have made my business easier. Thank you in advance if you end up using the Interact quiz builder and I get a small amount kicked back to me. 😘
Come follow along with me on the timeline from idea to launching my quiz to the world:
Quiz idea
I don’t know exactly how the idea for my Light Up Your Biz Quiz came to me, but like some of my other major income producing ideas (i.e. my Brand, Build, Blog course), it came to me almost fully formed.
I had an idea for a quiz that would help people determine what kind of wellness business model is for them based on their personality: 1-1 client work, online courses, or network marketing.
After spending 4 years in network marketing at that point, but also starting my business with 1-1 client work and then building several successful online courses, I had experience in all three, and I knew that each of those three ways had their own pros and cons that worked best for certain types of personalities.
I’m a keen observer with a huge attention to detail, and I could just see the commonalities between many of my network marketing friends, and then separately in my online course maker friends, and then lastly in those people who I knew were killing it at 1-1.
I brought up the idea for my quiz to my mastermind group that I was working with at the time, wondering if they had any experience in quizzes and if they thought it was a good idea. The leader of the mastermind actually said she doesn’t recommend quizzes, as she thought people take way too long to get them set up with the complicated software.
Hearing that made me re-think my idea, but in my gut, I knew I was onto something.
I had no idea how to make a quiz, but when ideas like this come to me, and my heart and my gut say DO IT, I just figure it out.
I sent a Voxer message to a fellow wellness entrepreneur and online course creator explaining my quiz idea, and she was like “Uh, YES, you need to make that!”. I asked her for a referral to someone who could help me set up the software (because now I had it in my head that quiz software was complicated), and I was off to the races.
I sent an email to Shaina at Dawn & Delight Creative on December 27th to see if we could chat about my idea and if she could help me.
Discovery meeting
Shaina and I met on January 4th to discuss my quiz idea. She recommended the Interact quiz maker app right off the bat, as it was the easiest quiz builder on the market and could be embedded into any website. I had never even heard of Interact, but when she said it was easy, I had a little bit of hope that maybe this would work.
I decided to hire her on January 10th, and we were off to the races.
Write the quiz results & questions
Shaina taught me that in the Interact quiz builder, it’s easiest to come up with the results first, then design questions that lead to those results.
On the morning of January 10th, I sat down to write the quiz content. By the end of the day, I had written:
the in depth explanations for each of the 3 quiz results, including what they should focus on and do next
all 10 questions, each a multiple choice with 3 options, each one ideally leading to one of the results
A really cool part about using the Interact quiz maker is that you can have one option lead to multiple results. So if you ask a question and it could apply to one, two, or all of your quiz results, that’s no problem! Interact takes care of all the scoring for you and spits out the right answer.
For example, here’s how I wrote a question for Shaina to input into Interact:
Notice how the last option could apply to 2 different results.
Here’s what the question and answer correlations look like within the app itself (which makes my visual learner heart happy). See how the last option leads to two results?:
Most of the questions only have one corresponding results, and the back end looks simpler, like this:
Write the quiz sign up page copy
It doesn’t matter how amazing or accurate your quiz is if no one signs up for it.
After you spend a ton of time talking up your quiz on social media or to your existing email list, they have to have somewhere to take the actual quiz, and that’s the sign up page.
The sign up page has 2 functions:
To sell them on the fact that they want to take the quiz (and it’s right for them).
To house the actual quiz so they don’t have to click anywhere else to take it. More clicks = less people taking action.
I wrote half the quiz sign up page on the afternoon of January 15th, and I must have run out of energy because I finished it on the morning January 17th.
Design the sign up page & visuals
Website creation secret: you start with your written content, and then build the website around that. Now that my sign up page copy was done, I could get to the making it pretty part.
I designed the quiz logo and sign up page by the end of January 18th.
Shaina had also let me know that there were “landing pages” for each of the quiz results, so I made images for each one to accompany that page. #alwaysbranding
Here’s the Light Up Your Biz quiz landing page as it stands today (the button at the top skips someone directly down to the bottom where they can start the quiz, this is called an anchor link):
Set up the quiz in Interact
By the end of January 18th, Shaina had input the quiz questions and results into Interact, and we were able to test it through a preview to see if it worked.
What I was getting confused with was where and when was I collecting emails for people taking the quiz?
It turns out that Interact totally knows what they’re doing, and have set the quizzes up so that people can start answering the questions right in the embedded quiz on any website, and it asks for their email at the end, before they give the results.
Think of how you’d feel after answering 10 questions and you desperately want to know your results. Of course you’d enter you email! You’d probably stop to think if you even wanted to take the quiz at all if you had to enter it at the beginning.
It’s natural that some people aren’t going to want to give you their emails, but for me, my all-time data since the quiz came out shows that 76.6% of people completed the quiz (i.e. gave me their email) after starting it. Yay!
After knowing how the emails were going to be collected, we had to play around with the landing pages for the results.
I thought that the full results were given right away after their email was entered, but if you use the built-in result landing pages from Interact, they’re very small and don’t allow for a lot of text.
Also, I needed to follow double opt-in laws, which requires that people click to confirm that they want to join my email list before I can legally send them any more emails (and their result details).
I didn’t want them to see their results before they had confirmed my double opt-in, otherwise there’s no incentive for them to confirm their email, so we had to figure out another path.
What we ended up doing was setting up a landing page for each result using a cover page in Squarespace. We put that website URL into the results settings in Interact, so it automatically re-directs them to those, where I let them know that they’ll get their full results after they receive the first email and click to confirm that they want them.
Here’s the landing page (each page was exactly the same except for the image on the left and the heading at the top with their result):
Having to follow double opt-in laws sucks, I’ve lost 127 quiz participants since early 2019 who have never confirmed they want their results, but some of these were also probably lost if the email went to spam. This is just a part of doing business legally!
Write the education email sequence
As with most other parts of business, the fortune is in the follow up.
To me, it’s great offering a fun quiz that people can take, and they’re likely to stay email subscribers for a certain amount of time. However …
If you want to create real, lasting income from a quiz, it means you need to educate people about their results so you can show them that you’re an expert who can help them solve their problems.
This is the super boring, totally unsexy part about owning a business. The work that actually creates income is rarely the fun Instagram post and stories, but the automated education and systems you have set up behind the scenes.
However, it’s oh so worth it when you see sales coming in automatically for work that you did months or years ago!
On January 24th, I sat down and wrote a 4 email autoresponder sequence for each result that was triggered when someone took the quiz.
The first email gets sent immediately, and that contains the in depth breakdown of their results. It describes WHY they got that result, and then lists their unique path to grow their business easier.
In this first email, I set the expectation that I’d be sending them several more educational emails over the next few days, with this paragraph:
Over the next few days, you’ll be getting some emails with amazing resources to teach you how to create an online course. There are specific steps to follow to make sure that it’s successful … rather than becoming something you spent months creating, only for it flop in sales.
Then, over the next 3 days, I sent one email a day linking them to one of my existing blog posts that educates them about something on that path.
At the point of writing these email sequences, I had 35 amazing and jam-packed blog posts on my website just sitting there collecting dust, and I wanted to use them.
I made sure I had 3 blog posts that could specifically help each result, and bam, I was instantly reusing my content (some of the posts were years old by that point!) to hundreds of new email subscribers.
Now comes the important part: in the very last email, I invited them to opt-in to the lead magnet for my paid online course, which then sends them through that sales sequence.
No matter which result they got, having a website would help each one, and I fully believe that my course is the go-to resource for learning how to DIY a pretty & profitable wellness website.
If they chose to keep learning, great, I was sending them more valuable education! And if they didn’t, no worries, they would continue to get my emails newsletters that I send out a few times a month when I write blog posts.
Sometimes the last thing you feel like doing after creating all those other quiz assets is write several different autoresponder series, but this last 10% of the work will create most of the income for you, so you tell me if it’s worth it to push through or not!
Test the quiz
On January 28th, Shaina embedded the quiz software onto my quiz landing page, and she and I both tested it by taking the quiz ourselves.
The results were accurate, the autoresponder emails fired off just fine, and we were ready to go!
Launch the quiz
So here’s the truth: I sometimes suck at launching stuff.
Like most business owners, I put all my time into energy into creating something, and don’t leave much in the tank to launch and market it.
However, I knew that this would be something that would be open year round, and it wasn’t like a product or course launch where there’s an open and close cart situation, so I was OK with it.
I launched the quiz super quietly on Instagram (cross posting with Facebook) with a single post, as well as some stories:
At the time, I had just under 1,950 followers on Instagram, and that post resulted in 70 website clicks, 6 new follows, and was shared 21 times to other people’s stories.
The best thing is that I had 137 people take the quiz BEFORE I even sent it out to my email list. I’m not entirely sure how many of those 137 people were brand new email subscribers (I’d have to manually go look up each one of them!), but I will say that my email list grew by 8.51% for January, which was well above my average monthly list growth by at least 3%.
On February 6th, I sent it to my email list, but those wouldn’t count as new subscribers since they were already on my list. However, this would help my current email subscribers to continue to see value and learn from me, preparing them for my paid offerings.
I also mentioned it in another Instagram post on February 6th, the same day my email went out to my list, which resulted in another 4 website clicks.
How to continue to get new email subscribers from your quiz
Like I shared at the very beginning, I’ve had 928 people take my quiz so far in just over a year since it launched, which means the majority came AFTER I launched it. How do I keep marketing it?
Well, the smart thing to do would be to mention it every so often on social media, which of course I forget to do.
The only thing I do to market my quiz is that it’s linked up on my navigation bar under the freebies option, but I also set up a Promotional Pop Up in Squarespace directing people to the quiz page.
This pop up feature is included for free on any Squarespace website that’s using the Business plan or above, and it’s very customizable.
I have my pop up to activate only on my home page, about page, blog hub, blog posts, and Instagram landing page, and only when someone has been on my website for more than 30 seconds.
The quiz is also linked up from my Instagram landing page (I made a special page on my website that is linked up from my Instagram profile, kind of like a free, more beautifully designed version of LinkTree or similar service), although this button is almost at the bottom, so I doubt that’s a big driver of traffic.
I probably had it in the announcement bar at the very top of my website at some point, above the navigation bar, but I can’t remember that much detail from the past year and a half.
I turned off my promotional pop up when I redesigned my website in early 2020, and definitely saw my email subscribers go down. When I turned it back on, email subscribers have increased, so for me, it’s the pop up that does the heavy lifting on autopilot!
Income created from my quiz
Alright, now we get to the good part, how much income have I generated from people who found me for the first time through my quiz and became email subscribers because of it, and eventually customers?
Believe it or not, after every launch of my Brand, Build, Blog course, I go back and track every single customer to see how they first joined my email list.
In my BBB launch of April 2019, a few months after launching my quiz, I generated $3,226 in course sales from people who first opted in with my quiz. Since the quiz didn’t launch until January 31st, that means that each person spend $500+ with me after first joining my list not even 3 months before that.
In November 2019, I generated $2,657 in course sales from people who first opted in with my quiz.
That means my quiz has helped generate at least $5,883 in one year (2019) for my business, and I haven’t even looked into evergreen sales of my course (it’s available year round, if you didn’t know, not just during launches) or any other paid offers.
I use the Lite version of Interact that costs me $204 US per year, which worked out to just under $250 Canadian after the exchange rate. Hiring Shaina cost me just over $200 Canadian (she did 2.5 hours of work).
Total, all in costs to set up my quiz was $451.97, and I estimate that it took me less than 25 hours of work.
Why does a quiz work for generating income?
When you provide follow up education, and provide it for free, people tend to trust you more. And when people trust you, they buy from you.
Not only that, but you can use a quiz to help people decide which of your offerings is best for them. If you have a DIY course, a group program, and a high-end VIP offering, there’s 3 results that you can recommend your quiz results on, based on what they’re looking for, their issues, and their budget.
Quiz ideas for your health business
Ok, ok, enough about me, I’m an idea machine when it comes to creating quizzes for growing your email list and business.
I've created a cheatsheet with several ideas that you can use for your own health and wellness business.
For everything from nutrition to essential oils, skincare to detoxes, there’s an idea in here for you.
Take these base ideas, tweak them for your own expertise and paid offerings, and you can have your own hugely successful quiz up and running (following the steps above) in less than 30 days!
JUST FILL IN YOUR INFO BELOW TO GET THE “QUIZ IDEAS FOR YOUR WELLNESS BUSINESS” CHEATSHEET!
I hope that this case study was helpful in showing you the potential of using a quiz to grow your health and wellness business.
If you’re interested in trying out Interact to build your quiz, I’d love for you to use my affiliate link by clicking here (but no worries if you don’t, I still love you!).
