Reality Check: 'Build a Quiz in 5 Easy Steps' Just Isn't Going to Happen

Are you as tired as I am of headlines like these?

• Five Easy Steps to...
• Three Simple Techniques to...
• Effortless Ways to...

Because it's never as 'easy' or as 'simple' as they say it's going to be, is it. And it's certainly never 'effortless'!

The other day I was doing some keyword research, and I plugged 'how to build a lead magnet quiz' into Google. I was flooded with search results that told me I could build a quiz in 5, 4 and even 3 easy steps. Yeah, sure.

I've built dozens and dozens of quizzes, and I don't know if I'm doing it completely wrong, but I haven't learned the magic trick to building a quiz funnel in 3 steps!

So, I'd like to set the record straight.

Why?

First, because quizzes are a lot of work and I want anyone who is diving into the world of quizzes to be ready. I know plenty of people that have gotten half way through putting a quiz funnel together just to thrown in the towel because they were not prepared for the amount of work involved.

Second, because when you are aware of the amount of time and energy something is going to take you, you can go into it with the right expectations, even outsourcing some of the work or using templates to make the work easier.

So let's dive in:

The Eleven (yes, eleven) Steps to Building a Lead Magnet Quiz Funnel

1. Set Your Quiz Goals

The first step is to determine what your quiz goals are. Too often people skip this step all together. 

How will your quiz fit into your business goals? Will you add some research questions into your quiz, and if so, what will they be? How will you segment your list and then what's your plan for segmented marketing? Will you use your quiz to suggest specific products or services? And also tied into this is determining what kind of quiz you will build - is the goal just list building right now? Or are you getting ready to launch? Or is this going to be an in-program quiz?

Until you've made these decisions, you don't want to move into any of the quiz creation or else you will be building a quiz that is not going to have the impact you want it to have on your business.

2. Come Up With Your Quiz Topic

The second step is to narrow down your quiz topic. In considering your quiz topic I want to think about your ideal quiz taker, the transformation you want to give them, and how your quiz will lead your quiz taker to your offers.

3. Determine Your Quiz Results

After you’ve got your topic nailed down, the next thing we look at are your quiz results.

I know it seems a bit bizarre to talk about results first because that's not at all the order in which we take a quiz. When we take a quiz, we learn about the quiz topic first, then we go through the questions and answer them, and then we get our result. But when we write a quiz, it's so much easier if you have your results figured out first, if you know what the results are going to be when you come up with a question, then it's really simple to come up with the answers to fit into each of the results. If you were to come up with the questions and answers first and then the results, then you've got a bunch of answers that you need to try to kind of fit into the results, and they might just not fit.

A few other best practices when thinking about what your results are:

• The magic number for results is 3-5; less than 3 then all you’re doing is splitting people into 2 groups, more than 5 and it means you’re making a lot of extra work for yourself - extra quiz reports to write, extra email sequences, and down the road, extra segments to market to.
• Everything needs to be connected. Of course they need to relate to your quiz topic, and they should be a part of the journey towards your offer.
• Also, think about how your results will make your quiz taker feel - the whole point of your quiz is to make your quiz taker feel heard and understood. And you also want your results to make your quiz taker feel positive and encouraged. So even if you have a quiz that has a results that are a rating, like a low medium high, you don't want someone that gets the lowest rating to feel bad about it. The way you word it still needs to be positive, still needs to be encouraging about what the next steps are.

4. Come Up With Your Quiz Question and Answers

Now comes the fun part - developing your quiz questions and answers.

The magic number for questions in a quiz is between 9 and 12 (not including your opt-in question). Any longer than 12 and you might start losing people.

I want to talk about 4 different kinds of questions that you can add to your quiz:

The first are your bucket questions - these are the primary questions that make up most of your quiz. These are the questions that you use to map out to your results.

Next we've got the research questions - these are the questions that I mentioned earlier when I was talking about gamifying your data collection. These questions are slipped into your quiz just for you to gather information about your audience. You don’t map the answers to your quiz results. The key thing to note here is that you need to make sure that your quiz platform has the analytics to show you the data that you’re collecting. Anywhere from 2-3 research questions is great.

Then we've got journey questions - the purpose of a journey question is to make sure that your quiz flows. Sometimes you need to add an extra question to end it nicely, or to bridge between two questions. Journey questions aren't always necessary though. These also aren't mapped to your results.

And the last type of question is your opt in question. You have options about when to ask them to opt-in - before you give them their results, after, or even after they get a teaser result, but before you give them their full report.

5. Map Your Quiz Questions & Answers to Your Results

After you’ve developed all of your questions and answers, you need to take your buckets questions and map them to your results. This is where the quiz magic happens. This is how you get the overall quiz results.

Different quiz platforms have different ways of making this happen. The below image is a screenshot from my favourite quiz platform Interact. To map each question's answers to the results, you will have the answers here on the left, and you just match them up with the results that they correlate with on the right. It's really simple.

You do this for every single bucket question that you've got and then the quiz platform takes care of putting your quiz takers in the right overall results based on these correlations.

6. Write Your Quiz Reports

Now, this we are getting to the harder parts - writing, designing and (possibly) recording your quiz reports. This is what you provide to your quiz takers to explain what their results mean, not just the definition of their results, but how those results are impacting them. And also how you can help.

This is sometimes the part of the quiz process where quiz builders start to run out of steam.

But it’s also the most important part of the quiz to your quiz takers, so you need to keep going. Your quiz reports, whether it’s a PDF report, or a video, or even other resources that you send to them - an audio file, a personalized playlist, whatever it is that you’ve developed that is specific to each result - this is what you provide to your quiz taker to start their transformation. And it’s also what demonstrates to them that you are an expert in your field, or that you are a trusted source to them, you are that support that they’ve been looking for.

7. Write Your Quiz Email Sequence

And once your quiz reports are done, you still have more writing to do, because you want to put together a great email sequence to welcome them into your world. I don’t care if it’s 3 emails long or 14.

Your welcome email sequence is so important. For one thing, you want to deliver your quiz report or resources to them and encourage them to use it. You just spent a ton of time putting the report together, and you want to make sure that they are seeing the value you are giving them.

Also since new leads are most engaged within 48 hours of subscribing, this is your opportunity to really wow them.

And of course, your welcome email sequence is the natural continuation of your quiz takers journey towards your offer.

8. Set Up Your Quiz Funnel

The next step is building your quiz funnel. This is where you put it all together. Build your quiz in your chosen quiz platform. Make it look good by adding images and ensuring the quiz styling is consistent with your branding. You make sure the copy of your quiz all sounds great - the title, the promise, the questions and answers. You might rearrange the order of your questions a few times to make sure everything flows nicely.

Some people then embed that quiz right into their website, making sure the landing page it's on looks great.

And then you want to make sure everything is connected - that when people give you their email address, that it will indeed does what you want it to do - that the right automations are set up for segmenting and to get them into the right email sequences.

9. Test Your Quiz

And once you’ve got it all set up it’s time to start testing and tweaking. First, of course you test the tech - run it all a few times making sure to get all results to make sure that they are all connecting fine.

And then send your quiz to trusted contacts to have them test the quiz experience - not just the tech, but also ask them to test the flow of the quiz, how the questions and answers feel. Is it too long (or too short)? Did they enjoy the quiz? Is anything confusing? Did they get the result they expected? Are there any typos or other errors? Do they think the order of the questions are right? Ask them for their honest feedback and make changes if you agree.

But, also remember that a quiz can always be tweaked on the fly, so don’t expect (or wait) for perfection.

10. Launch and Promote Your Quiz

Finally, let’s launch and promote your quiz!

Get your quiz out into the world and promote it anyway you promote any of your other offers. Put it on your website, promote on social media, even run ads to it if you want. Ask your business pals to send it out.

And don't just promote it a few times. Set up a regular promotion schedule for your quiz.

Also, this is where you get to pat yourself on the back, because you did it!

11. Optimize Your Quiz

Now, we're not quite done. After it’s been running for a few weeks or even a couple of months, you can do a few things to optimize your quiz.

By taking a look at the analytics of your quiz you can consider what you can change if you want higher conversion rates.

The rates you want to look at are things like - how many people viewed your quiz and then started it. If it’s less than 35%, then you might want to do something to your cover page to entice more people to take your quiz. And then look at the number of people who started your quiz and the number of people who completed it. I’ve been told that 45% is good, but I think that’s wrong. For every one of my clients, this conversion rate is more like 65-75% .

Luckily, it’s super easy to change things in a quiz, even on the fly. You can make little changes to the cover page to make it more enticing for people to start your quiz. If you find that want more people finishing the quiz, you can look at what questions people are dropping off at, and modify those - see if they’re confusing, or if the answers are too long. You can change the order of the questions all together. If you’d like more people opting in, you can change the language you use in the opt-in form. Using your quiz analytics, you can see exactly at what point in your quiz there is some friction for your quiz taker so that you can go in and fix it.

There you have it! 11 Effortless Steps to Building a Quiz! 🤣

If building a quiz seems like a daunting task to you, then let me help! I've got everything you need whether you are a DIYer, or someone who just wants to pass the task off.