What Are Quiz Funnels?
What do you hate the most about being an online service provider? For me, it’s the sell. Using a lead generation magnet to draw out a prospective client’s email address feels like pulling teeth to me. How many times have you been presented with teasers like “Ten Ways to Film a Reel Using Your Foot,” or “How to Find Enneagram Three Clients,” or even “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”? Did you feel that little edge of being pushed, something similar to when you last bought a car?
Until quite recently, I knew little about how quizzes are used instead of a lead magnet, and this is surprising because I use them all the time as a consumer, as I’m sure you do as well. Think about those questions you’re asked when paging through a site and deciding what hair color is right for your coloring. That’s a quiz. What foundation is likely to match your skin tone? Again, a quiz. What’s your management style? You get the idea.
Let’s leap to the seller’s side of the experience and break down the characteristics of the mechanism and its nature. Starting with a basic funnel, not unlike the one rolling around in a kitchen junk drawer or capping a half empty oil container in your garage, except it’s a virtual funnel that’s meant to collect and direct. Your prospective customers dive into it from all the platforms you use to tell the world about yourself, your business, and your products — platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook, and even your website.
Just like the slippery funnel you use to add oil to your car, every funnel has a top, middle, and bottom, and instead of watching the sludgy liquid slink down to exit at the base, a virtual funnel is built to keep your prospective customer’s attention and encourage engagement all the way through to the final sale at the very bottom. The most effective funnels use messages that are simple and repetitive. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? However, staying on target reduces any confusion for the customer.
Funnels exist as a well-traveled path that keeps the customer following along — no veering to either side. An ineffective funnel leaks, and that leak happens when the prospect leaves the path.
A leak might be an unclear message, or possibly the steps along the way aren’t connecting properly. As a result, your prospect leaves out of irritation or disinterest. Regardless of the quality of the funnel, each prospect follows the same path, is enticed in the same way, receives the same message, and, in the end, often buys the same product. Do you see a problem?
The elephant in the room is the assumption that customers interested in what you offer are homogenous.
An intelligent variation of the funnel exists, however. A quiz funnel is a kinder, more considerate funnel. Imagine your prospective customer. She’s invited to take a quiz, which, in most cases, leads her to learn a little more about herself or some topic of interest. What is your management style, for example? The quiz funnel is kinder because the customer decides to take the quiz and share her email. Based on the outcome of her quiz experience, you, as the seller, will have accumulated enough information about your prospective customer to personalize an offer as well as her email address.
A good quiz brings added value to your marketing efforts in several ways. Quizzes generate interest. You take a quiz and learn more about yourself, then share it with a friend to see how she compares. The results are endlessly fascinating because they reveal insights about ourselves and where we fit in society. Additionally, the results can be segmented so that each pool of prospects will contain people who provided similar responses to the quiz questions. One more side effect of quiz funnels is that the business owner walks away with highly converting leads and a way to connect with their audience (by email) that isn’t dependent on Instagram or TikTok’s platform. Do you remember #instagramdown?
Yes, hiring a quiz funnel builder is more expensive than just hiring a copywriter for a sales page, but the relationship between the two is synergistic. To create a quiz, the builder researches the same information that a good copywriter would use to write a sales page. Because research is often the most time-consuming and expensive part of preparing to write a sales page, copywriters often package quiz funnels and sales pages together and even sequenced emails. The information gained from customers taking the quiz also provides insights into how they think and how you can reach them.
In the end, making the most of the expensive research that went into preparing the sales page by adding a quiz is basically a two-for-one deal. Combining the two is also more profitable for the copywriter. With several excellent platforms out there that help build quizzes (Interact, Thinkific), a copywriter can focus on research and writing the copy for the quiz rather than building the quiz’s structure.
It’s often that last 5–10% of effort that changes a “meh” launch of an online course or product into something grand. Giving the launch that last push is where the quiz funnel process shines. Are you surprised that the return on investment when using quiz funnels is $14 for every dollar spent? Yeah, I know! Additionally, most lead generators have a 20–25% opt-in rate compared with a whopping 65% opt-in rate for quiz funnels. Where else are you going to find these kinds of hard and soft dollar benefits?
Instagram: @lyndacathcart.copywriter
