How to Grow Your Email List with an Interactive Quiz Lead Magnet

Looking for ways to grow your email list? An interactive quiz lead magnet is a high-converting way to engage your audience and incentivize new subscribers to join your list.

Sometimes the entire idea of opt-ins and lead magnets can be overwhelming, but in this case it’s actually super simple: your audience can take an online quiz via your website, and then join your email list to see their results. You can deliver tailored content to their inbox, while building an engaged email list audience.

If this is your first lead magnet: great! A quiz will be an easy and effective way to start building your email list. It’s much easier to create a customized quiz than to design a branded PDF, so a quiz is great place to start.

If you already have an opt-in (like a downloadable PDF), that’s great too—you’ve already taken the first step in building an email list. But here’s the thing about opt-ins: you don’t have to stop with one! You can create multiple opt-ins to generate more traffic from different audiences. Multiple opt-ins is a strategic way to build your email list with diversified leads.

For example, here are a few of my opt-ins:

• The Color Story Library (performs really well on Pinterest)
• 100 Daily Affirmations (performs really well on Pinterest)
• Build Your Brand Workbook (performs best via Instagram)
• Quiz: What is Your Creative Strength? (performs well on Pinterest and Google search)

You can see that these opt-ins target different audiences on different platforms, diversifying the audience on my email list.

Even if you are targeting a very niche audience (which can be a smart strategy!), it’s smart to diversify the format of your lead generation. Some people are eager to sign up for a free download, while others are more likely to take a quiz.

I like to use an interactive quiz in addition to more traditional “free download”-type lead magnets. Having a variety of lead magnets helps me reach a wider audience and grow my list with diversified leads, rather than putting my eggs all in one opt-in basket.

Why should you use an interactive website quiz as a lead magnet?

Online quizzes are high-converting lead magnets: They’re fun to start… and irresistible to finish. From the very first question on a quiz, people get invested—and then they have to find out their results!

My “What is Your Creative Strength” quiz has a 70.6% lead conversion rate. That means 70.6% of people who start the quiz join my email list and start receiving my email marketing nurture sequence.

This quiz also has a 94.7% completion rate (!!). That means that even the people who do not choose to opt into my email list upon completing the quiz are still being redirected to view their results on my website. Once they’ve landed on my website, they are in a dedicated space to experience my brand and the resources I have to offer. They usually click around, browse through my services, and start to establish a know-like-trust factor with me). Many of those people then choose to opt into my email list after browsing around, helping me grow my email marketing funnel that way too.

All of this happens in the background on a totally automated workflow; I designed this quiz in 2019, and it continues to generate new leads for me almost every day. You know how much I love to see evergreen content at work!

But the benefits continue even after new subscribers join my list…

How can online quizzes improve your email marketing strategy?

Quizzes can also be a smart way to segment your email list, based on the quiz results. The quiz questions can give you information about your audience, like what industry they work in or what stage of business they are in. These clues allow you to segment your list and tailor your email messaging to that particular audience. You can create marketing strategies for each segment, delivering relevant content that leads into your services.

Here are some examples of quizzes that would easily convert into pre-segmented email lists:

– What type of [fill in the blank] are you?
– What stage of [fill in the blank] are you in?
– What’s your [fill in the blank] personality type?
– What’s your [fill in the blank] style?
– Which [fill in the blank] is right for you?

Quizzes like these will give you valuable information about your audience: it’s not just about helping them uncover their Brand Style or Stage of Business… it’s about using those insights to tailor your communication with that segment of your list.

For example, you might learn via quiz results that someone is in the very beginning stage of their business—which means they probably aren’t ready to invest in your highest offer quite yet. You can tailor your email marketing to meet them where they are: free resources that establish trust and credibility, or a lower value offer that feels like the right fit for their season in business. You’ll save the highest offer for a more established client 😉.

How to start using online quizzes to build your email list:

• Sign up for Interact
• Design Your Quiz
• Publish Your Quiz on Your Website
• Market Your Quiz

1. Start by signing up for Interact:
   They’re the best for creating interactive online quizzes! You can start for free, but I recommend the Lite version if you want to include opt-in functionality and build your email list (so worth it).
   
   
2. Design your Quiz.
   Now it’s time to create your quiz. I recommend thinking about the end results first: what are you trying to find out about your audience? You can even match the end results to your services: each result corresponds to an ideal client for one of your services.
   
   For example:
   Result A: Beginner in Business → DIY Shop Product at $99
   Result B: Emerging Creative Business → Low-Level Course at $349
   Result C: Established Creative Business → Core Service at $2400
   Result D: Thriving Creative Business → Highest Value Offer at $7000
   
   It’s easy to work backwards from here, coming up with questions that fit each “type.”
   
   What does your average weeknight look like?
   Result A: Beginner in Business → Up way too late, but I need the caffeine to get my side hustle off the ground!
   Result B: Emerging Business → Resting up before a busy day tomorrow: my to-do list is a mile long!
   Result C: Established Business → Taking time off: I think I’ve finally started to figure out this work/life balance thing.
   Result D: Thriving Creative Business → Enjoying a glass of wine while my business runs itself in the background.
   
   You can check out this blog post to get more ideas for quiz questions.
   
   
   
3. Publish Your Quiz on Your Website.
   Embed your Interact quiz on your website and hit publish!
   
   You can also create customized pages for each quiz result. You don’t have to do this, but it is a great way to deliver valuable content to your audience in a customized setting and share more about your services (here’s an example of one of my results pages!). Just make sure this is a “hidden link” if you don’t want the page to show up on Google.
   
   
   
4. Market Your Quiz.
   It’s time to start driving traffic to your quiz page! I highly recommend Pinterest as a free, organic way to drive traffic from new audiences. You can do a deep dive on that here in my Pinterest blog post.

Need help? Interact has a blog post that will walk you through every step of this process, from creating your quiz and displaying results to setting up your email segments:

I hope this post is helpful in sparking some creative ideas for lead magnets that can be engaging for your audience, and effective for your brand!