Are you struggling to generate enough top of funnel leads to keep your sales funnel flowing?
Don’t worry, you are not the only one.
5 years ago, many websites offered info products such as ebooks, webinars, white papers and all kinds of exclusive content in exchange for an email address (what most consider a top of funnel lead).
these tactics worked a charm and to an extent they still do, but today everyone and their mother offer these kinds of freebies.
It has become a lot harder to convince people to give their email address in exchange for an e-book.
Or, people use a fake or secondary email address they keep for just these type of things as most inboxes are already receiving enough emails as it is.
Nowadays you need something else to really stand out from the competition.
But what could that be?
Introducing the lead generation quiz
Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital was struggling with the same question.
She runs an agency specialized in social media and digital marketing training and like many others, they offer info products.
They were performing okay, but over the course of several months, she saw fewer and fewer leads come in.
And the leads she was getting, were declining in quality.
She needed something new.
That’s when she and her agency came up with a lead generation quiz called the “Digital IQ Test”.
Short versus long form
Actually, Boot Camp Digital offers two kinds of IQ tests. The short-form test has 15 questions and the long one has 64 questions
Pop quiz: Which quiz performed best do you think?
Turns out the long quiz outperforms the shorter version as the IQ test with 64 questions had a higher conversion rate.
Someone who takes the time and the effort to take the long test is more likely to give their email address because they are more committed and interested.
How does a lead generation quiz work?
The idea is simple, have people fill in a couple of questions that measure their knowledge on social media and digital marketing and give them something valuable in return.
They used this test for two reasons:
- Your digital IQ is directly linked to your appetite for training, their core business. If someone takes the time to take the test it generally means that they are interested in learning more about digital marketing.
- It helps people to get a better understanding of their skills. In general, you have 2 types of people, those who say “I know absolutely nothing”, but that’s a small group. And then you have a lot of people who say: “Oh I understand everything.”
But as the saying goes “the less you know, the more you think you know”.
The nice thing about the digital IQ test is that it helps people see both the areas that they know and those they don’t know. This helps them to get a better understanding of their skillset and we can use those insights to encourage them to join our training programmes.
Krista chooses to make leaving an email optional.
Odd, isn’t it?
She believes that those who give their email addresses yield a higher quality and have a higher chance of converting to paying customers. And as a bonus, it removes a lot of fake emails or low-quality leads.
However, to entice the respondents to give their email address, they added a discount coupon for their training courses as well a rapport of their results for those who do leave their email address.
But why use a quiz to generate leads?
Using quizzes in your marketing strategy is still one of the most underrated types of content.
Especially since quizzes are amongst the most shared types of content on the internet?
Actually, 2 of the top 10 most shared posts on Facebook in 2017 were quizzes. And they work wonders for lead generation as well as for discovering your audience’s needs and preferences in an interactive way. People are more likely to participate in a quiz than to engage with static content or fill in a contact form.
On top of that, interactive content such as quizzes generates twice as many conversions as static content.
As a company, you learn more about your audience so you can promote relevant products or services, based on their quiz results.
How do you promote quizzes?
Like most content, you can’t just create it and be done with it. In order to make it a success you need to actively promote it. There are multiple ways to get as many relevant eyeballs as possible on your quiz.
- Organically
Underpromoting your content organically is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make. With a pure organic strategy, you can convert and attract new customers for free.
That’s what everybody wants, right?
Jaiya, an internationally recognized, award-winning sexologist, came up with a similar idea. Her interactive quiz is called the ‘Erotic Blueprint’.
The quiz helps people discover and talk about sex and their sexuality. The quiz has been up and running for less than a year and brings in, on average, 5,000 new leads each month with peaks that go as high as 20,000 leads. Thanks to it’s high ranking in Google.
- Paid advertising
Krista experimented with paid advertisements but it became very expensive very quickly. Because they don’t require an email address, they look at their cost per click and then they convert that to their cost per conversion. It becomes a costly way to obtain email addresses because at the end of the day a lot of people prefer not to share their email address. So the ROI isn’t there.
- Via social sharing
By sharing the average score you can benchmark it, like “here is how you could be doing” and promote your courses and training.
Another way is to break it down in categories, so people know how they scored on SEO vs Social Media vs Online Advertising. That would make it more interesting and valuable.
What happens after you’ve collected the email address?
What should you do once you’ve got a lead’s email address?
Like Krista, you can easily use the results to segment your audience. When people complete the test, they receive a personalized outcome based on their score.
Here’s how Krista did it:
People who didn’t score well on the test receive a novice or beginner badge. Boot Camp Digital encourages them to do certification or acquire an all-access pass where they can really learn everything they need to know to get more confidence and better results.
People who score well on the test receive an intermediate or advanced badge. They already know a lot about digital marketing but there is always room for improvement. They can take advanced classes or join expert groups to keep them up-to-date with the latest trends in digital marketing.
There’s always room for improvement.
For the future, Krista is looking to send a personalized report with an analysis of all digital marketings aspects and how a participant performed compared to the average or benchmark to their respondents.
Krista would like to focus more on promotion. This would not only make the digital IQ test a more effective tool from a lead generation standpoint by giving people something new and interesting. But they could also reach people outside of their website and their existing funnel which would make this tactic a home run.