Your email list is an asset you own. It accrues value over time, like an investment earning interest. People on your email list might warm up over 1, 2, or 5 years before purchasing from you. Or you are selling ads against your engaged list size and the more people on your list the more you can charge.

In this tutorial I want to go through how you can move your followers onto your email list using a quiz.

There are two primary types of quizzes read through and them and choose the one that comes easiest to you. Over time people typically employ both types so there are no wrong answers for which one you start with.

The first thing to do in creating this type of quiz to get people on your email list is to ask yourself what your followers are always asking you about. Let's say you talk about healthy eating, and people always DM you asking what kind of diet plan would work for their individual needs. Or you talk about tech and people always write in asking you what kind of tech they should get for their needs.

Everyone I talk to lights up when I ask them to think about what questions they get asked on a regular basis. So if you can take a moment here to think about this and determine what it is your audience asks you about that would be great.

For example, we work with Salary Transparent Street, they talk about jobs and salaries. People always ask them "Am I underpaid" so they made a quiz that answer that question.

If you can answer questions that you know for a fact people ask you all the time, then you don't have to worry about "Is this a good quiz" or "Will people want to take it?" because you know they want to know the answers to the question.

Then the pressure is off of trying to make it a compelling quiz. Which is a huge conversation I have with customers all the time. There is this fear that you'll work really hard on a quiz and then no one will want to take it. Which is a very legitimate fear because it happens all the time. But 100% of the time when someone creates a quiz that 0% of people want to take it's because the quiz does not tie back to an actual need of the audience.

The other pitfall to avoid here is the way you frame the question of the quiz. Sometimes there are questions you know the audience has, because they ask you in person, or during calls, but then you realize that your audience only notices that they have that question once you are talking to them and prompting them to uncover the question.

Your quizzes need to address questions that your audience are very aware and conscious of. Even if it might seem overly simple because you know that the real question is something deeper, you have to start off simple.

If the first prompt isn't ringing any bells for you, then the second option is to think about what frameworks you use in your business. For example, we work with Gretchen Rubin, and she has "The Four Tendencies" as one of her NYT best selling books. The Four Tendencies are a framework through which she can help people think about their live, and therefore through which she can be helpful to her customer.

Frameworks go by many names. Archetypes, personalities, ideal paths, ideal careers, ideal products, basically anything where there are multiple types of people and based on the type of person you have a recommendation for how they can get what they want.

Importantly, the quiz is still about getting your audience to what they want or need. You are just using a framework to get them there. This is often the case when your audience is not problem aware, meaning they don't know they have a specific problem and you have to guide them to the issue. They do know that they are a person, and it's interesting to them to learn more about themselves. So you use the framework to help them learn more about themselves, then tie their outcome back to ways that you can be helpful to them.

Most people never make it past this point. Writing quizzes seems to be the achilles heal of human beings. In 15 years working on quizzes I've seen it come easily to less than 10% of people. So don't despair if the thought of writing a quiz makes you want to stare at a blank wall for 8 hours instead.

We have support for you. If you are like "no way I am ever writing my quiz" then no problem, book time with me here and we can get it done for you. If you are like "challenge accepted, let's do this" then please read on.

I'm going to break this down so we know what we're working on. There are functionally five parts to writing a quiz from front to back.

For this tutorial I am focusing specifically on quizzes being used to move people from followers to subscribers, so the advice is unique to that use-case. There are other ways people use quizzes, like for engagement or segmentation, and those have different instructions, although it's not super different. Quiz strategy is kind of always in the same orbit.

Below is a picture of the perfect quiz cover page. The page has a title that's written in text. Then the quiz itself is embedded on the page. Then below that there is a description of the quiz.

Why do it this way? Let me tell you the reasons why.

Note: If you are already saying the name of the quiz and describing it on another page, you can embed the quiz on the cover page starting from the first question.

Once you've got an idea for your quiz and the page setup for it. The next step is to create your quiz results. These are the answers to the question you promise to answer in your quiz if you're doing a question answering quiz. Or they are the outcomes of the framework if you're doing a framework style quiz.

Group your answers to the question posed in the question answering quiz into results. You may have to bunch some together, but you can also have lots of different answers. The only real difference is how much work it takes to create all the results.

If you are making results that group things together, just make sure you leave the language of how you write those results somewhat broad while also being specific.

Here's an example from the "Are you underpaid?" quiz which perfectly gives a result. It answers the question and also provides more resources for the quiz taker to continue learning.

I'm using framework because it best encapsulates all the types of quizzes you can make following a framework. But I'm really talking about a quiz where you assign people to a type based on who they are and what they want. You'll want to define your different types as the results of the quiz.

Speaking in second person, using "you" language, you can tell the person about their result and what it means for them.

Here's an example from a style quiz by Next Level Wardrobe. The outcomes are different styles and my style is "Edgy." there is a well crafted description and a button for me to follow along on Instagram so I can see more style inspiration.

The purpose of quiz questions is to determine which result is right for the quiz taker. You can also mix in segmentation questions as needed. The right amount of questions to ask is the amount of questions you need to ask in order to figure out which result you would recommend to the quiz taker.

This holds true whether you are creating a question answering quiz or a framework quiz. And the way you ask the questions should always be the way you would ask someone in physical life, as if you were talking face to face.

There are various types and methods for asking questions that all sound very fancy like psychographics and profiling and personality, but at the end of the day, you want the quiz to very obviously be intended to help the quiz taker get what they want. Whether what they want is an answer or what they want is self discovery to get them to a broader answer.

Stay true to what you know about your audience and the way they like to be asked questions and the way they like to talk about themselves.

You can ask quiz takers to opt-in to get their results, or you can make it optional, or you can not ask. It's your choice and depends on what works for you. In most cases people are asking for an email address in their quizzes. Keep it simple. The purpose here is to ask people if they want to join your list and to let them know they don't have to stay if they don't like it.

The emails can integrate directly with your email marketing software, and segment based on which result someone gets or based on how they answer any particular question of your quiz. Overall the goal here is getting people to go from follower to subscriber, so once they're on your list the real work begins, with sending personalized emails once someone chooses to opt in.

Once someone opts-in through your quiz, you can send them a series of personalized emails. And this is where you should overdo it. People expect that they'll opt-in and then get a mediocre follow-up since you've already got their email.

Surprise them with an in-depth analysis of their result, with more follow-up emails that are personalized to them, and impress them with the level of expertise you can demonstrate after the fact.

The best quizzes have a series of follow-up emails, sometimes spanning months. Quizzes are very high on the memory index, people really don't forget their quiz result, so the more you can reference it and continue to follow up with personalized emails based on their result, the better.

Put your quiz in all the places where people might be going to learn more about you. You can add it to your link in bio like this.

To your website like this

Make a LinkedIn post about it like this

Make an Instagram post about it like this

Generally, every place where people are clicking to learn more about you, have the quiz there as an option. Every place people might go to DM you with the question that your quiz answers, offer the quiz there.

You can swap out the quiz on a regular basis, then create a hub where you house all the quizzes you've created so people can see them all in one place. Quizzes can be seasonal, specific, broad, narrow, it doesn't matter. As long as they address something that is on the minds of your audience. They will work to transfer people from follower to subscriber.