This guide is based on a 10-year empirical study of quizzes that have reached 1 Billion+ people and generated over 100 million leads. My name is Josh Haynam, I'm the co-founder at Interact, and I've studied quizzes for over 15,000 hours. This guide, which is about the length of a book, is everything I know about what makes a great quiz.

If I told you every mind-blowing story about the engaging power of quizzes we'd have several volumes, so I will sprinkle in stories as appropriate in this guide. But to tease a few big wins from quizzes. I've seen:

We created Interact because we saw how unfair it is that big companies are able to use machine learning algorithms to make personalized recommendations to their customers and get more sales as a result. Meanwhile small businesses who cannot afford to hire engineers to create those algorithms have missed out on the power of personalization.

Quizzes offer a simple but sneakily powerful way to provide a personalized, engaging experience to every customer, all the time. Personalized experiences, like what a quiz can offer, are highly engaging because it's all about the person taking the quiz. They also work exceptionally well. With an average conversion rate of 40% from quiz taker to lead.

I hope you can take in the information in this guide. It's a compilation from the absolute best marketers and psychology experts in the world. Together they have created quizzes reaching 1 billion people, which is no accident. Let's get into it.

Image: Gretchen Rubin

There are three ways businesses turn quiz marketing into dollars.

1. Increased Sales Revenue. In the case where you sell your own products and services, a quiz will move people from audience member to product or service purchaser. By audience member I mean someone who follows you on social media or visits your website. The quiz acts as an engagement tool to capture the attention of that person, then moves them through a quiz funnel to where they are subscribed to your email list and make a purchase from you.

Image: Salary Transparent Street

2. Increased Sponsorship Revenue. In the case where you make money by selling sponsorships and your business is ad revenue funded, a quiz moves people from your audience to your email list. Meaning from social media followers and website visitors to email subscribers. As your email list grows due to people taking your quiz and opting in, you can charge higher prices for your sponsorships. Quizzes are an excellent way to move people from your audience to your email list without eroding trust because a quiz helps your audience get what they want. It can also build your email list, but that's secondary to providing your audience with an excellent experience where they are getting what they want first.

Image: Advice With Erin

3. Increased customer engagement. In the case where you make more revenue by increasing customer engagement and therefore retention, quizzes are an excellent strategy to keep customers in good graces and wanting to continue paying you. Customer engagement quiz strategy starts with knowing what your customers are thinking about and then addressing their thoughts, fears, worries, and questions related to your business with quizzes.

Image: Direct Energy

4. Increased SEO traffic and discoverability. Quizzes are a great way to rank in search engines and AI chatbots because people actively search for quizzes. People search for quizzes because everyone is constantly in search of more information about themselves. So you can think of it as people are searching for answers to their inner questions when they search for quizzes. If you have a brand with a strong reputation, then you create quizzes that show up in those search results, you have very very little competition.

Most of the results when someone searches for a quiz term will be from websites that create quizzes for fun, and don't have the brand reputation and authority that you have in your domain. So there is virtually no competition, and if you do some quick research for quiz search terms in your industry you will quickly see that there is not much competition.

Here's an example from Gretchen Rubin who created an excellent habits quiz. The overall search volume for terms related to "Habits quiz" is north of 1,000 per month, and Gretchen's quiz ranks #1 for the term.

Here's what Anne Mercogliano, the CEO at Gretchen Rubin Media had to say about quizzes and SEO.

“Quizzes are one of our most powerful discovery features for people to find Gretchen’s body of work. Within a month of launch we are seeing that they consistently are in our top 10 SEO drivers to our site and a huge drive of our list growth as we see quiz takers consistently stick around and become engaged readers of our Newsletter.” – Anne Mercogliano: CEO at Gretchen Rubin Media

So not only are people finding the brand through SEO due to the quizzes, but those people are opting in to the email list, and staying engaged. That's how SEO is supposed to work, and it's beautiful to see it in action, and huge props to Gretchen Rubin and her team for making great quiz experiences that effectively move people from the search experience to becoming part of her engaged audience.

A quiz is quite possibly the most intriguing content format. The over-arching reason quizzes are so popular is that they are conversational and the focus of the conversation is the quiz taker. As a person browsing the internet, a quiz offering to talk to me about me is so much more interesting than if the same topic was formatted in another way. So that's one huge win right out of the gate. But there are two other factors that really drive home the power of quizzes.

People take quizzes because of two very core human desires.

1. To learn about ourselves

2. To see how we measure up

3. To connect our worldly experience to our inners selves

Those two have evolutionary levels of self interest. We need to know ourselves in order to reach our maximum potential in life. And we need to know how we measure up in order to make sure we can survive.

Now that might seem like a lot, and you're thinking "I thought we were talking about quizzes, now this is some Squid Games type stuff?" and that's a fair reaction. But I'm pointing out the level of seriousness with which quizzes address human needs because it's not good enough to just make something that's "fun" or "silly." When it comes down to it you need something truly foundational behind your content if it's going to move people towards action. And you need people to move towards action if your quizzes are going to move the revenue dial for your business.

Here's an example of a quiz that helps people learn about themselves, from Jenna Kutcher. I want to point out two additional things here based on her description of this quiz. Quizzes also have these aspects.

1. People know their group. Everyone wants to be part of a group. It makes us feel safe and helps us understand our place in the world.

2. People know how they stand out. At the exact same time as people need to be in a group, we also need to know how we are different, special, and unique. Because a quiz groups people into set outcomes, but then also points out what is unique about you based on your quiz answers, you can accomplish both of these deeply human needs.

Courtesy: Jenna Kutcher

The second example to highlight here is from Harvard Medical School. They have an Immunology Quiz that tests your knowledge. People who care to know that they are experts in Immunology take this quiz because they want to know where they stand today and how they can improve. It's a natural instinct for people to want to improve, and that's a beautiful thing. But if you can't measure where you are today you can't improve. So this quiz helps you gauge where you stand today.

Courtesy: Harvard Medical School

Another reason why people want to take quizzes like this is more subtle. It's because there is a sub-text telling the quiz taker that once they take the quiz they will get a more personalized experience for learning the subject. That's because if you're an expert already you won't be given the beginner guide so you can save time and it's a more tailored experience. Or if you are a beginner it will give you the easy version of the material to start out.

You and your business are experts in your topics. People coming to you are at all different stages of their learning journeys, a quiz signals to that person that you'll make sure to offer them a great experience where the learning is unique to where they are today, not just throw the book of knowledge at them and say "good luck!"

It's impossible to truly talk about quizzes without getting into psychology and Carl Jung. The connection between psychology and quizzes is as follows.

"Man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need—or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge—to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events." - Carl Jung

Jung was from a different time, so he's using masculine pronouns to represent all people. But the point here is that he uses the words "irresistible urge" to describe people's desire to connect their outer experiences to their inner worlds.

In other words, people can't resist when a quiz offers to help them make sense of something that happens to them in the world, based on their own inner world.

Here's a real-life example from The Sorority Nutritionist. This quiz offers to help you uncover why your weight loss is a hot mess. It's not "Why is it hard to lose weight?" in general, it's "Why is it hard for you to lose weight?"

Courtesy: The Sorority Nutritionist

Here's another approach to this from Atlassian. They ask "Are you an effective leader?" Which again personalizes the topic and makes have the irresistible urge to uncover how your outside experience as a leader connects with your inner experience and who you are.

Courtesy: Atlassian

The principle still applies if you move over to the E-commerce world, with product recommendation quizzes. It's once again the irresistible urge to connect the outside world to your inner world. A quiz like the following "Which Flair Espresso Maker is Right For You?" accomplishes this by taking something you care about in the world (Espresso) and connecting it to your inner world (Which one is right for you?)

Courtesy: Flair Espresso

People always ask me what they should know about quizzes. If there's one thing you should take away from this entire article about quiz marketing it is this point. People take quizzes because they are looking to connect their worldly experience with their inner self. You have to help people connect with the quiz topic by personalize it to who they are, what they know, how they show up in the world. If you do not do that, and you just talk at people through your quiz, it will fail, 100% of the time.

Now let's flip over to your goals as a business owner. It's great that quizzes are so helpful and appealing to quiz takers. It's great that you can help people discover more about themselves and solve their problems using your quizzes. But, you have a business to run, and you have to make money.

Quizzes contribute directly to your bottom line by building your email list and selling your products and services. The way a quiz persuades people to join your email list or buy your products is through the principle of reciprocity. In the landmark book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini points out the reciprocity is the most powerful method of persuasion, and humans throughout history have felt the need to reciprocate when someone does something for them. It's such a powerful driver that it cuts through every culture and tradition from the beginning of time.

So how does a quiz use the power of reciprocity to convince people to join your email list and buy your products when they have a million options available to them? By helping your quiz takers get what they want. It was Zig Ziglar, who said "You can get anything in life you want by helping other people get what they want." So if you want to get more leads and sales, you need to identify what your audience wants, give it to them, then ask for their email and to buy your products in return.

Let's look at an example from Man for Himself, a men's fashion brand that has content as well as products for sale. One of their quizzes is a men's hairstyle quiz. If you are a man, you know that at some point in life you consider changing your hairstyle, but it's hard to know which one is right for you. So you want to know which hairstyle is right for you, and this quiz offers to help you find the right hairstyle.

Courtesy: Man for Himself

So the quiz is positioning itself as a helpful guide for you to get what you want, great start. Then, the questions reaffirm that the quiz can help you get what you want by asking relevant and thoughtful questions. The type of questions that you would only ask if you were actually an expert in recommending hair styles. You know how in order to verify your identity you have to answer questions that only you know the answers to? Think of this as the inverse of that. You are verifying that you know what you are talking about in terms of the topic of the quiz by asking questions that only you would know to ask. This signals to the quiz taker that you are in fact an expert, and you can in fact help them get what they want. So you are building trust throughout the questions by continuing to reaffirm that you know how to help the quiz taker get what they want.

Then, once you've verified you are the expert by asking relevant, helpful questions, you ask the quiz taker if they would like to continue hearing from you on the topic of the quiz (in this case, about hairstyles), and this is where you ask them if they want to opt-in. So the trade here is that if you give your email then you will get personalized hairstyle recommendations and grooming tips in your inbox. The conditions of the trade are that you are not obligated to stay subscribed and it is easy to unsubscribe. As the quiz creator, you are also giving your expertise in terms of the questions you have asked, as well as the recommendations you are going to give, both right away in the quiz results, and over time by email. This makes it a good trade, and the person taking the quiz can choose whether they think it is fair, or choose to skip this step if they are not interested in the trade. It is such a power move to not force the issue, to provide so much value, to give the quiz taker so much of what they want, that you can say "it's fine either way, if you would like to take the trade or not."

And gosh does this turn marketing on its head, where the traditional way of doing marketing is to say "I'm hiding my value behind an opt-in form or a paywall, you can't see what I have to offer until you give me something." Bleh, what a horrible trade. Imagine if that was real life, and you were trying to make a trade but you told the other person you aren't even going to show them what you have to trade until they commit to the trade. Who in their right mind would want to take a trade like that? It's insane. So with a quiz, you can make a fair trade, where you both lay out what you are offering. You are offering personalized advice and recommendations, both in the quiz results and by email. You've already demonstrated through the thoughtful questions you have asked, that you can actually be helpful to the quiz taker. So that's what you have to offer at this stage. In return, you are asking for an email address or other information if you choose. Across 250 million quiz takers, 40% choose to take this offer and opt-in, so it's a pretty great offer if you execute on it well.

The results of this particular quiz send you to more content. So the "selling" is your continued engagement. What you get in return is your analysis of an ideal hair style. Man for Himself does offer products, they have a line of hair care products. But they aren't pushing them right away. Instead, they are going to continue building up their case, their side of the deal, by providing you with more content that's helpful to you and helps you get what you want. Then, a while later, once you've gotten to know the brand and trust them, they will offer the products.

Many experts agree this way of selling is the future. Where it's creator-first, or content-first, instead of product-first. People are tired of products being shoved in their face, claiming to help them feel better, look better, whatever. They want to know the person they are buying from, they want to feel like they are getting help with what they want first, not just being told to make another purchase.

This quiz example exactly exemplifies that type of future marketing, and it's a blueprint for all of us to learn from.

But, you might be saying, "I want my quiz to more directly sell my products and services." To which I say, coming right up! Let's look at a quiz that still accomplishes the goal of reciprocity, but is more product-forward. To which I present you Tonic Site Shop's website template recommender.

Tonic is a great brand, the founders are friends of ours and people we deeply respect for their marketing chops. This quiz is perfectly executed and exactly exemplifies how you can make the most of a product-forward quiz. It starts off once again with what the audience wants, which is a website that works for them and their brand. It's super straightforward and to the point, which I really appreciate.

Courtesy: Tonic Site Shop

The quiz clearly demonstrates a deep level of expertise by asking you questions you will easily know the answers to and then relating those to a website design. This shows that they know enough about web design to know that most people don't "speak the language of design" but rather are thinking about their own life when they answer design questions.

It's a genius approach because if you are at all familiar with the world of design, it's exceedingly frustrating because people will say things like "make it pop" or "I want it to jump out more" which doesn't really mean anything, unless you drill down to understand what the person actually means when they say these things.

By relating the quiz back to real-life things that people easily know their preferences on, you can get underneath the meaning of the otherwise nebulous statements that people way about web design. This shows that Tonic knows their audience well enough to know that talking directly about web design is intimidating, and they know what topics their audience doesn't find intimidating, and they know how to connect the non-intimidating to the intimidating in a way that's natural.

Only after going through that process do they ask for an email address. At this point as the quiz taker you are already aware that Tonic is able to help you, and you are deeply curious to know what they recommend for your website match.

The results of the quiz are products, website templates you can purchase. But they still fulfill what the customer wants, which is to find the right website for their needs. You have followed through on your end of the bargain in this case. Because it's highly visual, they have equated your visual preferences to your quiz results. Which is a very fair trade.

It's 1996. You are professor at Harvard and you've assembled the world's leading marketing experts who are selling products on the new hot thing, the internet. The internet has 35 million users and has been growing at an insane pace. Today's topic? Interactivity on the web.

You set the tone for the conversation with an opening statement.

The term interactive, as we interpret it, points to two features of communication: the ability to address an individual and the ability to gather and remember the response of that individual. Those two features make possible a third: the ability to address the individual once more in a way that takes into account his or her unique response. Thus we see interactivity as a tool that allows good marketing to become good conversation. The promise of the interactive paradigm, we anticipate, lies in its ability to put a more human face on marketplace exchanges without losing the scale economies of mass marketing. - Harvard Business Review

As you go around the room discussing the efficacy and value of interactive content, there is near unanimous consent that interactivity will play a huge role in marketing. Some experts even predict that every website will have an interactive component to help guide people towards the right solution or learning pathway within the next few years.

The following quote from the conversation sums up the immense value offered by interactive pieces of content.

Josh here, popping in from 2025 to say "Good god, what happened?!" browse around the internet today and there is virtually no interactivity. How often do you visit a website to find a component that asks you what you would like to get help with, or what you are interested in, or proposes a conversation to help you find what you want?

Almost never is the answer. And it's shocking to go back to 1996 and see that the experts of that day all agreed interactivity was a huge opportunity to mix together content, product, selling, in one neat concise, conversational package.

I've been working on quizzes for 12 years now and I can tell you what I think the reason is for why people don't use interactive content.

It is hard.

That's it. And I know this because in 1,000's of conversations with companies who decide against using interactivity, it is always because an easier option presents itself. Sometimes it's throwing more money at advertising, sometimes it's redesigning the website, sometimes it's to do nothing. But the answer is always some version of "Interactive content is too hard."

It's a shame, because in reading that Harvard Business Review article you get so excited about interactivity. You're like "yah, this is absolutely genius! you can offer people a personalized journey to working with you, and be helpful to each person in a conversational way? that's so good, my audience will love this!" Then it doesn't happen...for 29 years.

Why am I telling you all of this backstory? Because we are in a unique place in time. Over the last 5 years since the pandemic hit in 2020 I've seen an enormous percentage of businesses get decimated, and not come back. Consumers are changing their preferences, demanding more, finding loopholes to not pay for products, revolting to price increases, refusing to pay unless value is clear.

It's a harder time to grow your business.

So what do you do when it's a hard market? You do hard things. And what's the hard thing from 1996 that all the top marketing experts said was genius? Interactive content, I.E. quizzes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Yes, it is absolutely hard to create interactive content. Essentially every piece of interactive content is actually 10-20 different pieces of content between all of the results you have to create, the questions, the follow-up emails. It's a behemoth of content, and every piece of the quiz has to be exactly calibrated because people experience your quiz one at a time, and they will not take your quiz if they don't like what they see.

But if you do it, and make great quizzes, the results are incredible.

Since 2014, Interact quizzes have been served up 1 Billion times. Businesses who have created quizzes with us have generated over 100 million leads. The average quiz has a 67% completion rate and people spend more than 2 minutes taking each quiz.

The numbers are nothing short of other-worldly. And if you are willing to put in the work to create quizzes and build interactivity into your business, you can experience those results for yourself and your business.

As I'm typing this I think about all the businesses who implemented quizzes over the last 12 years. I've watched brands go from 1000's to 100's of thousands of email subscribers because of quizzes. I've seen revenues increase by millions of dollars a year directly because of quizzes. I've seen business owners reach their dream life where they are able to live how they want and make great money, because of quizzes.

If you match the criteria for using quizzes, the marketing leaders from 1996 would tell you now is the time, don't wait.

In 2025 this is the must-do quiz marketing strategy. Why? because quizzes are a content format that is not yet used in most marketing strategies. Quizzes have really high SEO search volume, and they appeal to people on a personal and human level.

People still love taking quizzes, and if you use quizzes strategically to answer questions your audience has, and to help them get what they want, then they will love your business too.

A full quiz marketing strategy starts by identifying what your audience most wants to know about themselves in relation to your business. Then you help your audience find what they want through your quizzes. You repeat this many times to create your core quiz hub and then you can add more quizzes over time.

Pro Tip: When thinking through categories of quiz content you can create, there are four main areas to consider.

1. Answering your ideal audiences questions. You know what's on the mind of your ideal audience, you know what they think about and obsess over all day long. If you present quizzes as solutions to the questions your ideal audience has, then they will see the quiz as a helpful tool for getting the answers they want, and will be incentivized to take the quizzes for selfish reasons because it benefits them.

Courtesy: The Car Mom

2. Self actualization. Meaning the desire to become the best version of oneself, and to realize one's full potential which is a common goal for all humans at all times, and with brands we work with they know what their audience is trying to accomplish for themselves, then orient their quizzes to align with what their audience wants.

Courtesy: Man for Himself

3. Leveling assessments. This is a follow-on of answering ideal audience questions. Because sometimes the questions your ideal audience has revolve around "where do I stand?" Because that has ramifications for other things they care about like status. You can create leveling assessments to answer that question for your audience in specific areas.

Courtesy: Hi-Q Group

4. Knowledge tests. From the beginning of time people have loved trivia. There's something innately fun about figuring out if we know the answers to questions. Great brands use this as part of their quiz strategy and choose topics that will appeal to their ideal audience.

Courtesy: Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts

Very simply the way our top clients turn these concepts into quizzes is by dividing the answers, advice, or ranking they would give someone into groups, which become the results of the quiz. Then they work backwards to create questions to figure out which group someone is in. The mindset I see our top quiz creators coming from is they imagine what their audience wants to hear based on which group they fall into, then they write that out.

Quizzes are often the first point of interaction. They are the way your ideal customers discover your brand because quizzes reach people through SEO, share-ability, PR, and more. For many companies, quizzes are now one of the top ways that new people find out about the brand.

Now let's look at what a quiz strategy looks like in real life with some of our top clients.

Below is pictured the quiz resource center from Gretchen Rubin. There are three quizzes pictured here as part of their quiz marketing strategy. Anne who is the CEO at Gretchen Rubin Media has told us that "Quizzes are one of our most powerful discovery features" and "Rank in our top 10 SEO drivers" which is a pretty incredible feat for a handful of pieces of content.

But quizzes are powerful, and the ones Gretchen has created are absolutely full and rich experiences that deliver value in a personalized, helpful, and unique way that is truly special and deserves the attention these quizzes have gotten.

Images: Gretchen Rubin

Another example of a full quiz content strategy is from Salary Transparent Street. They are a job board and career education company focused on helping people find the right jobs to enjoy their careers and get paid well. They have a hub of quizzes, each optimized for SEO traffic. They also have a great social following so the quizzes get put on the SEO map by the organic traffic from socials, then have the long-tail inbound traffic stream from search engines and AI bots.

Here's what one of their quiz pages look like. As they add more of these over time each one fits into the same format and is optimized with content on the page for crawlers to read, but that content also gives great context to the quiz so people know why it's worth it to take the quiz.

Image: Salary Transparent Street

The full quiz content strategy also works in enterprise companies. Below is the quiz hub from Direct Energy, an energy company in Canada. They have done an excellent job of creating quizzes to answer common customer questions and build a connection with their customer base in an ongoing way.

Courtesy: Direct Energy

And let's not forget about E-commerce, where you can employ a full quiz strategy to not only recommend products but also increase engagement over time with a great set of quizzes you can add to over time.

Pusheen is a great example of using a full quiz marketing strategy. They've developed a a set of beautifully branded and interactive quizzes that their audience can engage with and enjoy. The quizzes incorporate the Pusheen products and every quiz page has an opt-in form at the bottom if someone wants to join the Pusheen email list.

Courtesy: Pusheen

This is the original Interact quiz use-case, and the reason why we created the company. I am still baffled by some of the results people get. 80,000 subscribers in two months. 500,000 subscribers in two years. 50,000 subscribers in a week. And this is not some shady tactic where you're hacking a system or scaling up ads to an audience that might be not the right fit. This is simply moving people who already know about you from being lurkers to being email subscribers.

The most over-touted metric of all time is that email marketing has a 43x ROI. And I would heavily caveat that metric because that does not mean getting people on a list and spamming the heck out of them. But for those that do the work to create a highly useful email newsletter, a quiz is actually the absolute best way to move people from follower to email subscriber.

I can't talk about this topic without spotlighting Jenna Kutcher. She's a standout when it comes to using quizzes for moving audiences onto an email list. Back in 2017 she created one of the original follower-to-email-subscriber quizzes that put the concept on the map in a big way. It was called "What's Your Secret Sauce" and it's a quiz that has been imitated but never replicated.

Image: Jenna Kutcher

In a lot of ways Jenna pioneered a new content format that is the quiz. She created “What’s your secret sauce” which is a quiz helping people find their unique competitive advantage.

As a business coach who helps people wanting to create their own companies, the question of “what makes me stand out?” is particularly prevalent.

It’s a genius question to address, because it’s one that people might not come up with if you asked them on the spot what their biggest struggle was or what is on their mind most of the time. People in Jenna’s audience would probably answer with more generic issues like “how do I make more money?” Or “how do I get more followers?”

But deep down, behind all the numbers, people basically want to know “do I have what it takes?” And “what makes me uniquely capable of doing a really hard thing like being successful building a company?” It’s a truly human question, and one that is on the mind of most people at most times.

The way Jenna gets through to the heart of her customer through the quiz is genius. Every question works to diffuse any pre-conceived notions someone taking this quiz might have about being able to trust that Jenna "gets" them. Here's an example that essentially asks "how big is your business?" except if you asked the question so directly in that way people would get defensive because that's a very personal question and probably stirs up some defensiveness, because who doesn't feel comparison envy when looking at their own business.

So instead she asks, "how close are you to having your dream career?" and every answer choice speaks directly to the types of people who are likely to be taking this quiz.

Then she asks more questions to get people acquainted with themselves and with her work. Every question is more and more personal, without being overly nosy. It's a delicate balance, a conversational dance, to get the quiz taker to reveal more of themselves and their businesses, but not too much where it feels uncomfortable. It's the art of question asking, of scripted conversation.

I'm focusing so much on the conversation that Jenna has with people through this quiz because #1 it is extremely popular, and #2 these questions lead up to the opt-in form at the end of this quiz. We purposely put the opt-in forms at the end of Interact quizzes precisely because it allows the quiz taker to get to know you as they answer the quiz questions. This leads to not only higher opt-in rates, but also better email list retention because the people who opt-in are the ones who are actually interested in hearing more from you.

Then of course Jenna being Jenna and having the ability to distill helpful information in just the right way, the results of this quiz do not disappoint in the least. Each result is full of unique and personal helpful education. Each result is written in a deeply personal and human way, while also offering real-life strategies from Jenna's own experience building a company and helping 1000's of others do so. It's like you get a behind the scenes audit of your situation by an expert, without having to pay for anything. In return, as the quiz taker you are happy to provide your email address and continue learning.

Jenna's Secret Sauce quiz is an absolutely perfect, 10/10 example of how you can move your audience from follower to email subscriber. She posted it a few times on Instagram, and has it featured prominently on her website and link in bio so people can take the quiz (or the subsequent quizzes she has created).

If you are looking to move your audience from followers to email subscribers, so you can build up your email list as an asset that you own, then a quiz can be a great solution. But I do want to caveat that it's not simple. That's why this guide is a book-length tutorial on how to create a quiz. Because the simple-looking, fun, engaging experience Jenna created with this Secret Sauce quiz example is far from easy to pull off.

A product-forward quiz focuses on helping people find the right product (or service) to match their needs. There are different ways you can approach this type of quiz. It can be as straightforward as "Product Matchmaker" or as personality-based as "What's your (blank) personality?"

The whole premise for product recommendation quizzes is based on a year 2000 study called the "Jam Study" which found that if you offer people fewer options they will buy more. Then you add in the fact that in a quiz format people are also seeing options that are personalized to their tastes and preferences, and the conversion rate to sales is much higher than just showing a list of products catalog style.

Until now, most E-commerce sites have been focused on building online catalogs, which are simply an online version of a print magazine. The quiz is a new and fundamentally different format for displaying products based on the shoppers' preferences. You can also use quizzes as an ongoing engagement tool by creating a series of fun quizzes that also recommend products.

Here's a straightforward product matchmaker version of a quiz from Henry's House of Coffee. Hrag, who is the owner at Henry's, created this quiz to help people who are visiting the website better choose the right coffee.

Courtesy: Henry's House of Coffee

If you want to go for more of a personality-based quiz approach in E-commerce that's great too. Common Era Jewelry does a really good job of this with their quizzes. They create personality-type quizzes that connect to products at the end. Connecting products to personas is a really smart way to personalize the experience, and turn a physical product into something that connects on a human level.

Image: Common Era Jewelry

Then there's the content marketing based approach to E-Commerce quizzes. Which means you are creating quizzes using a content marketing strategy like you would with blogs or YouTube videos, but each quiz ties back to products at the end. Pusheen does a great example of this with their set of quizzes. Each quiz is based on a topic that appeals to their audience, then they work in their products as it makes sense into the quiz results.

Image: Pusheen

For businesses where sales cycles are long, or where you have a lot of customers who pay relatively low amounts to retain, you can use quizzes to keep a connection going with people.

In both of these cases, the challenge is staying top of mind with people as they either make a decision about whether to buy your product or they make a decision to continue paying for your product. I want to take you through two different examples of this which are vastly different but also similar.

The first is from Atlassian, a software company. For Atlassian, marketing awareness and staying top of mind is important, as those are the metrics by which software marketing measures itself in general.

They make quizzes that are relevant to their audience of information workers who are thinking about how to be better at their jobs and level up their careers. So they make quizzes like this Leadership Style quiz. the quiz engages people because it's a quiz, and the quiz taker gets to learn about themselves, which people innately enjoy. And it also leads to more content from Atlassian, increasing the amount of time someone spends engaging with the Atlassian content and also making a memorable experience so that quiz taker is more likely to recall Atlassian when they need a solution that Atlassian can offer.

I think this is absolutely genius. I mean Buzzfeed is getting 90 million visitors a month, and a good chunk of that is coming to their quizzes. Why would a smart brand that actually has subject matter expertise in an area create and own a portfolio of quizzes that have to do with their area of expertise?

It's so smart, people enjoy taking quizzes, and there is existing demand, you are simply combining that demand with your own expertise to engage your audience.

Image: Atlassian

Over time Atlassian has created many different types of quizzes for their audience, and they all exist on a quiz hub where someone can go and take all the quizzes. It's super cool to browse through even if you're not the ideal customer, they've done an excellent job.

Image: Atlassian

Okay so that's one example from a forward-thinking software company. And here's another from an innovative museum. The Natural History Museum uses Interact quizzes to engage their audiences with fun quizzes ranging from "What's that Insect?" to "Which Dinosaur are You?"

Image: Natural History Museum

Each quiz is an experience in itself. Super enjoyable and interactive. Again it's taking a page out of the content site's book where you can get massive amounts of traffic by creating quizzes, but these quizzes have the subject matter expertise from the Natural History Museum.

Image: Natural History Museum

Because quizzes are a lot of work, I recommend the following business milestones before investing in building one.

10k+ total followers across social channels

2k+ monthly website visitors or link in bio visitors

The reason being that quizzes are a great conversion tool, they will turn your audience into email subscribers and buyers, but they very rarely help you reach net new audiences. So if people are already coming to check out your work and following you, then you'll see great success with a quiz moving those people to be email subscribers and buyers. But if people aren't already coming to check out your work there will not be anyone to convert.

*meaning if people email in or DM you the same question over and over again, and writing a help doc or guide hasn't solved the problem, you can use a quiz to answer that question.

It's a great question, because creating a quiz will take time. If you match the business requirements above I would say yes, you are best off creating a quiz. And here's why. Quizzes are like a 24/7 customer engagement tool that is a version of you. That "you" in quiz form can be present everywhere your potential customers are, all of the time, in real time.

Whether your goal is to grow your email list, increase product sales, or make your brand more memorable with your target audience, the quiz can accomplish those goals one customer at a time without any additional effort from you.

You write the quiz once and then the quiz creates a memorable, helpful experience for your potential customers whenever they engage with the quiz. Otherwise, you are relying on your website or social media feed to engage people. And the problem with those formats is that websites and social media feeds present one piece of content at a time. If the piece of content the person sees first doesn't apply to them, they might just leave. And in fact most websites and social media profiles have bounce rates over 90%. Meaning that more then 90% of people will just see the site and leave.

A quiz or set of quizzes is a long term investment with compounding returns. The longer you have your quizzes the more value you get. I've seen companies create a whole portfolio of great quizzes that end of driving traffic, leads, and customers for years and years. It's an easy one to put off for later, but then you lose out on all that long-term value.

Image: Kaye Putnam

The following is everything I've learned after observing the world's best content creators make quizzes for the last 12 years. You can read through it all, or use ChatGPT to summarize it for your specific use case using the following prompt.

Or if you want ChatGPT to actually write your quiz you can use this prompt.

First let's talk about what you are trying to get out of this. Why would you use a quiz in your business? The top reasons are:

These are the reasons why people typically create quizzes, and I would guess that you want to achieve one or more of those goals. Now bear with me for a second, because in this guide. I'm going to walk you through a very lengthly and in-depth process for creating an ideal quiz, but we are not going to focus on what you want, which is those four goals. Instead we are going to focus on what your quiz taker wants.

But rest assured, if you provide the quiz taker with what they want, they will be delighted to become a lead, join your list, buy your products and services, and engage with your brand. If you give your audience what they want first, then they'll be happy to return the favor. So we will focus from here on out on giving your customer what they want, but keep in mind it's in service of getting you what you want.

The following are the primary types of quizzes that are successful. Which one you choose depends on your audience and what they want from you.

Personality is defined here as everything that makes a person who they are. Their traits, tendencies, goals, ambitions, fears, failures, dreams, preferences. These are sometimes called psychographics as well. Personality based quizzes are all about the quiz taker. You ask them questions about themselves. You show results that are about them based on how they answer the questions. The whole experience is a great big shining light on the quiz taker, putting them firmly as the center of attention. Which is precisely why people love personality quizzes. They get to be the center of attention for once. Most marketing puts the brand or business or product as the focal point. A quiz reverses that and puts your potential customer in the spotlight.

I want to quickly point out the iterations of personality-based quizzes because this is often a point of confusion. Just because I'm using the broad-based word personality to describe this type of quiz does not mean it can only be "What's your personality?" type of quizzes. Below is pictured a "Career Type Quiz" which uses personality quiz logic to recommend an ideal career type. Think of the career types as "Personalities" that someone can match to.

Courtesy: Advice with Erin

Personality quizzes can also span over into the E-commerce world. Below is a quiz titled "Which Ancient Goddess are You?" from Common Era Jewelry. It's a great quiz that connects your Goddess type to Jewelry pieces. Underneath it is a personality quiz but it is being used to recommend products. Personality quizzes are very flexible and usable in tons of use-cases.

Courtesy: Common Era Jewelry

Personality quizzes can also be used as matchmaker quizzes to connect people with the right resource, product, service, or solution for their needs. Below is an example from Nerd Fitness, they have an option to "Find Your Coach" which matches you with a fitness coach based on your preferences and goals with fitness. This use of a personality quiz solves what the customer wants, which is to get in shape, but to get in shape in a way that works for their preferences.

Courtesy: Nerd Fitness

While any type of quiz on this list can and probably should recommend your products and services, a product based quiz specifically recommends products and services. A product based quiz is very direct "I can help you find the right product" is the message it sends.

The product quiz below is from our friends at Henry's House of Coffee, and it's a perfect example of a great product quiz. The basic premise is that you are greeting people who come to your website the way you would in-store, and helping them make a product selection. You can still make the quiz personal and inviting by writing it in your own voice. But the goal is to help people make the right selection that matches their goals with buying your particular kind of product.

Courtesy: Henry's House of Coffee

The Challenger Sale popularized the concept. Assessments bring it to life. What I'm talking about is challenging people's assumptions as a way to engage them. Or put another way, asking them how they measure up. Or put another way, seeing where they stand in relation to the ideal.

There is something very intriguing to people about seeing how they fair when asked about a topic they care about. It can be practical, like to answer the question of "Should you actually move to Hawaii?" or they can be more playful. Whichever path you choose, an assessment taps into people's innate human desire to know where they stand, in relation to themselves or to others.

Done correctly, an assessment taps into a core topic that your audience truly cares about, and challenges them in a way that perfectly threads the needle of being engaging but not overly pushy or too soft.

Image: HIEstates

This type of quiz uses branching logic to guide customers to the right product, course, or content that helps solve their problem or get them what they want. It's super flexible if you are wanting to filter which recommendation you give someone based on very specific criteria. For example, you could have a question that asks people if they are shopping for bracelets or necklaces, then branch based on that question. Or in the world of education you could ask people if they struggle with productivity or self confidence, then branch based on their answer. Think of it as a flow chart turned into automated quiz. Where people follow a path through the quiz that's unique to them and you can fully control what they are shown at the end based on exactly which choices they make throughout the quiz.

In real life, what a customer sees is something like what's pictured below from MamasteFit. They have a customer helper quiz that guides people to the right resources for them from the library of resources that MamasteFit has to offer. You can think of this like a librarian or front desk person who guides the customer to the right content, product, or service. It's meant to be a helpful assistant.

Courtesy: MamasteFit

Another great example of a branching logic guide is from CoconutVA. They use a quiz as a qualification test to see if someone is a good fit to become a VA for them. It uses branching logic to automatically sort and segment people, so only the right people are offered the opportunity. How much easier is that then asking people to read the criteria and self select? So much easier.

Courtesy: CoconutVA

"How much do you know about (topic)?" will always appeal to your audience so long as the topic is relevant to them. People want to know how they measure up, and a quiz is one way to really engage your audience.

Scott from Bird Watching HQ has done an excellent job of this, so I'm going to showcase how he did it as an illustration of how you can do it. He's created a series of quizzes about birds, that ask people how much they know. Here's an example question.

At the end of the quiz you get an answer key showing which questions you got right and wrong, along with an explanation of why each correct answer is the right one. It's a feedback system that's highly satisfying. Quizzes like this really put the "quiz" back into the strategy, because they most match what people are expecting when they hear the word quiz since they are like the school quizzes. Only difference is you get an answer right away instead of having to wait for it to be graded. And the topics of these quizzes are subjects that you audience truly has an interest in.

Quiz ideas should always address what your audience wants. Generally audiences want one of two things.

Here's the full version of coming up with quiz ideas for your business.

Before proceeding I want you to think about what type of quiz this is going to be. There are primary quizzes and there are content quizzes. Primary quizzes are a single quiz that encompasses your whole business. You include everything you do in that one quiz and it lives everywhere you show up online.

An example of this would be Kaye Putnam's brand personality quiz. She has run this quiz for about a decade now, updating it as she would update a product or course in her business. The quiz has 12 results. Every result has a many-email follow-up sequence. It's a huge tree of knowledge from her business that is a primary part of how she operates online. This is a great primary quiz.

Courtesy: Kaye Putnam

A content quiz is one that fits into your content strategy. So it's on a secondary or tertiary subject you help with as a business. It's still important to your customer based obviously, but it's not necessarily applicable to every single person in your audience. Content quizzes can live in a Quiz Hub where you house all of your quizzes and people can take them. An example of this is the Atlassian Quiz Hub where they have many quizzes on different topics that their audience cares about.

Courtesy: Atlassian

Content quizzes should be treated the same way you treat your overall content marketing strategy. You want to think about the questions your audience asks you a lot, then create a quiz that very effectively answers those questions. You can think of it as content marketing 2.0 where it's now personalized to every single person who engages with your content instead of being the same for everyone.

Everything starts with what your ideal audience wants. Wants are subjective, and don't have to be tangible. Some audiences want to know how they can get in better shape, others want to learn to speak english better, and others want self actualization. Whatever the version of wants is that your audience has, that's where the quiz experience starts.

The reason why this is where great quizzes start is because you have to become the guide to help your audience help get what they want. Too much marketing starts with what the business wants - more leads, more customers, more engagement on social media. But your audience doesn't want that. They're not here to help you reach your goals, they're here to reach their own goals.

What sets great quizzes apart from poor ones is the understanding of what an audience wants on a personal, human level. This deep knowledge of the audience then lets you get creative, because if you really get what they want you can have some fun and infuse your own style into your quiz. But it has to always lead back to what the audience wants, 100% of the time.

If you are familiar with the heroes journey, the backbone of every story ever written, you know that there is the hero and then there is the guide. The guide is the wise person who comes alongside to help the hero get what they want. The audience member is the hero of the quiz journey, you are the guide.

Let's take a look at a couple of examples to put this into practice. The first one is from Hadar Shemesh. Hadar is a speech coach and teaches language to people. Her audience wants to speak better. So her quiz is titled "What type of speaker are you?" and it's a leveling assessment to figure out where you are on the scale of learning language.

If we double click on this quiz topic and analyze what's happening, we can see it's truly understanding of the audience. The title of the quiz is "What type of speaker are you?" rather than "How well do you speak?" and then in the description it explains that you'll find your "speaker stage' with resources and tips on how to move up.

Instead of framing this quiz in a negative light, which decreases motivation, it's framed in a personality light, which increases self-concept and confidence. Only once those things are in place does it offer to give suggestions on reaching the next level.

Think of it this way. Instead of saying "you are not very good at speaking, here are ways to get better" it says "you are this type of speaker, here are some pros and cons of being this type of speaker. I'm with you, and want to assist you in reaching the next level, here are some ways to achieve your goal of improving your speaking." Which one of those feels better in body as you read them? Psychology says the second one, by a mile.

And it's not just what feels good, people are more motivated to take action when they feel safe, seen, acknowledged, and in a good place. All of those things are done with this quiz title and cover page. None of that would be possible if Hadar and her team didn't actually know what the customer wanted. If they didn't know then they might go with some sort of generic quiz or make the framing of the quiz very negative, which would not perform well.

100% of the time when I talk to customers whose quizzes are not performing well it is because there is a lack of true understanding about what the ideal quiz taker audience wants. You can see from this example that what the audience wants is nuanced, particular, and core to their humanity all at the same time. It's no simple thing and can only be fully understood after 1000's of hours of talking to and working with your ideal audience.

The average example on our top quizzes list is created after over 2,000 hours of the business owner who created the quiz talking to their customers, and it really shows when you see how beautifully simple but deep the quizzes are.

Let's go over to the E-commerce side, because there are fascinating solutions here to creating quizzes that deliver on what your customers want. The first and more common approach is the direct option. Your customer wants to know which product is right for them, because finding the right product makes them feel good, or fulfills a desire for status, or makes them feel seen. You create a product recommendation quiz that delivers on that want, and the customer is happy. Simple, effective, and works well.

Check out this example from my friend Hrag who runs Henry's House of Coffee, it's an absolutely perfect implementation of creating a product recommendation quiz that helps people find what they want.

The other way to implement E-commerce quizzes is to make them more personality driven. This approach is more of a "I see you, I understand you, and these are the products that would work well for you" versus the very straightforward "Here are the products that would work for you" of the direct approach. Which one you choose honestly comes down to what your audience truly wants. If they want to just get to a product then the direct approach is best. If they want to self actualize and see themselves in your product before committing, then go with the more personality driven option.

Common Era Jewelry created a great personality driven product recommendation quiz, pictured below. The approach here is to determine what aspects of personality matter most to your audience, then make a quiz that connects up your products to the personality types of your audience.

Last but certainly not least is the knowledge quiz. People want to learn. Everyone wants to be better, smarter, more capable. Quizzes can make learning more approachable and more fun by helping you find learning paths that are relevant to you as an individual.

This example from NASA is super great. It's a quiz designed to help increase your knowledge about NASA and the space missions. But it does a beautiful job of turning learning into a unique and personal experience by titling the quiz "Your Artemis Mission" so it's about you, and your unique path.

This concept is not new, personalized learning journeys have been discussed in the world of education for centuries, and a quiz is a really simple and straightforward way to creating personalized learning paths.

Any time you have a complex subject, like space, it's helpful to divide the topic up into personas, or the different types of people who might want to learn the subject. Then you can serve up each section of the subject to the corresponding persona in a way that is enjoyable and understandable to that persona. Everyone enjoys learning, but people enjoy learning in different ways. If you can offer up learning in the way that matches what a person wants, you'll get much higher engagement and learning retention rates.

Your quizzes are part of your marketing strategy, and at Interact we make the quiz a blank slate you can customize so it matches your brand. I want to go over a few common ways I see top brands customizing the visual identity of their quizzes so they look great.

Please note, you can turn off the cover page for Interact quizzes and also redirect your results to your own landing pages, so you don't have to use Interact other than for the questions if you don't want to. Regardless I'll show a few examples of how businesses are establishing visual identities with their quizzes.

At a high level, you want your quiz to match your brand. And you can use a mix of images and colors to accomplish this. Here's a great example from Cristina Cleveland's Interior Design Style quiz that has been taken over 200,000 times.

Courtesy: Cristina Cleveland

But if you want to go with a pure-text version of a quiz you can do that as well. Here's an example from Common Era where they use a very nice blend of colors to create a quiz that looks on-brand and easy to take.

Courtesy: Common Era

You can also opt to use an image for each question and turn the image into a graphic that helps bring the question to life. Here's an example of that from Advice With Erin.

Courtesy: Advice With Erin

You could also take it another direction and use icons as the answer choices so it has a more graphical and minimalistic look. Here's an example of that from BiSaddle.

Courtesy: BiSaddle

You can also embed the quiz in a way where the quiz is a part of a page that is branded with your look/feel so it's super clear that the quiz comes from you. Here's an example of that from Amy Porterfield.

Courtesy: Amy Porterfield

Quiz cover pages can also be customized using a combination of colors/images. Here's a great example from Atlassian where it looks nice and on-brand using built-in features from Interact.

Courtesy: Atlassian

Then if you want to use your own custom cover page for your quiz you can optimize it to be exactly how you want like this example from Candice Coppola.

Courtesy: Candice Coppola

Likewise, results pages can be customized exactly how you want when you use the redirect feature and create your own landing pages for each result. Here's a great example result page from Gretchen Rubin.

Courtesy: Gretchen Rubin

Or you can use the built-in results view from Interact and keep it nicely on-brand so it looks great as part of your visual identity like this result page from Salary Transparent Street.

Courtesy: Salary Transparent Street

Visual identity is important for quiz marketing just like it is for all forms of content marketing. Pick your path and stick with it. The nice thing about hosting your quizzes on Interact is you can always go back and make updates whenever you want.

When someone lands on your quiz result, they must think to themselves "Yes! that is me." As soon as they think that, you've got them on your side, and you can work together to help them get what they want, which will in some cases involve working with you, or consuming your content, which is your goal as the quiz creator.

In order for your quiz results to truly resonate with the quiz taker, a few things have to be true. Firstly, you must know the types of people you work with at a deep level. Not just demographic data like age or job role, but psychographic, personal information like what they are worried about and how they feel about themselves. Of course that is highly privileged information, and must be used thoughtfully, but when used properly you can be extremely helpful to your quiz taker audience.

When I'm working with a client on a quiz I usually ask them to think about the most common ways they help their audience get what they want (which was the title of the quiz if you remember). I ask the quiz creator to think through the top ways they help their audience and then group those into the results of the quiz. There is no right answer in terms of how many groups you have. Some quizzes have just a few, others have 50+. Of course you'll have to write each of these results and create emails to go along with each, so you have to be aware of how much work you are creating for yourself, but the best advice I have here is to stay true to what you actually experience within your customer base. If you find that your audience has many different ways of wanting to be helped, then create many ways of helping them. If you find that the answers to what they want usually fall into one of three main solutions then you might only need three quiz results.

In terms of how you present these results, you can utilize language that is specific but also general, so you are not alienating people who feel like the specific language doesn't quite fit them. You can also be straightforward with your quiz takers and let them know sometimes you get it wrong, or the quiz results could be similar to one another so they might feel like another result is a better fit.

If you've established yourself as a helpful person, which we will get into in the next section on asking good questions, then you have some leeway in your quiz results to not be perfect every time. That takes the pressure off of perfection, but then you can be free to write directly and personally to each of your quiz result types.

Let's walk through an example from Gretchen Rubin, she's the GOAT of quiz results and I very much appreciate the thoughtful care she puts into every single one of her quiz outcomes.

This quiz result is for her "Habits for Happiness Quiz" so the result is all about which habit you should pick up to become happier. I worked on this quiz with Gretchen's team, and as we went through it I got to see how much thoughtful care was put into writing these results.

The result begins with a very clear headline and sub headline, explaining to me exactly what I need to adopt as a habit in order to be happier. You can think of this as the "3 second version" of the quiz result, if someone literally just glanced at this result, they would see this and know exactly what their result is.

The result then continues on to tell you why this result will help you get what you want. It's put in the context of what the quiz taker wants, which is to be happier. So everything is in relation to that. I cannot stress how important this is, and how often people miss this. You have to put everything in the quiz result in context of the reason why someone took your quiz in the first place.

Put another way, the quiz taker is taking the quiz because they want something. Your quiz title promises to help them get what they want. Everything you write in the quiz result should be in service of helping them get what they want, and you should reference what they want directly.

It might seem simple or obvious, but quiz takers are thinking about what they want. And your quiz is supposed to help them get what they want. So keep acknowledging what they want as you explain their result. Okay, I think I've said that enough times in enough ways that it's clear on how important the connection between what the quiz taker wants and the result you show them is.

In this section the quiz result also gives specific, helpful, easily actionable advice for the quiz taker to follow. This advice helps the quiz taker get what they want, and it's broken down in a way that's not overwhelming. Again, you have to know where the line is for your audience. How much advice and suggestions can they metabolize without getting overwhelmed and clicking away. What kind of advice or follow on steps would be useful to them but not so in-depth that they'll shelve the ideas for later?

I like how Gretchen broke this down and made each suggestion it's own element with just very small steps the quiz taker can take to implement the suggested habit to become happier.

The result continues with the focus squarely on the quiz taker and their unique situation. One thing to note here is that if you've done a good job with your quiz questions, and the quiz takers believes the result they are getting is accurate to them as a person, then they will consume enormous amounts of information in the quiz results. It's almost like at this point the quiz taker is a reading, or watching a video, about themselves. As if someone wrote an autobiography about them. People cannot get enough of hearing about themselves, in a good way, because everyone wants to improve and better themselves.

With Gretchen's result below, she's employing a great approach to delivering feedback for this quiz result. She starts off by giving some positive and helpful prompts for the quiz taker to think about. Then she delivers some notes of feedback and caution. You always want to deliver positive before any sort of constructive feedback or areas to focus on. You always want to completely avoid criticism or negativity, as those will actually de-motivate someone from trying to improve themselves.

After three sections of helpful content on this quiz result, there are suggestions for diving deeper from Gretchen's library of work. In this case, because the quiz taker wants to know a lot of information before diving deeper, that's how the quiz is set up. That's not always the case, sometimes you get straight to the resources section. But because this quiz is designed for people who want to know a lot before moving on to the next step, the suggestions are at the end.

These resources are unique to this quiz result, and selected for this type of person. You will know how much to sell versus how much to just give suggestions in your quiz results. I've seen both ways work well, but generally you want to give more helpful information as a lot of people who take your quiz will be finding you for the very first time and may not be quite ready to buy from you. You can always give that option, in case people are just in a place where they need a paid solution immediately, but generally I don't recommend pushing it too hard.

Now I'm going to contrast everything I just showed you with that beautifully written, in-depth quiz result from Gretchen Rubin, and show you one that is simple, to the point, and equally as helpful to the quiz taker.

This one is from Salary Transparent Street, and it is a result for a quiz titled "Are You Underpaid?" and right away you'll notice the contrast. This result is short and to direct, but it answers question being posed in the quiz, and gives the quiz takers what they want. The quiz taker wants a direct answer about whether they are being underpaid. And this result gives them that answer.

It also links to a salary database, where the quiz taker can get more helpful information to reaffirm the quiz result and show them exactly where they stack up in terms of salary compared to their closest peers.

Now let's look at some E-Commerce quiz results and see how there can be both long-form and short-form results, which is totally dependent on what your quiz taker audience wants from you.

Here's a quiz result from Common Era Jewelry's personality driven E-Commerce Quiz. You can see that they first address the quiz taker and talk about the quiz taker directly. That's super important. People take quizzes for selfish reasons, because they want to learn about themselves. But in this case being selfish is a good thing, because as Socrates said "to know yourself is the beginning of wisdom." I'm quoting Socrates because it's relevant to this quiz which is about which ancient Goddess you are. So it starts off with the quiz title, which is "Medusa" then it goes on to give a tagline for Medusa. Then the very first section of content is "About You" because that's what we are here for.

Right after that it's "About Medusa" which is really more "About You" because you have now found out that you are Medusa. This is great, because everyone likes to hear good things about themselves. And this result continues to say good things.

Then, only after three sections of talking about the quiz taker, there are products introduced. The products are still in context of the quiz taker, so they are relevant to what the quiz taker cares about, themselves.

Please don't perceive this as cynical. The fact that people care about themselves and want to find self actualization is simply Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As soon as we have our basic needs taken care of then we want to find ourselves. It helps us to know how we operate in the world, where we stand in relation to others, and how we can be the best version of ourselves. Brands like Common Era, who know this at a deep level, can give their audience what they want, which is self knowledge, and then find intelligent and natural ways to weave in their products in connection with that self knowledge.

Great quiz results can come in any format, any medium, any length. The question you have to ask yourself when creating your results is two-fold. First, what does my quiz taker need to feel totally satisfied with this quiz result? What do they need to feel like this quiz gave them exactly what they wanted when they started taking the quiz, and more? Second, you have to ask yourself, how will this quiz result guide the quiz taker to the next step that I want them to take? Whether that next step is to see another piece of content from you, or to take a specific action, what will motivate them to do that?

Accomplish those two things, in that order, and your quiz results will delight your quiz takers, and also get you what you want, a win-win.

The following are principles for writing quiz results. Read these and keep them in the back of your mind as you construct your quiz results. These are not hard rules, but rather guidelines. I always keep these in mind as I'm working with clients to create quizzes. I pull them out as needed in order to steer the conversation and ensure we write quiz results that are ultra-compelling and really resonate with the quiz taker.

Ask people for their reactions when they get your quiz results, the results are nothing short of extraordinary. Just look at this Reddit Thread where people are discussing their results from Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies Quiz.

Courtesy: Reddit

There are clearly strong emotions in relation to which result people got. This is true whether people agree with their results or not. And you want to make sure to be gentle with people as they are receiving their quiz results, because you never know how much it might mean to someone. I've talked to numerous people who have been brought to tears by reading their quiz results. I've talked to people who say their relationships or careers have been saved by a quiz result. I've talked to people who say their whole perspective on life shifted after getting a quiz result.

It's rarified air, and you want to be as human and personal as you can be in your quiz results, because it can mean a tremendous amount to people.

Because it's such a delicate topic, and people do take it very seriously. You can make the opening to your quiz results more digestible by writing them like the beginning of a biography. If you've ever read a book by Walter Isaacson, one of the greatest biographers of all time, you'll notice that he really paints the picture of who someone is, starting with their upbringing, before pointing out their flaws or incongruences.

You can do the same thing with your quiz results. Give people a biography of themselves, their inputs, and what makes them tick before offering up any suggestions for change or improvement.

How long you spend on this biography part depends entirely on the nature of your quiz. If your quiz is very straightforward it could be a one-line biography. Like literally 15 words that very succinctly describes the person. if your topic is heavier and more personal then it might be as long as 500-1000 words to describe the person before you even get into any suggestions you might have for them. You will know what your audience needs, so stick to that.

Here's a great example of an opening biography from Nutrition Stripped. Their quiz is about finding your balanced eating archetype, which is a pretty sensitive topic. They do an excellent job with the opening of the quiz result by just writing out the biography of the person who is getting this result.

The result unfolds in reverse order, meaning there is a 1-second version first, then a 10-second version, then a 2-minute version. This follows standard practice for creating great content. You always want to draw people into the next section of the content. The best way to draw people in is to continue talking about them. Using "you" language, this quiz result begins to describe the person who got this quiz result, and it goes into more and more detail as the result goes on.

Courtesy: Nutrition Stripped

You'll notice that they begin to introduce potential drawbacks or pitfalls of the result only after setting the stage with the person in a positive way. This comes from the study of Positive Psychology, which basically says that if you ground yourself and focus on your strengths then you are more able to create positive change in your life. There is research showing that positive affirmation makes us more able to change ourselves for the better. Much more so then negativity. So "You are doing great and can continue improving" makes us much more motivated then "You've got some real problems, let's fix it."

But if you are going to establish enough trust with someone for them to believe you when you say "You are doing great" they need to believe that you actually know them. The best way to show that you actually know them is to write their biography. Hence why I've spent so much time explaining this concept.

The art of asking good questions is deep and complex. There are over 100 psychological principles to recall when coming up with a "simple" set of quiz questions. Because it can be so complex, what I've done below is lay out a series of principles by which to write your quiz questions. I mean for this to give you a frame of reference so you can fill in the content with your own expertise and voice. I want to give you the way of thinking about how to write the quiz questions rather than inform the actual content of the questions you ask. I find that when I work with people, they often know the right questions to ask in order to create a great quiz experience for their audience, and my job is to prompt you to think of those questions.

So what I'm going to do is lay out a set of principles, goals, and ways of thinking about what questions to ask. Hopefully this sparks you to think of the perfect set of questions to ask so your audience feels connected to you on a human level and you get the full benefit of the conversational ability quizzes can offer your business.

This is the most obvious but also there's some really bad advice out there against it. What I'm trying to say is that your questions should all be in relation to the results of your quiz. In relation meaning that every question should be designed to help you determine which of the quiz results is right for the person taking the quiz. Now there is some art here in addition to science because you don't want the questions to be too obvious. You don't want to give away the results while people are answering the questions. But then you don't want the questions to be disconnected from the results, so it's a fine balance.

Here's a great, simple example from Henry's House of Coffee. They ask a question about where you are on your coffee journey, which helps inform which coffee recommendations they should make for you at the end of the quiz. It's not super direct, meaning there is still some mystery about how this informs the selections, but it is definitely connected to the results.

What I mean is that you want your questions to ask about the topics your audience is already thinking about. You want them to feel like you are reading their minds, but in a good way. You want your quiz takers to go "Wow, I didn't even think about that, but now that you are asking that is something I care about" when they read a question in your quiz. So you want to be provoking thought from your quiz takers as they go through your quiz.

Here's an example of a question that is really perceptive about knowing what is on the quiz takers' mind. It's from Morgan Pommells, a psychotherapist. And the quiz is about what kind of child of an emotionally immature parent you are. It's trying to determine what kind of traits you have inherited as a result of having an emotionally immature parent. The question being asked is a scenario-based question, meaning it asks about how you would respond in a certain situation.

The reason why this question seems to "read minds" is because the scenario being presented is one that the quiz taker is aware of, like they know that the scenario is something that comes up in their life. But it's not exactly clear how that scenario might connect with their personality profile in this quiz. That little question and mystery makes it such an enticing question because you want to know how it connects to your result. But also on its own this question is thought provoking because it makes you think and reflect on yourself and your life.

Courtesy: Morgan Pommells

Importantly though, this question is not too deep or too thought provoking so as to prevent someone from having a quick answer. You always want your questions to be simple enough where your audience will have a quick answer and not have to think too hard about it before providing their answer. So it's a balance between thought provoking but also a smooth path through the quiz.

You can ask a question that inspires. How? By introducing a concept to your quiz takers in the form of a question. Like for example "What would you do if you reached your goal weight?" for a quiz that's about getting to a goal weight. This subtle-y introduces the idea that the person taking the quiz can reach their goal weight, and lets them dream about it. This is inspirational, because it lets the quiz taker see a path forward. I really like questions like this because they get people into a motivated and action-oriented state of mind rather than making them feel like they can't do it.

Here's a great example. Jenna Kutcher asks this question about what you would accomplish in the next 90 days if you could snap your fingers and get one thing done. This question does so much to inspire people towards what is possible because it introduces the concept that they are able to reach these goals, but in a subtle way.

Courtesy: Jenna Kutcher

You can use a question to introduce concepts and inspiration in a way that's more approachable for people. If you go the direct route and tell people that things are possible for them, there is often an immediate negative reaction. Like "you're telling me I can reach that goal? no way." But if you introduce it as a hypothetical like "If you could accomplish anything related to your dreams, what would it be?" then you diffuse the automatic knee-jerk negative reaction and let people dream a little bit without risking anything.

The best way to communicate authority and build trust is to show you understand your audience. There is no better way to show understanding than to ask deeply relevant questions. In order to ask questions that are really on-point you have to know your audience at an innately human level.

Quiz questions are even more powerful in trust building because you are also providing answer choices that essentially speak for the quiz taker. You are putting in the most common responses that someone might have. If you do not know what someone in your ideal audience might say when you ask a question then the answer choices will be "off" and the quiz taker will immediately know that you do not actually know them.

Here's an excellent example of a quiz question that demonstrates audience understanding at a deep level. It's from Amy Porterfield, a marketing expert who knows her audience to a degree most businesses couldn't even dream of. The way she asks this question about why someone would want to create a course, and the way the answer choices are phrased to represent what her audience thinks about is nothing short of perceptive.

Courtesy: Amy Porterfield

If you want to build trust with your audience through your quiz, so they will opt in at the end and have a strong bond with you from the start, ask questions that are truly relevant to them. Nothing builds trust faster or establishes your authority more quickly than asking questions speaking to what the audience cares about.

Showing your personality through your quiz questions lets people get to know you. If they are going to work with you, buy from you, read your book, take your course, or listen to your podcast, they need to connect with you on a personal level.

Often the greatest indicator of success in business-client relationships is personality fit. Do you get along well with the people you are working with and vice versa? If so, then it's likely to be a positive relationship and business connection all around.

One way to vet for this connection is by showing your personality throughout the quiz questions. This will endear and draw in the people you want to work with, and it will politely indicate to those who are not a good fit that they can move along to the next option. It's a huge win-win when done right.

Here's an example of showing personality in a way that draws in the ideal customer while politely moving on from the non-ideal customer. Harley Jordan asks how you act when you are mad, and the first answer choice starts with "stomp in adult" which might be one of the funniest and most descriptive phrases I've seen this year. It not only perfectly conveys what she means by this answer choice, but it also shows Harley's communication style. If you get it, and it makes you chuckle but also think to yourself then great, you are a perfect fit to collaborate with Harley. If not, then you'll move on and she won't have to deal with people who are not the right fit.

Courtesy: Harley Jordan

People are naturally attracted to vulnerability, and showing your true self is vulnerable. It's definitely possible that you will get some haters if you show your true communication style through the way you ask quiz questions. But it's also true that if you show your true self within the quiz that you'll see a ton of success with your ideal audience.

1. Help quiz takers reach an ecstatic flow state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the author of Flow, a book about reaching ecstasy in real life. He watched people during WW2 lose hope in life as they as their reality crumble around them. But not everyone fell apart. Some people found a way to reach ecstasy, which he defines as a state of being outside of reality, by getting into a flow state.

A flow state is when you are working on a task where you feel like you have skill but are also being challenged. Now with a set of quiz questions the level of ecstasy can reach all time highs because the subject where you have skill but are also being challenge on is you. What I'm saying is that you want to transport people to world where they are the center of attention, this world lives outside of reality, and everything in this world is about them. Now they are being asked questions about themselves. They have skill, because they know themselves. But they are also being challenged because some of the questions make them think about aspects of themselves they might be less familiar with.

What that looks like for your quiz depends on what your audience knows about themselves or how much they know about a topic if you are doing an assessment or knowledge test. You want your quiz to help them reach a flow state by dialing in your questions to challenge them but only to the point where they still have enough skills at their disposal to answer the questions reasonably easily. If you make the questions too hard it will make people anxious. If you make them too easy it will lead to boredom.

NASA's Artemis Mission quiz does a great job of transporting to a flow state (get it, because it's a space mission quiz). This particular question exemplifies what I'm talking about with reaching the flow state. The question asks "What type of challenge are you excited to solve?" and it takes you to flow because 1) It asks you about a scenario outside of reality. 2) It challenges you to think about yourself in a way that you might not typically. 3) The subject of the question is the quiz taker, and people like to talk about themselves.

If you can take people to an ecstatic flow state within your quiz questions, you can achieve quiz completion rates as high as 90%, even with quizzes where the average person spend 5-10 minutes taking the quiz. It's really incredible, and psychologically if you optimize for three steps you can achieve this for your quiz. Here's a recap.

1. Make every question about the quiz taker, they are the subject of the question

2. Make the questions somewhat challenging, but make sure the quiz taker still feels like they have the skills to answer the questions

3. Make the questions transport the quiz taker to a different mind state where they can think outside of their current reality.

4. By the end of your question asking, you should have so much information about your quiz taker that you can directly help them get what they want in regards to your quiz topic.

5. In your question asking, you should gather information about the quiz taker so that when you present them with suggestions for how they can get more of what they want by working with you or buying your products, you are able to present those suggestions directly in the context of what the quiz taker wants and who they are. You want the suggestions to sound like "Here is how you can achieve your ideal state of being, and here's how I could assist you."

While we are talking about quiz questions I want to go over the types of logic you can use to make your quiz function as you desire. There are four main types of quiz logic.

This type of logic is the most versatile. The way it works is that every question has answer choices, and every answer choice correlates, or gives a +1, to one ore more of the results of the quiz. As someone goes through the quiz and answer the questions they are racking up +1's for the different results, and whichever one they get the most +1's for at the end of the quiz is the one they see as their result.

Using this type of logic you can realistically make any quiz somewhat accurate so long as there are different results you want to distinguish between for the quiz taker.

Personality with multiple outcomes shown.

If you want to give people more than one outcome, meaning to show them a ranking of which result they are most like, you can turn on show multiple results within Interact and show a ranking. This way, instead of it just being the result they get the most +1's for, it can be a ranking of all of their top results, starting with showing their top 2 and going up to as many as you'd like within reason.

This is also called a scored quiz. It works in the following way.

Here's a reference for what the point values associated with each answer choice can look like, and the result ranges that correspond.

With a scored quiz you can assess pretty much anything to see where someone lands. Like for example, LeadershipIQ has an empathy assessment that measures your level of listening with empathy. Each answer has a point value and your level of overall empathy is based on how many points you get. The more points you get, the more empathetic you are, the less points you get, the less empathetic.

This is the type of scoring system you might have seen printed in the back of magazines in the past, since it's an easy tally system for people to use if it's written down. With interact, all that tallying happens automatically so the user has a smooth experience just answering the questions and then seeing their score.

Courtesy: LeadershipIQ

A knowledge test, also called a trivia quiz, figures out how much you know about a topic.

Here's a perfect example from the Natural History Museum. The quiz is about identifying birdsong birds. Each question has images of the types of birds that are the possible choices. Two are wrong answers and one is a right answer.

Courtesy: Natural History Museum

You can see all your answers at the end with an answer key. As the quiz creator you can also choose to show the correct answers right away after each question. This gives people immediate feedback and I personally really enjoy taking these types of quizzes. It's one of the more under-rated features within the Interact quiz platform.

You can use a quiz to very specifically make recommendations for people and assess things. This is highly versatile, you can pretty much figure out anything because it's like turning a flow chart into an interactive quiz that someone can go through using if-then logic.

And here's a real-world use case for a branching logic guide quiz. It's a pre-qualifying assessment for CoconutVA, and they use branching logic to assess if someone is the right fit to work with them.

Courtesy: CoconutVA

You can create branches that lead to different outcomes with this type of quiz. It is highly powerful and elegantly simple to set up with our drag and drop branching logic quiz builder. I like using this format, it's so versatile. It is more involved as you'll have to map everything out, but once you do it is a great experience for the quiz taker.

The optional opt-in form you can turn on for quizzes appears at the end of the questions, before the quiz results. If you've dialed in your quiz idea and questions, then the person taking your quiz should already be very comfortable with you and interested in learning more from you on the topic of the quiz. So that is exactly what you should tell them you will do if they choose to opt in.

Let them know they can continue to learn from you, should they choose to opt in, then make the opt in optional, unless you need to know who took the quiz because you are following up personally.

Here's an example of how to ask for the email gracefully from Gretchen Rubin on her Habits Quiz. You can see that she makes it clear what you will be receiving if you choose to opt-in, not just for now, but also in the future. She makes sure you know the value that will be provided over email should you choose to subscribe. Then she also has the skip this step option if someone doesn't want to opt in.

Even though for many the main draw of using quizzes is lead generation and list building, I'm spending very little time talking about the opt-in form. That's because as long as your opt-in form clearly informs people about what additional value they will be getting if they opt-in, there really isn't much else to say on this form. People will opt in because your quiz is on a relevant topic and your questions make them feel seen, heard, understood, and make them believe you can actually help them get what they want.

If those other things aren't in place there's really nothing you can say at this point that will convince them to opt in. That's why we put the opt in form at the end of the quiz, because the quiz is like a free trial of what it's like to work with you, then this opt-in is the first thing of value you are asking from the quiz taker in order to continue working with you.

The best way to use your quizzes is by embedding them onto your website. Whether you are creating a primary quiz that's on yoursite.com/quiz or a quiz that's embedded into a page or blog post like yoursite.com/blog/leadership-style-quiz, you want your quiz to be on your domain so all traffic and authority is going to your website. It also helps with building brand awareness if people see your logo and brand and become familiar with it. We built interact to be embeddable from the start, because we wanted people to use quizzes within their existing marketing strategy. So whichever of the following options you choose for embedding you can't go wrong.

The full quiz funnel option means this.

Let's look at this in practice from our friend Amy Porterfield.

Here's the cover page, this is a custom page on her site, not Interact.

Here's the take quiz page, another page where the quiz is embedded, designed to be a smooth transition from the cover page. Quiz takers take the quiz and the opt-in form shows up on this page.

Here's the result page, another custom page on her site, not Interact.

This is the ideal full funnel quiz where you are customizing everything and it's a completely branded experience where the quiz functions as a logic mechanism to get people to the right results pages.

This setup is the hardest, you have to create a cover page, a take quiz page, and a page for each result, so you are in for at least 5 pages on your site. But, you can make it as custom as you would like.

This option is where you embed your quiz on your website, like this from our friend Kaye Putnam. People take the quiz and the opt-in form shows up all on this page.

You can also optimize this page for SEO by adding content to the page. Since people will be taking the quiz on this page that's great for SEO. All the questions happen on this page.

At the end of the quiz you redirect to your own custom results landing pages. Kaye talks about this in depth on her video. Each page is set up on her site so at the end of the quiz you can set up that quiz to the full depth you want.

This option allows you to fully optimize for SEO and user experience and is a little less work than the first option. Honestly both are great and it's up to you on your choice.

This option is for using quizzes within your content strategy. The example below shows an individual quiz page from our friends at Salary Transparent Street. Using a quiz this way you are embedding the quiz into a page using all the defaults from Interact, which I must say still look really good, and people like the design of it. But it's less customizable than if you are making all your own pages obviously.

Brands will often create quiz hubs where all the quizzes can be housed and people can reference them over time. Here's an example from Direct Energy where they have a quiz hub.

Which option you choose depends on your needs for your quiz. You can also do a mix of these options. For example, if you wanted one full funnel quiz with custom pages for your primary quiz, then you also wanted to create a quiz hub for SEO, you could do both option 1 and option 3.

How you promote a quiz depends largely on what type of quiz you have created. If your quiz is a primary quiz, that will be used as your main lead magnet, and the onboarding system for your business across all channels, then you'll want to do use pretty much every promotion strategy below. If your quiz is a piece of content that will fit into your content strategy then you may choose to promote it less than the primary quiz, or you can do all the methods. Whatever works for you! I'm just going to show everything I've seen to work really well for promoting quizzes and you can choose.

Place a prominent call to action for your quiz on your website. You can make it the primary call to action, the secondary call to action, or add your quiz(zes) to your menu navigation. Keep in mind that the more prominently you show the quiz the more people will take it.

You can also make your quiz a pop-up or announcement bar on your website. With interact we have built-in promotion options so you can turn your quiz into a popup or announcement bar. Or you can use your built-in announcement bar/pop-up options and link to a page where your quiz is embedded. Whatever works best for you.

Post a post to promote your quiz in your style. Use a ManyChat automation so people can comment "QUIZ" to get a link to your quiz instead of having to go through your link in bio.

Courtesy: Advice with Erin

You can do the same on LinkedIn, posting the quiz with the same tone and cadence you normally use to post on the platform.