The absolute best quizzes give the quiz takers (your ideal audience) what they want. Only you truly know what they want, and you only know that by talking to your ideal audience over and over again.

For example, Gretchen Rubin is a NYT best-selling author and she knows that her ideal audience wants to have better habits so they can be happier, so she made a “Habits for Happiness” quiz.

Cassandra Sethi knows her audience wants to know their ideal style, so she made a quiz for men and another for women, that help you find your ideal style.

Hannah, founder of Salary Transparent Street, knows that her audience wants to know if they are underpaid, so she made a quiz “Are You Underpaid?”

Jenna Kutcher knows that her audience wants to level up in their lives and careers, so she made a quiz “The Level Up Quiz”

These are all highly successful lead generation quizzes, so let’s look at how they are constructed.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the language throughout the quiz is hyper-specific. You can tell that it’s written for a certain audience, and not written for other audience.

This creates an insider effect that clearly signals to the ideal customer that this quiz is for them. It also quickly weeds out people who are not the right fit for your business.

Second, you’ll see that the questions being asked demonstrate a deep and broad understanding of the quiz taker. The questions being asked are questions you would only ask if you really know the person taking the quiz and what they are going through.

This effect is called the reverse qualification effect, where the quiz taker is actually qualifying you as someone they might want to work with by seeing if the questions you are asking actually make sense to them and show that you know what they are dealing with.

Third, you’ll see that these quizzes offer more in-depth coverage on the topic of the quiz when they ask for an email address lead at the end of the quiz. By this point, if someone has answered all the questions of the quiz, they’ve already seen that the person who created the quiz knows who they are, what they want, and how to provide value, so the opt-in form is simply an offer to continue that conversation.

Fourth, you see that the results of the quiz, immediately after the opt-in form, not just over email, give the quiz taker what they want.

If what they want is an answer to a question, it’s clearly given. If what they want is to learn something about themselves, that is shown in a clear and concise way. If what they want is a product recommendation, that’s given.

Image courtesy Advice with Erin.

Fifth, the quiz taker receives an immediate email with tons of additional value, personalized to their quiz outcome. This is vital because you’re now transitioning over to communicating by email versus through the quiz itself. The best quizzes over deliver by email because you don’t want people to feel like they’ve been bait-and-switched where they put in their email and then get virtually no value. So the best quizzes give a ton of value over email.

These are the best practices of creating lead generation quizzes.

Stay focused on these principles and your quiz will perform really well. It’s all about understanding what your audience wants and giving it to them in a personalized way through the segmentation power of quizzes.

If you can stay in the mindset of “How do I help my audience get what they want using the ability of a quiz to provide different answers to different people” then you will be sure to have success.

If you flip over and start thinking about what you want, and your goals, then you are toast, and a quiz won’t work.