This transcript has been edited for length. To get the full measure, listen to the podcast.
Michelle Huff: Can you tell me and the audience more about yourself and your company Interact?
Josh Haynam: We have created software for building quizzes, which are the hot thing online right now. You see all those quizzes on Facebook and everywhere. But we’ve created a tool where businesses can build their own quizzes. Everybody’s seen quizzes on news sites and Buzzfeed and stuff like that. But how many have used them in their own companies as a way of doing marketing? Almost none.
Why are online quizzes good for lead generation?
Michelle: Why do you think quizzes are a good tactic for lead generation?
Josh: I think it’s because people take them. And it’s so funny how many people I talk to tell me they take quizzes and they act like it’s some big secret that they take them. I won’t tell anybody if you don’t want me to, but you are the same as everyone else. And it’s everybody. I helped at my sister’s elementary school career day. She’s a second-grade teacher. And I was taking quizzes with the kids. And they loved it. They were so involved. They would answer the questions by raising their hands. And they were just yelling and screaming about their favorite choices. And then we’ve also had quizzes run with companies like Jiffy Lube, where the average quiz taker is a 70-year old male. And that’s like your grandpa.
They’re taking these quizzes. They’re commenting on Facebook. They’re fighting with each other in the comments about which outcome they got on the quiz. And it’s everybody. It’s kindergarteners through your grandpa. And it’s across the board, everybody enjoys taking quizzes. And when something like that happens where there’s a massive universal appeal, brands have to pay attention. Because there’s an opportunity there for you as a marketer to lasso that tool, lasso that enthusiasm that people have about this concept, and use it to grow your brand.
So, you take a quiz that works in your industry, like let’s say you sell coffee, you make a what-kind-of-coffee-drink-are-you quiz, and you share that out onto social channels, and your website, and things like that. And you use it to draw people in. And then within the quizzes built on our platform, you can ask people for their email address to see the results. Then you have that contact. And you can follow up. And you can segment those emails based on what kind of coffee drink they are for that example. And then you can send somebody a latte email versus a cappuccino email.
And it’s magical, because you’re sending them stuff they’re interested in, which is one of the huge challenges with marketing in general, is making sure that people care about the stuff that you’re sending.
How do B2B marketers use online quizzes for lead generation?
Michelle: How should marketers approach quizzes when marketing to a business?
Josh: The key with quizzes is to remember that even within an organization, you’re selling to a person. And that person has interests, that person has things they like, they don’t like.
One good example is an enterprise security software that’s sold to large organizations. The way they made their quiz was they asked what’s your IT personality? They’re selling to IT people who buy the security software, which is sold to the company. But the person who buys it is an IT person.
Selling to a person makes sense when you understand what their interests are and what they would be drawn to. And then you try to cater to that. That’s an effective way of making the quiz for a B2B.
Michelle: Is there a delivery format or way people like to take quizzes better than others? Is it better to have it on your website? Is it better to be in social channels where they’re kind of already in a social kind of mood? What tends to work?
Josh: There’s a stack rank of what works well. Number one is Facebook. That’s where most of these things live. It’s where a majority of the traffic to quizzes comes from. The ones that do go viral, it’s on Facebook. And number two is on your website. With our platform you can launch the quiz as an announcement bar across the top of your site, or as a popup that comes up on your site after a certain time delay. Then people see it when they come to your webpage, and they take the quiz there, and you’re able to capture contact information from more of your website visitors. Those are the two main ways. We do see it used in email from time to time. It’s not nearly as effective. It’s really about Facebook and then about your website traffic.
Post quiz follow up and building out a nurturing cadence
Michelle: How do you apply your test results to a lead gen nurturing campaign?
Josh: In terms of bridging that gap over to following up with folks, you have somebody that found your quiz on Facebook or on your site, and they’ve opted in, and now you’re trying to connect that over to a follow-up email. The best way to do it is to segment your list depending on the quiz outcome. The first email you’ll send is a longer version of their quiz results. So, your quiz result was latte, let me tell you more about it. And you give them the full description via email. And what that does is even though they’ve just seen that same description for the most part within the actual quiz. Now it’s in their inbox and it feels familiar. And it’s a connection, it’s a bridge.
And now they’re seeing the same thing, they’re used to it, they know what it is. And it kind of establishes that connection between this quiz they took on Facebook, and suddenly you are being in their email inbox. That’s the important bridge email. Then the next email you send still has to do with the quiz. And what you can do is you can send out, ‘hey, here’s the other quiz results that you could have gotten but you didn’t get.’ Because people are always curious. They’re like, ‘not a latte, but like maybe if I was a cappuccino, what does that mean about me? I really want to know.’
Michelle: What if I was just an espresso shot, what does that tell me about myself?
Josh: What does that say about my personality? Very, very important. And you can send that out. So now that email is a little bit different. It’s not exactly about the quiz result. But it’s still very connected back to the original quiz. You’ve got that bridge. And then the bridge kind of expands a little bit. So that’s your second email. And then your third email is a list of suggestions for the latte person. This is obviously all about coffee, but it can go a lot of different routes.
Michelle: I’m in Seattle. I love coffee. This very much resonates with me. I’m a latte.
Josh: Perfect. So, you send a list of suggestions for a latte person. And maybe on that email you have another offer. It could be to schedule a consultation, or check out a video and try to get people to engage a bit more. But now that email is still related back to the quiz, but it’s getting a little bit further away because you’re offering new suggestions, now you’re offering new content. It’s not just from the quiz. So that’s your third email. And then the fourth email is where you do some sort of offer. You say, ‘hey, we can help out latte people to increase their productivity by 100 percent by drinking two lattes. And you should buy those from us, so click here to get your coupon.’
In other cases, it’s ‘join our webinar’ or schedule a consultation, or a free demo, watch our video, whatever it is, whatever your next offer, that’s what happens in the fourth email. You’ve got this series of four emails that are the onboarding stuff. And then you typically will filter them back into a regular drip campaign that nurtures them along a life cycle your company has set up. But those first four emails go out within the first week or two. They warm people up. They get them used to your brand sending out content. And then you’ve kind of opened the door to other content as well.
Michelle: You mentioned Facebook. Do people, from a B2B standpoint, do people take quizzes on LinkedIn? Is that something they do? Or have you started to see that more and more?
Josh: We have. LinkedIn’s big on their content stuff internally now. So, people are creating quizzes, and they’re putting them into those posts, and linking to the quizzes from those posts, and seeing some pretty good results. We’ve seen some that have done quite well on LinkedIn. It’s kind of a burgeoning channel. But it’s picking up steam. And in terms of B2B stuff, it’s the best place to go.
Michelle: Awesome. I’m sold. So, beyond the quiz technology, what do you recommend having in place, especially if I wanted to really use it from a lead gen standpoint? How does that whole flow work?
Josh: I think the main thing to think about before doing any sort of lead gen is how you’re going to follow up with people. With a quiz, it’s ideal to have those follow up emails already prepared. I think the most important thing to have is a solid onboarding sequence that you are sending to new leads already. Because if you have that, then the quiz can do well to get you new leads and plug them into that sequence. But if you don’t have the sequence, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good to have the leads if you don’t have anything to do with them after the fact. So, the most important thing is to have an onboarding flow. If you have that, you can plug a quiz right into it quickly and see how well it does for you.
Michelle: Well I learned a lot about quizzes today. How could people learn more about you and Interact? Where should they go? How could they learn more?
Josh: Our website is tryinteract.com. I write on our blog quite a bit, so tryinteract.com/blog, which is more of the background and kind of what’s going on behind the scenes, the psychology of it, the statistics behind why things work certain ways. That’s where you can learn more about the actual science behind what’s going on.