I was first introduced to quizzes as a marketing tool nearly a decade ago while attending an event where Sally Hogshead was a speaker. Sally is a branding expert and creator of The Fascination Advantage®, a quiz/assessment tool that measures how others perceive you.
After delivering a powerful keynote about how others perceive us, Sally invited the audience of hundreds of people to take her quiz. Phones quickly lit up the room. Talk about a powerful way to engage an audience, and perhaps more importantly, capture their contact information. These efforts propelled two of her books to the New York Times bestsellers lists, likely due to the massive email list she’s amassed from those who’ve taken her popular quiz.
Clearly an innovator, she turned the world of personality quizzes upside down and has since had over one million people take her quiz. By the way, the quiz costs $59, but is bundled and sold to her audiences along with her keynotes and training programs. So, it’s not only a fabulous lead magnet, it’s a phenomenal revenue-generator.
More recently, I interviewed Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith for our weekly podcast. A physician and author of several books, she launched a publicity tour in support of her most recent book, Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity.
Publicity tours can be challenging when it comes to book sales because listeners often think, “I’ll look up that book later,” and then forget about it. Dr. Dalton-Smith decided to convert her audience into mailing list subscribers by creating a Rest Quiz. She let audiences on her tour know they could take it for free to learn about what kinds of rest they needed.
Over 200k people have taken her quiz so far, yet her book launched just a year ago. She created the quiz herself using a free Worldpress plugin. (By the way, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith is speaking at the Fall 2020 Nonfiction Writers Conference where she will share her tips for creating lead magnets and profitable online courses.)
Following the podcast interview I conducted with Dr. Dalton-Smith, a member of our Nonfiction Authors Association community decided to launch his own quiz. Steve Friedman is the author of In Search of Courage: An Introvert’s Story. He designed a quiz to help people learn their introvert superpower, and over 600 people took the quiz during its launch. Steve reports the quiz has been the best lead magnet he’s used so far. I expect those numbers will multiply rapidly in the coming months and years.
I decided our community needs a quiz, too! So I got to work creating The Author Platform Quiz, which assesses your book marketing efforts and goals and provides specific, customized tips for boosting book sales. You can take the quiz here.
How To Create Your Own Quiz
There are all kinds of quiz tools available to produce a quiz. Many offer free trials that unlock more features when you become a monthly subscriber, with rates ranging from $10 to $100 per month. I conducted quite a bit of research while assessing tools. Following are some of the top options I discovered.
Typeform – This is the tool I chose for the Author Platform Quiz because I wanted something that provides customized feedback for users. Instead of simply tabulating a score and basing the results on that, Typeform offers logic tools that allow you to create custom responses to each and every quiz question and answer. It is also user-friendly and was far easier to create than I had anticipated.
Surveymonkey – I’ve been a subscribing user of Surveymonkey for years. It’s a great tool for creating surveys and assessments, though I couldn’t easily find a way to integrate the logic of customized responses to questions. This may be an available feature, but I couldn’t find it. But if you want to create questionnaires, this is an excellent tool.
Riddle – This popular platform offers 15 types of quizzes, personality assessments and surveys that you can customize for your needs. Like most of the others listed here, it also integrates with tools like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Quiz Maker – This platform boasts its ease of use as being a key feature, which may be helpful for those who aren’t tech-savvy.
Google Forms – This is a completely free tool from Google where you can create questionnaires and simple quizzes. Though it’s easy to use, it lacks design customization so the appearance of your forms will be rather bland.
WordPress Plugins – There are a number of tools that either integrate with WordPress or can be added as a plugin to your site. Here are some to consider, based on the highest starred reviews: Quiz and Survey Master, Quiz Maker, and Formidable Form Builder.
Let us know how quiz marketing works for you!
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And don’t forget to take the Author Platform Quiz to get customized tips for improving your marketing efforts and boosting book sales!
