Boost Your Quiz Conversions with Customer Avatars

When you sit down at your computer and open a new document, do you ever find it hard to start writing? 

Some call it writer’s block, while others say their creative well has run dry or that they lack inspiration.

More often than not, writing content for your business is difficult simply because you don’t know who you’re writing to exactly. And so, you stare at the blinking cursor on your screen, wishing you knew how to begin.

When you know who you’re trying to communicate with, your marketing and messaging will instantly improve. Deciding who your ideal client or customer is is important, but how do you go about this process? Many business influencers will refer to this as defining your target market or buyer persona, but we like to call it your customer avatar.

A customer avatar will help you better understand your audience members by noting what they have in common. Then you can meet their challenges with solutions they’re willing to pay for. 

We know that each person is inherently unique, but there are traits and characteristics a group of individuals may share. Identifying these common traits will make it easier to authentically market your services or products to those target customers. 

Throughout this article, we will explore what a customer avatar is, the essential information one should include, and how to use your customer avatar to create a better, more engaging quiz.

You can continue reading or jump to your desired section here:

What is a customer avatar?

A customer avatar is a generalized representation of your ideal customer. It explains the type of person you would like to work with or create products for. A customer avatar can also be referred to as your ideal customer profile (ICP), target audience, buyer persona, marketing persona, or ideal customer avatar (ICA).

While customer avatars are typically fictional examples, it’s best to create an ICA inspired by real people in your audience. 

Start by thinking about past clients you’ve worked with, where everyone had a great experience, or past students who completed your course and frequently share it with their friends. Identifying who these people are will help you understand what they have in common. What made them a fantastic fit for your business? Why would you want to help them again?

Unlocking these answers is the key to understanding who you already connect with inside your business. This is a helpful exercise because the better you know your target audience, the better you’ll be able to serve them. The result is an increase in lead generation and sales.

Benefits of defining your customer avatar

There are many benefits to creating a customer avatar that accurately represents people in your ideal audience. Before you create one for your business, let’s talk about why you should set aside time to complete this exercise effectively. 

ICAs communicate how much you understand your audience

Quiz marketing, like other areas of marketing, is all about helping audience members increase self-understanding. By adding value to your brand through content, you’ll make a lasting impression.

While you may think you can help everyone who comes your way, it’s best to focus on the group of people you’re most equipped to work with. You can decide who fits in this group by your professional experience, personal interests, or any number of factors. Once you’ve chosen a group of people, your job is to show them how much you understand them.

Your prospects want to know how you can help them, not how you can serve the masses. By following your ideal customer avatar, you’ll be that much more equipped to personalize your marketing so every piece of content feels like it’s been created and recommended specifically for them. Since 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides a personalized experience, it’s clear why defining your ICA is important when it comes to running a profitable, successful business.

ICAs produce better stories that convert

Much like entrepreneurs, novelists and poets see it as their responsibility to find their ideal audience. The most brilliant storytellers in history weren’t trying to craft stories to fit everyone’s desires and needs. Instead, they decided to break the mold and create stories with a specific group of people in mind.

No matter what you’re writing, you need to create stories that are worth reading and remembering. The only way to do that is to know who you’re trying to reach before you start writing. This is why many publishing houses require authors to write book proposals that clearly define their audience before considering their manuscript for publication.

As business owners, we also need to be storytellers who craft impactful messages for our audience. When our prospects feel connected to us and inspired by our brands, it’s easier to convert their initial interest into a purchase. This is especially true for brands that offer premium-priced products and services. 

Take a page from an author’s book and create your ICA early!

ICAs make it easier to define your niche

Most entrepreneurs agree that having a niche is a necessity, especially when it comes to creating an effective marketing strategy. The term “niche” has become a buzzword in the world of online business, but it simply refers to someone’s specialized area of business. You’ll need to know who your ideal customer is before you can define your niche

For example, it’s much easier to sell your services as a stationery creator if you design paper goods for newly engaged brides rather than trying to satisfy every potential type of customer. The same is true for a social media manager who only works with non-profit organizations rather than trying to serve corporate and small business clients as well.

By trying to connect with everyone, you end up connecting with no one or only on a surface level. We need deep, personal connections with our audience to show them we’re worthy of their attention and trust. That’s why you need an ICA.

ICAs help your audience identify as your target market

With a well-defined niche and customer avatar, new visitors or followers won’t have to guess who you serve. From your clear messaging, they’ll quickly determine if they fall into your ideal audience or not.

If they don’t fall into your target audience, they may still find value in your emails, blog articles, or social media posts. But you should continue to focus your messaging on your ideal customers since they will be more likely to buy from you.

So, where should you start with creating a strong customer avatar?

Let’s break down customer avatars into two main categories.

Demographics and psychographics 

Most customer avatars will consist of demographics and psychographics. Demographics are quantitative, while psychographics are qualitative—they can work together to create a clearer picture of who your ideal customer really is. Business owners typically start by defining their audience’s demographics first, which is a list of generalized factors that describe a person from an external view.

Demographics can include age, gender, ethnicity, location, or other factors that may be deemed important. You can be as specific as you’d like. These factors will create a solid foundation for your ideal customer profile, but they only skim the surface of what you need to know.

Next, you have psychographics, which focus on the psychological factors that influence your ideal customer. This can include someone’s habits, motivations, pain points, preferences, and defining traits. Psychographics give you the depth of understanding you need to start writing better content.

Again, it might be helpful to select people who have worked with you, bought a product from you, or are currently in your audience. This could help you create a customer avatar that feels more real. To give more clarity around creating your own ICA, let’s make a (mostly) fictional example in this next exercise.

The ideal customer profile template 

Now that you understand the difference between demographics and psychographics, you can put this knowledge into practice. By following our ideal customer profile template, you can create a customer avatar that will radically transform how you relate to and connect with your audience.

Your demographics should be pretty straightforward. If you need more help with filling out this section, look at the data inside your Google Analytics account or your social media business accounts. Since your demographics are largely quantitative, reviewing your analytics is a great place to start.

Audience Demographics:

Age: ______
Gender: ______
Location: ______
Education: ______
Income level: ______
Occupation: ______

Now let’s move on to your psychographics! 

This information will give you incredible insights into the mind of your ideal customer. Since defining your audience’s psychographics is about understanding how your ideal customer thinks, we’ll spend more time in this section.

You might be able to fill out most of these sections on your own, but collecting this qualitative data from your audience could help. Use customer surveys (which you can create inside a free Interact account), small focus groups, or 1:1 customer interviews.

If you feel like you have to guess at any point in this process, take the extra step of asking your audience. I made this step easier for you by including customer avatar questions you can ask inside your surveys and beyond.

Audience Psychographics:

Characteristics 

  • What three words would your family or friends use to describe you?
  • How do different people in your life see you?
  • What are you known for? How do you want to be remembered?
  • What are the defining characteristics of your personality? 
  • How would you describe your personality to a stranger?
  • When someone meets you for the first time, how do they perceive you?
  • Who are your heroes? Who do you look up to? 
  • Where do you hang out? Where can you be found on any given day?

Interests

  • What are your favorite hobbies?
  • If you’re not working, what are you usually doing?
  • What do you wish you had more time to do?
  • What does your ideal day look like?
  • What does rest and relaxation look like for you?
  • What skills would you like to build?
  • What do you like to read, watch, and listen to?

Challenges

  • What are you most challenged by?
  • What are your most significant pain points right now?
  • What solutions have you already explored to solve your problem? How effective have those solutions been?
  • If you had a magic pill to get rid of any problem, what would it be and why?
  • What are you challenged by at work, at home, in life, etc.?

Fears

  • What are you most afraid of? 
  • What keeps you up at night?
  • What keeps you from reaching your full potential?
  • What limiting beliefs do you have? How do they affect your everyday life?
  • What fears stand in your way of growth in a specific area in your life?
  • In what ways have you tried to stand up to your fears? What was that experience like?

Motivators

  • What motivates you?
  • What are you least motivated by?
  • What is your most valuable resource (time, money, energy, etc.)?
  • What areas of your life motivate you (work, family, community, personal life, faith, etc.)?
  • What are your current habits? How do they affect your purchasing decisions?

Desires

  • What are your biggest goals for the next year? Three years? Five years?
  • How would you describe your goal-setting style?
  • What does your ideal future look like?
  • What do you daydream about?
  • What dream feels out of reach but is still something you aspire to?
  • What do you want to achieve?
  • What legacy do you want to leave behind?

Of course, you don’t need to have your audience answer all of these questions. Instead, choose a few from this list that feel relevant to the information you need. Your customers’ responses should reveal how your ideal customer is wired and what’s really motivating them when they make purchasing decisions.

If you’re able to fill out the answers to most of these questions through your own research and experience, that’s great. However, it may be helpful to see an example of how to put this information together into a clear customer avatar. That’s what we’ll do next.

Get inspiration from our customer avatar example

Let’s use a simple customer avatar example created for Shaina Leis, a life coach and business educator who used her ICA when creating a career mindset quiz.

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After starting her business and creating a YouTube channel, Shaina began to notice what her favorite clients had in common: they were all women in their 20s hoping to ditch their cubicles to build a life and business they love.

While this insight gives Shaina a great start in understanding who her ideal customer is, it’s only the beginning of what she’ll uncover about them. She still needs to define the rest of her audience’s demographics, which you can see below.

Age: 25-35
Gender: Female
Location: Urban areas (like Chicago, LA, and NYC)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, likely a recent graduate
Income level: $50,000-$75,000
Occupation: Communications, marketing, or similar field

With more details coming to the surface, Shaina is able to get a general idea of who she is trying to attract. All of her messaging from here on out should target educated women in their 20s and 30s who are looking to escape their uninspiring day job.

But she still needs more information to write stories and content that will resonate with these women. She starts by gathering more intel from her audience. By working with a strategist and surveying her audience, she is able to complete her audience’s psychographics.

Characteristics:

  • They feel like they were made for more than a typical 9-to-5 routine.
  • They’re seen as multi-passionate people who are often creative.
  • Their loved ones describe them as considerate, intentional, and genuine. 
  • They would like to be described as bold, innovative, and brave.
  • They are rule followers to their core and don’t like to rock the boat.
  • They find themselves saying “yes” to almost every opportunity that comes their way, leading them to feel overwhelmed or burned out.

Interests:

  • Personal development junkies
  • Cozy but modern interior design
  • Yoga on the weekends
  • Throwback ’90s music 
  • Reality TV shows
  • Beach days

Challenges

  • Their family and friends tell them to choose a “stable” job over what they really want to pursue.
  • They’re not connected to many business owners who can give them guidance or mentorship.
  • This is the first business they’ve built, so it’s difficult to know where to start and how to grow it from there.
  • They don’t have awareness around their limiting beliefs but know they’re affecting their decision to take the leap. 
  • They tend to follow the rules and have perfectionist tendencies that can get in the way of taking calculated risks.

Fears

  • If they don’t take action soon, they’ll stay on the same uninspired path.
  • They’re afraid they don’t have what it takes to become a full-time entrepreneur. 
  • They’re worried about letting go of the financial security of their day job.
  • One of their worst fears is letting down the people they love most.
  • They don’t want to make a mistake or regret changing their career.

Motivators

  • They are highly motivated by freedom and flexibility, especially when it comes to their schedule and the projects they work on.
  • They feel confident in taking action as long as they have the right mindset and direction when moving forward.
  • They don’t mind hustling for a season to reach their goals.
  • They don’t want to live life on autopilot. 
  • They’re motivated to get unstuck so they know what next steps to take in making their dream business a reality.

Desires:

  • They want to build a career that feels exciting and fulfilling. 
  • They want to gain instant clarity around what they’re meant to do and have peace of mind that they made the right decisions.
  • They’d like to spend part of the year as a digital nomad, working on their laptop from the beach or another interesting location.
  • They’d like to feel confident in their career path and feel like it effortlessly fits their ideal lifestyle. 

After listing all of these psychographics in her customer avatar, Shaina understands who her ideal customer is. Now it’s your turn to follow the same exercise and make your own customer avatar.

You might be wondering what you can do with your customer avatar after you’ve created it. While it’s helpful to review your customer avatar whenever you’re writing new content—like an email, sales page, or social media caption—you can also create an interactive quiz that’s influenced by your ICA.

Use your customer avatar to make a quiz

Wouldn’t it be nice to find a fun way to connect with your ideal audience without adding tons of work to your plate? It’s possible with an automated quiz!

An interactive quiz is arguably the best way to create a lasting relationship with your customers, and it runs completely on autopilot. All you need to do is put in some intentional work upfront, and you’ll end up with an engaging freebie that you can use for years!

With conversion rates around 40%-50% or higher, quizzes outperform most lead magnets, downloadables, and freebies. This is because quizzes are built with your customer avatar in mind, helping your audience self-select answers that fit them best so you can recommend resources and products.

Since a quiz is interactive by nature, it creates a memorable experience that leads to more leads, email subscribers, and sales. If you’re ready to explore quiz marketing for your own brand, we’re here to help!

Below is a step-by-step guide to help you use your customer avatar to create a quiz, no matter what niche you’re in. To illustrate each step, I included real examples from Shaina’s quiz so you can see what this looks like in action.

Decide on a quiz topic and title

Your first step is to brainstorm a few ideas for a quiz. You may already have a winner in mind, but if you haven’t come up with an idea you love, here are a few things to consider.

You should create a quiz that either:

  • Focuses on a topic or subject that you’re an expert in
  • Fits your niche and communicates what you want to be known for  
  • Explores a shared interest with your audience
  • Gives your audience a product recommendation based on their preferences
  • Tries to understand if your audience is the right fit for your services
  • Or satisfies all of the above

Once you have a list of ideas, narrow it down to your favorite. If you’re deciding between a couple of options, ask for advice from a few people in your audience or friends who intimately know your business. They may be able to give you the extra validation you need to choose a topic.

Next you’ll need to create a title for your quiz. We typically recommend writing your title in a question format. When visitors or followers find your quiz, they’ll read the question and feel intrigued, wondering what their answer might be. This entices them to click the “take quiz” button and complete the quiz so they can reveal their answer.

Shaina initially thought about creating a quiz title like “What is Your Passion?” until she decided to get more specific based on what she learned about her audience in the customer avatar phase. She settled on a great quiz title: “What Career Mindset Is Keeping You Stuck?”

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Here are a few other quiz title formulas you can use to create your own:

  • What Type of ____ Are You?
  • What Is Your ____ Superpower?
  • What Is Your ____  Style?
  • What Is Your ____ Archetype?
  • Which ____ Is Your Perfect Match?
  • What Kind of ____ Are You?
  • What Kind of ____ Do You Need?
  • How Much Do You Know About ____?
  • How ____ Are You?

You don’t have to follow these formulas, but they may help you get a head start. Once your quiz title is set in stone, focus on writing a one- to two-sentence description of your quiz below your cover photo. 

Shaina kept it simple with “Claim your passion and build your dream career,” but you can take inspiration from other business owners by viewing other live quiz examples.

Write your quiz results based on your customer avatar

While you may think the next step is to create your questions and answers, you should first define your quiz result types. This may seem counterintuitive since the quiz-taker will see the quiz questions right after they click the “take quiz” button, but you need to nail down your quiz results before tackling the rest of the quiz content.

This is a perfect time to review your customer avatar. Many quiz creators build quiz result types based on the characteristics of their most common customer personas. You previously defined what their traits, habits, and motivations are inside your ICA, so you’ve already done some of the work.

Now it’s time to pull all of your knowledge together so you can create strong quiz result descriptions. We recommend writing a minimum of three to four sentences about each quiz type, but we love when quiz creators like Shaina go above and beyond.

Shaina used elements from her customer avatar to create four main quiz types, one of them being the Investigator and Soul Searcher. 

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We can see from reading this description that someone who gets this result is:

  • A lifelong student
  • Passionate about self-reflection
  • Not afraid to make investments in their personal development
  • Has a hard time staying patient 
  • Needs extra guidance and direction

Some of these characteristics and traits directly relate with those from the ICA activity. That’s why it’s so helpful to have your customer avatars created before you make your quiz!

You’ll also notice that Shaina ended her quiz result description by telling quiz-takers what comes next. Since she is sending a free PDF guide through email, she directs her quiz-takers to their inbox to download it. You can do the same thing when you use an email sign-up form inside Interact!

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To take this step even further, you might consider creating quiz result landing pages on your website. It’s a great way to impress your audience while giving them even more value before you begin emailing them. 

Quiz creators like Bethany from Primally Pure and Kaye Putnam have found it easier to convert quiz-takers into excited buyers with their quiz result landing pages. They’ve both generated more than 6-figures of passive income from their quiz. Quiz result landing pages take more work, of course, but they can seriously pay off! 

Choose questions and answers with quiz logic in mind

Now it’s time to create your quiz questions and answers! We usually recommend sticking with seven to ten quiz questions. Then you don’t have to worry about overwhelming your audience with too many questions, and they’re encouraged to complete the quiz. 

Some quiz creators choose to have fewer questions, but you may not be able to collect enough data from those questions to give an accurate and in-depth quiz result. As you begin to brainstorm quiz questions, make a list of any that come to mind. They don’t have to be ordered yet.

If you want more questions to choose from, get inspiration from this list of 50 Quiz Questions You Should Be Asking. We also have more questions you can pull from in our growing library of Interact quiz templates.

Once you narrow down your favorite questions, reorder them so each question flows naturally to the next, creating a memorable experience for your quiz-taker.

Next up is writing answers that connect with your ideal customers. You can do this by ensuring each answer option correlates with a specific quiz type. This is why it’s better to start with defining your quiz types! Shaina will show you how it’s done with an example. 

Remember how I said it’s valuable to ask your ideal customers about the three words that best describe them? You can also ask this through a quiz question. It will give you insights into their personality, all while keeping the tone of your quiz fun and lighthearted.

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If we reverse engineer Shaina’s quiz, we can easily see how the answer option of “reflective, thoughtful, deeper thinker” fits perfectly into the Investigator and Soul Searcher quiz result type. However, her audience doesn’t know the results options yet. This means quiz-takers can answer the questions honestly while the quiz automatically provides them with the right result upon completion.

You may want to add questions that are just for fun. This is especially important if your quiz covers a serious topic. Business influencer Jenna Kutcher recommends adding two or three fun questions if your quiz is about seven to ten questions.

When you add a fun question, you can decide whether you want it to correlate with a specific quiz result type. Inside Interact, it’s possible to include questions that don’t affect the quiz-taker’s final result, so you can focus these questions on delivering a fun quiz-taking experience.

Shaina included the below movie-themed question for fun, but each buzzword or phrase correlates with a specific result type. It’s a delightful way to add pop culture references without distracting from the main point of the quiz.

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You can do the same while adding stock photos or GIFs from our image library inside the Interact quiz building platform. We make it really easy to find the right images for your quiz!

Write personalized emails in a follow-up email sequence

If you decide to collect email addresses after someone completes your quiz (which we highly recommend), then you’ll need to write a follow-up email sequence. There’s nothing worse than hearing crickets after signing up for an email list.

Instead of making your audience wait, we recommend sending them a series of emails right away. Your email marketing platform will automate these emails, so you don’t have to lift a finger after it’s put in place. Interact integrates with most email service providers, so this process should be incredibly simple.

Here’s a sample quiz marketing funnel so you can see how this series of emails will come together: 

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To summarize this graphic, you’ll should create four personalized emails:

  • Email 1: Personal welcome and review of the person’s quiz result type
  • Email 2: Educational tips and advice based on your quiz topic
  • Email 3: Case study or personal story that relates to your quiz topic
  • Email 4: Call-to-action with a sales pitch or a list of resources for more information

After this series, you may wish to send ongoing newsletters or use a welcome email sequence. Some people add quiz-takers to sales email sequences after they’ve completed this quiz-related email sequence, but it’s completely up to you. Review your sales strategy to determine what next step is best for your ideal clients.

Shaina’s quiz leads to a follow-up sequence that includes a freebie guide based on each subscriber’s quiz type and accompanying email content. She gives resource recommendations from her blog and YouTube channel and additional tips on how to transform career mindsets based on personality traits.

You can do the same by sharing advice, stories, and tips that will help your audience solve whatever problem they’re facing. Remember to add personalized details about their type where you can! This will help your subscribers feel like you know and understand them in a deeper way beyond the quiz. 

Publish and share your quiz

I’m excited to see what kind of quiz you create after your customer avatar inspires you! Once all of these steps have been completed, it’s time to publish your quiz. You can preview your quiz to ensure everything looks just right before it goes live. 

After you hit the publish button, there are a few steps you can take to make sure more of your audience finds your quiz. One is to embed your quiz on your website. No matter what platform you host your website on, you’ll be able to easily input our automatically generated code into your template or custom site. 

It’s a smart move to create a separate landing page for your quiz, much like Shaina’s example. You’ll be able to link directly to it while keeping your audience on your site.

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After embedding your quiz into your website, you can share it on social media. Showcase it on all of your platforms in case people in your ideal audience follow you in different places.

Shaina knows much of her audience is on YouTube, so she shared her quiz with her nearly 50,000 subscribers through a dedicated video. This led to a sharp increase in the number of people taking her quiz in its first week.

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She also shared her news about launching the quiz on Instagram and other social media platforms. You can follow the same strategy by promoting your quiz on social media

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For even more inspiration, check out how fellow coach Ashley Beaudin created a quiz that became a social media sensation!

Wrapping Up

You have everything you need to create a customer avatar that fits your unique audience. Get started by testing our tool and see if it works for you. If you haven’t signed up for a free Interact account yet, what are you waiting for? 

Here are some of the things we covered in this article:

  • What is a customer avatar?
  • Benefits of defining your customer avatar
  • Demographics and psychographics
  • Our ideal customer profile template
  • Getting inspiration from our customer avatar example
  • Using your customer avatar to make a quiz

All that’s left is for you to make your own quiz. We can’t wait to see what you create!

What is the best quiz for you business?

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