Jeff Callahan has 15+ years of experience in the personal development space as a student, teacher, coach, and speaker, and is the founder of Become more compelling. Jeff helps ambitious overthinkers improve their people skills and build more fulfilling businesses, careers and personal lives. His clients include professionals from top companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and more. He can also quote Back to the Future word-for-word. Here we’ll learn how he doubled Become More Compelling subscribers with a quiz.
What is Your Communication Style? Take Jeff’s quiz:
Learn more about Become More Compelling here.
Our favorite quote:
That made me take a new perspective of I don’t really care about the number of people I’m getting, because when you’re growing an email list it’s easy to get wrapped up in “I want the most number possible”. But that’s not really what you need. What you need are engaged subscribers who want to be there.
Table of contents
Read the Full Transcript Below:
“What is Your Communication Style?” Quiz
Hey so I am recording a case study for Interact, and so I’m gonna walk you guys through the questions that you sent me and appreciate you guys having me on as a case study. So in question one tell us about your quiz and what purpose does it serve in your business. So my quiz.
Is, do you know your communication style? And so when someone clicks on that, they go right to the quiz. And so the, the quiz itself is to to help folks that wanna know more about how they communicate and walks them through. I believe it’s seven questions to try to get a handle on how they approach social situations, interactions.
And then of course they get results on the back end of that. And it’s on the purpose it serves in my business is primarily as a, let me call it opt-in carrot, lead gen. The purpose is to get email subscribers. And it does very, very well at at helping me meet with that. And it’s featured pretty prominently, like right there above the fold on my homepage.
But I also have a persistent bar that leads to the same quiz, cuz my view is whenever the visitor’s on the website, I want them to be able to opt in at any time. And I don’t want them to have to think about, oh, where’s a signup form? Or, I want that offer of the quiz to be there pretty much all the time.
Who is the Target Audience?
My target audience is, People who who want to improve their people skills, more often than not, that ends up being primarily people in the STEM fields. And so that’s not universal, but that’s a pretty close a pretty close approximation of who it’s for.
Typically they are folks who, You know, they, they want to make better conversation. They want to speak up more in meetings at work. They want to be a better leader with their team. And more often than not, they’ve had to focus for years, if not decades on technical skills. And they’ve realized they’ve gotten to a certain point in their in their life, in their career where they know they need to balance out those technical skills with softer skills.
Since my quiz is typically like the people who are taking my quiz, it doesn’t lean too heavily into like the STEM specifically. But those are who ends up being many of my clients. My quiz is really focused on just anyone who has ever sort of had those sticking points of wanting to be more socially confident.
And so that my quiz walks them through you know, questions like, why what are you most likely to do at a large social gathering? You know, talk with as many people, strangers, secluded, or leave his soon as soon as it is polite to do so. So it kind of runs the gamut of who might be taken the quiz.
Promoting the Quiz
So, I’ve been running my quiz, let’s see, I’ve got the analytics pulled up here since July 27th, 2020. So, gosh, it’s in a few months. It’ll be three years, which is kind of crazy. My quiz has been viewed 283,000 times.
My primary channel is SEO. So I don’t do any paid ads and I am sort of prominent on Reddit in terms of people know me. I’m a mod of social skills sub subreddit. And so chances are some people come to me that way, but not very many compared to SEO. So SEO is the main channel.
And you just get a quiz that you like that, that seems to resonate with your audience and you wait. Cuz that’s really the best sort of strategy, especially if you have traffic coming to your blog. And so there’s never really a big need for me to go out and actively promote it. What I do sometimes is if I’ve got a thread on Twitter or something like that, I’ll have a a tweet that goes on the bottom of that asking people to sign up or to take my quiz.
So that’s another way that people may have taken the quiz as well.
What Problem is the Quiz Solving for the Business?
Before the quiz, I had a guide to group conversations because that’s what a lot of my audience tends to struggle with. And so, audio guide, you know, it did okay. For me it did good. On a given month with the audio guide there, my opt-ins were maybe around a hundred. As soon as I turned the quiz on, my opt-ins jumped to at least 200 if not more per month. And so that was a really good shot in the arm.
So solves that problem of like giving people a reason to opt in. And the thing I really like about Interact and quizzes in general is it’s more interactive. So it is instead of like, oh, I’m gonna get this guide or I’m gonna get this audio it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna learn something about myself.
I’m gonna give inputs and I’m gonna be an active participant in this process. Which I think is a great way to get the audience involved. Right. Which is exactly what I’m looking to do.
Any Challenges While Creating the Quiz?
Next question. What were some of the challenges you faced during this process that worked out or encouraged you to take a different perspective?
You know the only, the only thing I can really tell you in terms of a challenge so this is sort of a pro tip. For the first like two years I ran the quiz if not two and a half years. I had people opt in to get their quiz results, which was great from a standpoint of like, Hey, I want to you know, get as many subscribers as possible.
But the reality is, a certain percentage of those subscribers are just kinda looking for the result of their quiz and then they’re gonna move on. And so what that means on the backend for someone who runs a newsletter is you have to go in and and clean that list and look at when they opted in. Are they opening any other emails or are they just in it for the quiz result?
Which is fine. I don’t fault them for that at all. But I think what that led to, and the challenge part was, over time as the quiz grew that resulted in more than I would like of sort of unengaged new subscribers. And there’s a simple fix to that, which I’m currently implementing, which I’m gonna show you, is when you click through the, the quiz, I changed it from send my quiz results, and that was the only option.
But now I have a skip and see a summary of your results. And so you can click that and now you can go to a a summary results page. This isn’t the full thing. The full thing actually has more more results and recommendations at the bottom and all kinds of stuff. But this solves the problem of someone who’s just in it to get their quiz results in and scoot on down the road, right?
So I, I really like this. And so it, it does give another opportunity for like click here to get your expanded quiz results and then they can opt in to get those full expanded quiz results that have got more recommendations and action steps.And there it even pitches my course. Private coaching offering, which is great, and so that solves that problem really, really well.
And so that made me take a new perspective of, Hey, I don’t really care about the number of people I’m getting. Because in the beginning when you’re growing an email list and all that stuff, it’s easy to get wrapped up and like, I want the most number possible, but that’s not really what you need.
What you need are engaged subscribers who want to be there. And so that solves that.
How the Business has Evolved Since the Quiz
How’s your business evolved since my quiz? Overall the number of subscribers have, has grown quite a bit. And what is really nice is a good handful of times I’ve had someone who gets on the results page and at the bottom there’s a link to buy a self-pace course.
I’ve had several people just spend $297 right there. Right after they became a subscriber, which still kind of blows my mind. It links to the product page and they’re able to read, read about the product and decide if it’s right for them. But that’s a pretty big game changer where like you’ve got some interaction going and you’ve got an opportunity to present a product for sale, which is great.
So that, that is really, really cool. I’ve really enjoyed that aspect of it.
What has Interact Done for Your Business?
Ooh, okay. I would say that Interact has more than doubled the amount of new subscribers on a monthly basis and led directly to revenue and for any business owner, that’s exactly what you want. So some version of that. And yeah, if you guys end up you know, having me on the website, that would be cool. If not, that’s fine too. But hopefully this video has been a good overview of my experience with Interact.
I would definitely recommend you guys to anyone who He is looking to have more engaged people be subscribers from them, and I’ve really enjoyed being a customer. I appreciate you taking the time to watch.
Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for readability and clarity.