Over the last 6 years I’ve seen almost every major cosmetics and beauty brand use interact to create quizzes at some point. It’s a perfect fit and the quizzes that have been created specifically for makeup products have done really well on social media and as content on websites. In this guide I want to walk you through 3 ways to use makeup quizzes for your brand to engage your audience and sell products.

NEW: We Now have a template category specifically for makeup quizzes, you can browse through them and use any of these quizzes for your own brand. See them here.

Give Your Quiz A Title

I could talk about effective quiz titles for days, but just so we don’t get stuck here we’ll go over the main ones that work well with makeup quizzes.

1. “Which (Product) Fits You?” so it would be “Whch Lipstick Matches Your Personality?”

2. “Which (Brand) Fits You?” so like the example here “Find Your True Makeup Brand Match”

Both of these are personality-type quizzes, which get the most engagement.

Crafting quiz questions

Questions take the longest and are the most difficult to do in a quiz. There are two pieces to them – the logistics and the creative writing part.

The Logistics:

1. Have 6-10 questions with 3-6 answers per question

2. Connect the questions to the quiz outcomes using corellations

The Creative:

1. Here’s a list of ready-made questions you can pull from

2. If you want to write your own, here’s how to write questions

We offer different formats for your questions at interact. You can change them around but the one thing to make sure of is that you use images within every question where you possible can without “forcing it” (I.E. adding images that have nothing to do with the question).

We’ve found that images dramatically increase engagement on quiz questions and make it so more people will finish your quiz.

Setting up your quiz opt-in form

Quizzes are one of the top ways to grow your email list. If enabled, you can set up your quiz where it asks for an email address in order to reveal the results of the quiz and you can customize what the opt-in form says so that you can include an additional offer or discount for anyone who does opt-in through the quiz.

Across 60,000 quizzes that have generated more than 11 million new subscribers for interact customers there is an average opt-in rate of 50%, meaning that 1/2 of your quiz takers will opt-in if you have this option enabled.

With testing and analytics, we discovered that the main reason for such a high opt-in rate is the relevancy of the opt-in incentive. Because you can customize the opt-in form to be personlized for the particular quiz you created the offer is so enticing that half of people end up going for it.

Setting Up The Quiz Results (Products)

If we zoom out a little bit and take a look at this type of makeup quiz we see that it’s really a product recommendation tool mixed with a personality quiz so people want to take the quiz because it helps them find the right product or products for their style.

The key with writing these results in a way that makes people want to purchase the recommended products is to connect the way they answered your questions back to the products.

So if they told you their favorite color is Muave and you’re recommending a Muave lipstick then you’d say “We know you love Muave so this lipstick is going to be perfect with any outfit you’re rocking”

Discovering your unique style makes the rest of buying products easier because you can measure each option against your style. That brings us to our second option for creating makeup quizzes, which is to help people find their beauty style and then recommend products based on that.

Naming Your Style Quiz

There are a couple different ways you can go with this for makeup quizzes.

1. What’s Your Beauty Style? – and then show products that match your style

2. What’s Your Color? – and then show products that work with your ideal color

3. Who’s Your Beauty Icon? – match up with a celebrity and then recommend products to match their looks

Questions for personality quizzes

Since this type of quiz is more general (finding your beauty style instead of finding a specific product), your questions should also be more general.

So instead of asking about specifics within beauty products, you might ask about someone’s favorite color. That kind of thing. The same logistics apply for the number of questions etc.

I had to include this question example just for fun, it really doesn’t have anything to do with the quiz and isn’t even used as part of the scoring system, but it’s just fun and that’s part of what makes quizzes so great as a marketing tool.

Opt-In Form Setup

“Enter your email to see your (blank) style” pretty much makes perfect sense, if you’re taking a quiz to find your style then the quiz says that if you enter your email you can see your style that all adds up.

The other thing that’s really easy to add as an incentive is to tell people you’ll be sending them personalized product recommendations and discounts on the types of products that match their style by email.

This does two things in one: it gives a reason to opt-in and it makes it essential to opt-in (if you want the recommendations and discounts we need somewhere to send them).

Setting up the results and connecting back to products

Once you show someone their style or color or whatever your quiz is about, then it comes time to give a result explanation where you talk about what it means to be your particular style, and you will also be able to have a call to action button linking to specific products for each style.

These personalized product recommendations convert 2.3x better than a generic list of product offerings so don’t forget to include that button!

When LUSH Cosmetics approached us about doing quizzes I was pretty excited. They’ve got one of the most unique brands in the world and I knew they’d make great quiz content.

The first quiz they ended up doing was a trivia quiz about the brand itself, which makes a ton of sense given that LUSH is such a fascinating company and they make off-the-wall-looking products.

Let’s take a look at how they did it and you’ll get some ideas for how you might be able to implement trivia quizzes into your marketing plan as well.

Your Trivia Quiz Title

We participate in trivia because it’s a challenge. Whether we’re talking about trivia night at your local bar or Jeopardy, we all want to know if we can measure up to the questions being posed.

Therefore when writing quiz titles for trivia there are two main ones that capture this idea of creating a challenge.

1. How Much Do You Know About (Blank)?

2. How (Blank) Are You?

In the blanks is the subject of your trivia, so like “makeup” “LUSH” or “Color palettes”

The Trivia Questions

Trivia questions are more straightforward than personality-type questions because every one has a correct answer and you can test people’s knowledge on a subject.

Life Hack: If you are looking for a way to come up with good trivia questions you can Google “Facts about (subject)” and then make trivia questions on that subject based on the facts.

For every question you can set up different screens for the “Incorrect” and “Correct” feedback. That way there is instant gratification after someone answers each question and the quiz becomes like a string of one-off questions that all combine together to create a great interactive experience that will draw people in for a long time.

You’ll also be able to provide an explanation of why the correct answer is the right one, which makes a huge difference in terms of how people feel about a trivia quiz when they can have their option validated and then get a real explanation of why the right answer is the correct one.

Opt-In Form on Trivia Quizzes

While trivia quizzes don’t convert to subscribers as well as personality quizzes it’s still a good idea to have an opt-in form just as a backup list building tool (you can never have too many subscribers, there is no such thing as too big a list, so long as it’s a healthy list).

Because you’ve already given away the answers to each quiz question as people go through the quiz there’s not so much of an incentive to opt-in in order to see your results, but there are other incentives you can offer, like a discount or a prize like the LUSH example here.

Trivia Quiz Results

Of course you show people their score in the results of a trivia quiz, but you can also use this space to link out for other products you can offer people.

The best way to do this is to correlate someone’s score with a product by saying “You’re The (Bath) Bomb!” meaning that you scored pretty well, and then you link to the bath bomb.

It’s goofy, but so are quizzes, and that’s kind of the point.

Now you know how to build your own Makeup quizzes, and have 3 options for how to get started! Click below to create a free quiz building account and start playing around with your own quiz ideas.