We’re all in business to sell more products and services. 

I know that’s not a groundbreaking statement, but hear me out.

If we know the main goal of our marketing efforts is to raise awareness and increase customer interest so people purchase our offerings, why does so much of our marketing fail to drive the kind of results we’re looking for? 

Call it crickets, call it a virtual tumbleweed…

via GIPHY

No matter what you call it, it’s easy to feel stuck where you are, but you don’t have to stay there. 

By using proven growth strategies, you can utilize marketing funnels, email marketing, and interactive quizzes to generate profits for your business on autopilot. 

With these growth strategies, you’ll be able to personalize content to each segment of your audience and recommend an offer that’s a perfect fit.

Selling just got easier with these growth strategies

One of the best ways to earn more income is to include multiple tiers of products and services you can sell to an interested audience. As an entrepreneur, it’s a good idea to diversify your business model with several offers. 

When you sell multiple products and services, you don’t have to rely on one or two offerings to generate the majority of your income. We have to constantly adapt our businesses to fit any and all changes in the market, so having a diversified business model will help you prepare for even the most seemingly unpredictable changes.  

Here are some of the most popular income streams we see in online entrepreneurship: 

• Online courses (sell what you know) 
• Freelance services (sell your time) 
• Coaching or consulting programs (sell your philosophy)
• eCommerce shops (sell tangible products)

In this article, I’ll be walking through the ins and outs of each income stream and specific quiz-based growth strategies you can use for your own business. You can use the links above to go directly to the income stream that interests you!

Some of these growth strategies have helped Interact quiz creators generate five, six, and SEVEN-figure profit directly from their quizzes. I’ll share these incredibly successful examples throughout this article and show you how to do the same. 

Grow your business with a quiz by signing up for a free Interact account!

As you read through these sections, you may have an idea of what income streams you want to add to your business model, but try to keep an open mind. You may just discover a new way to build your online business!

Online courses

Online learning is currently a $107 billion dollar industry but some experts predict it will grow to $325 billion by 2025. Yes, that’s billion with a “b.” 

It may feel like everyone on the internet is creating an online course, but that’s because it’s a great source of income for side hustlers and full-time entrepreneurs alike. 

Courses are a great income stream for online educators and entrepreneurs who want to generate more passive income by teaching what they know.

You can teach virtually any topic through your online course. Not sure your niche would translate well into an online course? What if I told you that there’s online course earning potential in niches you’d never expect?

That’s right, you don’t have to teach something that’s business-focused in order to seriously grow your revenue. Everything from reading tarot cards to digital painting to photo organization to making enamel pins has been turned into a course.

What could you teach a course on? 

What knowledge do you currently have, and how could you share that with the world? 

If you want to sell an online course, you’ll need to have a growth strategy in place to help you do that. The first step is to decide what kind of marketing funnel you want to create. 

Choose a marketing funnel based on your growth strategy 

There are two main funnel types for selling online courses: launch funnels and evergreen funnels. 

A launch funnel, also called a closed-cart funnel or live product launch funnel, will focus on promoting your online course that is only offered for a limited time. If you’ve ever seen course creators who have their course cart open two or three times a year, this is the kind of funnel type they are using. 

Launch funnels focus on using urgency and scarcity tactics in order to convert visitors into course students. It’s easier to persuade someone to purchase a product when you’re selling it because it won’t be available whenever they want it. 

Think about the last time you were in the store. You may have purchased an item just because it was on sale for a limited time. Even if you didn’t have an immediate use for it or didn’t initially come to the store for it, you couldn’t pass up the chance to bring it home with you. 

Launch-focused course creators use this same growth strategy when they set up their funnel.

The other way to sell your courses is with an automated evergreen funnel. An evergreen funnel, or an open-cart funnel, won’t focus on a timed launch period in order to make sales. Instead, it makes your online course available for purchase at any time. 

Evergreen funnels are a great choice if you’re looking to generate online course sales from your email marketing strategy through email sequence automations that run all the time. That way, your audience doesn’t have to wait to purchase your online course. 

This six-minute video describes the difference between live launch funnels and evergreen funnels if you want to see how both are mapped out.

Still not sure which funnel is the right choice for your online course?

Let’s go over the biggest pros and cons of each funnel. 

Launch funnel pros: 

• You can take advantage of limited time offers and bonus deals. 
• There will be more urgency to buy your online course if it is only offered for a short time. 
• You can raise prices easily since the course price can increase with each launch. 
• You can still reuse the same email campaigns for each launch so you don’t have to duplicate your efforts. 
• Everyone who enrolls in your online course can complete the lessons at the same time, making it a great fit for course creators who want to include a community component. 

Launch funnel cons:

• The course is only available for a limited time so people can’t buy whenever they need it. 
• You’ll earn a big one-time payout during your launch but might need to balance it out with other evergreen products if you want to earn a consistent income. 
• You have to ask people to sign up for a waitlist if you only launch a few times a year. 
• Even though some things can be scheduled, these funnels require a lot of hands-on work since it is all done live. 
• You might feel burned out after a few launches because of its fast-paced nature. 

Evergreen funnel pros: 

• You’ll generate more consistent revenue since you are able to generate online course revenue any time. 
• You can build an automation system once and never have to touch it again (other than slight ongoing maintenance) as it makes sales for you. 
• People don’t have to sign up for a waitlist before they can purchase your online course.
• You can use evergreen webinars and make it feel like you are personally teaching your audience while you still take advantage of everything being pre-recorded. 
• You still have the opportunity to do special live launches with bonuses if you choose to do so while having your evergreen funnel run in the background. 

Evergreen funnel cons:

• Everyone who enrolls in the online course will be coming in at different times, making it more difficult to nurture new students while connecting with alumni students.
• If you don’t have evergreen content (like blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, etc.) or lead magnets that consistently grow your email list, it’s tough to make consistent online course sales from your evergreen funnel. 
• You need to generate consistent traffic to your site rather than focusing on driving traffic during a bigger online course launch. 
• You miss out on the urgency of people buying your online course for a limited time because it’s offered whenever they want to buy it. 

No matter which funnel you choose, you’ll need a simpler way to build your email list in order to sell your online course more effectively. They say “the money is in the list” because many entrepreneurs primarily market online courses to their email lists. 

Since email subscribers can be worth up to 15 times as much as social media followers, it’s a good idea to focus on building your email list before your social media following. 

One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is to use lead generation quizzes. 

Build an online quiz for your marketing funnel 

Quizzes don’t just work for big media brands like Buzzfeed. Interactive quizzes can also help first-time course creators generate profit directly from their quiz or the follow-up emails they send right after. 

Using a quiz to market your online course will give you the opportunity to be a part of your audience’s self-discovery process, positioning you as a trusted guide whose goal is to help your audience better understand themselves and the topics they’re interested in.   

A quiz will also help you gather more data about your incoming email subscribers, which is invaluable when you make tweaks to your online course marketing funnel in order to increase conversions. 

Don’t just take my word for it. 

Brand strategist Kaye Putnam had the brilliant idea to create an online course based on each brand archetype result in her quiz. This growth strategy resulted in over $100,000 of online course revenue JUST FROM HER QUIZ. 

I repeat, over six-figures of revenue from an evergreen online course funnel. And her quiz has now been taken over 100,000 times. Just think about how a quiz could change the way you sell an online course. 

Learn exactly how Kaye built her successful quiz here. 

Amber Lilyestrom, a seven-figure entrepreneur and business coach, also found success when using a quiz to generate more leads for her online course. 

Since her online course teaches other entrepreneurs how to clarify and utilize their core purpose in business, she created a quiz that helps people find their core purpose. 

She has since generated over 2,500 leads for her online course and sold more low-ticket course programs that then lead to her higher-ticket offers. Using low-cost Facebook ads, she is able to consistently acquire new leads and optimize her funnel over time.

In another example, Becca from Little Z’s Sleep offers a unique quiz that helps her audience find exactly which online course program is the best fit for their needs. Each course is based on the different stages of sleep every child encounters from newborn to toddler age. 

If the choice isn’t obvious, the quiz makes choosing a program much easier without extra effort from Becca since it’s already been set up. The quiz is mentioned on her main sales page as well as on social media and her blog. 

So how do you build a quiz that will help you sell more of your own online courses? 

Even if it is your first time creating an online course, you’ll find that quizzes are a great growth strategy because they’re easy to set up and blow most average lead magnet conversion rates out of water. 

Learn how to launch your first quiz here and read through our best insider tips for creating a quiz that sells your online course on autopilot. 

Get them to sign up for your course waitlist: If you’ve chosen a live launch funnel, it’s best to use your quiz as a way to get quiz takers to sign up for the waitlist. That way, you can capture them as a lead so when you’re about to launch your online course, you can send them the appropriate launch email sequence. You’ll offer value through your quiz email sequence until then. 

Give away one of your course modules for free: Who doesn’t love having a sneak peek into something before they buy? You can utilize this growth strategy if you want to build your quiz taker’s confidence in what your online course offers. If you can show how much value you give in just one video tutorial or lesson, think about how much value your new subscriber will assume you’ll give inside the full-length online course! This is a great growth strategy for evergreen and live launch funnels. 

Lead with a low-priced offer: If you are going to sell your online course at a higher premium price, you might want to lead with a low-priced digital product that will help you generate warm leads. Like Amber Lileystrom’s example, you’ll use the low-price product to build more trust with customers and show your true expertise before you sell your bigger offer. This low-priced offer can be a mini version of your course, an eBook, a collection of templates, or any number of digital products. Get creative!

Ask quiz questions that help you create better course trainings: No matter what marketing funnel type you choose, it’s important for you to gather as much information as you can about your new subscribers. By writing questions that are relevant to your course students, you’ll be able to assess what topics they’re interested in, gauge their skill level, and learn more about their goals.  

Before you create an online course, it might be helpful to sell your services as a freelancer or service provider for more hands-on experience. Then you can generate more income while learning more about what your clients need the most help with. 

When you are able to accurately identify your clients’ problems and ready to build a solution that helps them solve each one, you’ll be more prepared to create an online course and teach people on a larger scale. 

Let’s talk about how you can feel more confident and comfortable selling freelance services with some key growth strategies. 

Freelance services 

Your business’s success comes down to how well you serve your audience and meet their needs. By selling freelance services, you are able to collaborate with clients and use your time and talents to complete a task on their to-do list. 

Can you think of a problem your audience would love to pay someone to solve for them? That’s where a freelancer or service provider like you comes in!

You can offer freelance services for graphic design, writing, photography, illustration, programming, and more. Do you need additional inspiration? Here are over 100 freelance careers you can pursue as an entrepreneur. 

It’s best to create a freelance business based on skills you’ve been cultivating over time, but don’t let a lack of experience stop you from getting started. There are plenty of ways you can gain experience, like building your own personal brand, trading services with other entrepreneurs, or taking on lower priced or pro-bono freelance projects to include in your portfolio. 

You can create a full-time freelance business or offer freelance services on the side of your day job. No matter what you decide to do, it’s important to realize that there are a few different ways you can earn an income as a freelancer or service provider. 

How to build your business model as a freelancer

One way to build your freelance business is to offer your services based on an hourly rate. This allows you to make money in exchange for the amount of time you put into a project. 

This may be a good strategy when you first get started and need to assess how much time will go into each project, but as you gain experience, you may want to quote your freelance projects with a flat fee. With a one-time, fixed project fee, you’re able to set a price that isn’t solely determined by how much time you put into a project. 

You could work two hours, five hours, or twenty hours on a project and get paid the same amount if you are pricing with a flat fee. This presents a great opportunity for people who are experienced because you are naturally able to perform tasks more efficiently without sacrificing the quality of your work as you improve your skills. 

When you price based on a one-time fee, you can also better predict what your income will look like month-to-month as you book client projects within your schedule. Make sure you know how much estimated time it will take you before you quote a one-time project fee. This will protect both you and the client from unrealistic expectations.

Once you determine how you want to price set your rates as a freelancer, think about how many clients you want to serve at one time and how long you want to work with them. 

Do you like one-time projects or working with the same clients each month? 

Do you like to follow a four-week process or collaborations that last longer than four months? 

How many people can you serve for each service package that you offer? 

Ideally, what would your freelance business look like if generating leads was no problem? 

You can create your freelance service packages with the answers to these questions in mind. Next, you’ll focus on how you can generate consistent leads for your business. 

It’s not uncommon for freelancers and service providers to go through dry seasons where lead generation is tougher during some months than others. To offset this time, you can use growth strategies to attract the right kind of clients whenever they are looking for a service provider to partner with. 

Create an online quiz as a growth strategy to sell your services

Quizzes can be an effective growth strategy when selling freelance services because you’re able to set up email automations along with your quiz to generate more leads with little to no effort after publishing your quiz.

All you need to do is set up your quiz in Interact and connect it with your email service provider (ESP) to make sure it runs properly. It’s a one-and-done growth strategy that will create consistency in your business.

When you embed a quiz on your freelance website or post about it on social media, you can direct traffic to your quiz in order to get to know more about your incoming freelance clients. The more you know about them, the better you can serve them.

After a potential freelance client completes your quiz (when it is built using our signature free quiz framework), you’ll understand:

• what setbacks your potential client is currently experiencing
• what solutions they are most interested in exploring
• what goals they want to accomplish and what they’re motivated by
• how they make decisions and what influences their decision-making process
• how they (or others) would describe themselves

You can use this information to better communicate with your client lead when they reply to one of your follow-up emails or book a discovery call with you. 

Just think about how helpful it would be to know exactly what their goals, motivations, and problems are before you talk to them! That’s what can happen when you use quiz data to inform the client booking process. Here are a few freelance-focused quiz examples that can show you how to do this well. 

As a systems strategist, Stefani Jessica uses her skills in automation to create a seriously helpful quiz for entrepreneurs who want to assess how healthy their business is. 

Since her freelance services promise to help you save more time, make more money, and build a dream team, she is specifically looking to attract business owners who find themselves stressed out while trying to scale their growing business. She does a great job of finding these people with her quiz. 

At the end of the quiz, Stefani offers a few tips to help entrepreneurs tackle their next big tasks and gives recommendations based on what level of business growth they are at. 

When people take the quiz, they’ll feel more confident and at ease when they contact Stefani to book her services because they’re armed with the right information to start the collaboration. 

For another freelance example, graphic designer Lindsay Scholz created an ideal brand aesthetic quiz to help her identify what styles her client leads love. Not only that, but the quiz has also helped Lindsay grow her email list by 300% – wow!

Lindsay crafted the quiz so each result comes with a detailed description of what brand vibe fits them best, which makes sure her audience is speaking in the same language when they talk about visual branding. 

Then, when her client leads are ready to book her freelance services, having the same language makes the discovery call an enjoyable and simplified conversation where everyone is on the same page. 

This booking process is made even easier with the “let’s get started” call-to-action (CTA) button that directs quiz takers to her freelance design services page. From her services page, she talks about all of the different design capabilities she has along with her creative process so people know what to expect when they book her services. 

As a final example, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring (so to speak) and talk about my own brand voice style quiz. 

As a freelance copywriter, I initially created an Interact quiz to help my audience learn more about their writing style through the quiz, Then, through my follow-up emails, they could create a mission statement that accurately reflected their brand and writing style. 

Not only has the quiz grown my email list by over 2,500 subscribers in my first year (with the number continuing to climb beyond 4,000 now at the end of 2019), but I’ve also turned a few email replies from my quiz follow-up emails into freelance client projects ranging from $2,000-3,500 EACH.

Read more about my full case study here. 

Many content creators use quizzes to generate revenue for digital products on autopilot, but I’m here to tell you that you can increase your profits as a freelancer too. Sometimes the pay day is even greater as a freelancer!

So what tips should you keep in mind when creating a quiz as a freelancer or service provider? You’ll want to utilize these growth strategies as you build a quiz inside Interact. 

Offer a free discovery call: Your quiz will help you determine if someone is a great fit for your freelance services, but what should you have them do then? You can offer a free strategy consultation or discovery call that gives you time to connect with the quiz taker and talk more about their specific needs. 

Recommend a service based on quiz results: As a freelancer, it’s really smart to use your personality descriptions as a way to talk about how you can help quiz takers with any necessary next steps in their journey. After you tell them more about their personality and get them nodding along, you can introduce what their struggle might be and how you can help them solve it with one of your services. You might want to recommend different services based on their quiz results and set it up within Interact so each CTA button goes to that specific services page. It’s easy but feels very personalized!

Utilize social sharing to attract more leads: When someone takes the quiz and they find out they’re the perfect fit for your freelance services, chances are they will be connected to other business owners like them who would also benefit from what you offer. They can market your business for you by sharing your quiz! Simply turn on the social sharing buttons on your personality description preview pages inside Interact so people can share their quiz results on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

While a freelancer offers a service that sometimes involves a tangible product or output, a coach or consultant helps their clients in a different way. That’s what we’ll be talking about next. 

Coaching programs

As a coach, your job is to help clients harness their strengths, learn new actionable skills, and reach their goals. By partnering with clients, you’ll be able to make a lasting impact in their lives by giving them the tools they need to move forward. 

Coaching is not the same as therapy, so you don’t have to worry about becoming a licensed therapist to start a coaching program. Both are important professions, but a coach is there to help you create a detailed and actionable plan for the future. Coaching, in short, focuses on building toward a great tomorrow rather than focusing on what happened yesterday.

Depending on the client you work with, they may need to work with a therapist before you start working together. Here is a guide to help you determine which client leads are ready for coaching. You are the client’s biggest advocate so make sure your recommendations line up with what they need. 

One of the first decisions you’ll make as a coach is what niche you want to practice in. It’s best to choose a niche you are already well-versed in. It’s easier to attract clients when you already have an expertise in what you’re talking about. 

Here are a few coaching niches you can choose from: 

• Life coaching
• Health or fitness coaching
• Wellness coaching
• Personal development coaching
• Mindset or accountability coaching
• Business coaching
• Relationship coaching
• Career coaching
• Parenting or family coaching
• Executive coaching

Depending on which coaching niche you choose, you may want to look at becoming a certified coach from an accredited program so you can learn how to effectively coach someone through their problems and solutions. 

You don’t need a certification in order to get started, but it will help you stand out from competitors who aren’t certified and give you more tools to use with your coaching clients. Some client leads will also be looking at your credentials when choosing which coach to work with, so this is a good thing to keep in mind. 

If you are looking to position yourself more as a consultant or strategist who is recommending the best path versus helping your client find their own best path, your experience in the field may be enough to help you confidently get started with your program. 

Building a business model around your coaching niche

With your coaching niche in mind, you can think of how you want to build your coaching business model. In order for it to be sustainable and profitable, you may want to consider adding one-on-one coaching or group coaching programs to your business. 

One-on-one coaching is typically a private set of interactions with a client where you are helping them individually with their setbacks, goals, and mindsets around any given topic. This is where most coaches start because it’s easier to help a client when your attention is solely focused on them. 

If you feel like you are answering the same questions over and over in your individual coaching sessions, it might be a good sign that your business could benefit from a group coaching program. Group coaching allows you to coach multiple people at one time so you’re able to save your time and energy for other business projects. 

Group coaching only works when everyone in the group is in a similar stage of life or business, has similar interests and goals, and benefits from the extra layer of accountability the group coaching program provides. Some of your clients may need one-on-one help while others will thrive in a group. It’s all about understanding what your client’s needs are so you can recommend a coaching package that fits them.

Once you know what kind of coaching you are going to offer, you can decide whether it’s best to meet virtually, over the phone, or in person. Virtual coaching is becoming more and more popular, especially for entrepreneurs who want to be location independent.

You can choose whether you want to price your coaching sessions individually, create different levels of coaching packages, or sell an all-in-one program that people can invest in. Here’s more information on how to set your pricing as a coach.

With so many program types and package options, how do you determine what offering is the right fit for each individual client lead? An online quiz can help you with that!

Make your own quiz to sell your coaching programs

It takes a lot of manual work emailing back and forth or jumping on countless discovery calls to determine if someone is a good fit for your coaching program. The easier way to sell your coaching services is to have them take a quiz to see which offering is best for them.

Inside your quiz, you can give personalized recommendations based on their quiz results so they can build trust not only in you but also in themselves. This is important for them to develop before working with a coach.

Each quiz question will give an intentional set of answers that line up with the quiz result options you’ve already created. As your potential coaching client takes the quiz, they’ll be able to self-select answers that will automatically generate a result that tells them which coaching package is best.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, we’re about to make the process even easier.

We have dozens of coaching-based quiz templates you can customize for any coaching niche so you don’t need to start from scratch. All you need to do is pick a topic that resonates with your coaching audience and personalize the quiz results to your unique quiz strategy.

If you aren’t able to find a quiz template that fits exactly how you want to use your quiz, feel free to build your own quiz from the ground up. This article will show you exactly how to do that, but let’s look at a few examples from other coaches who use Interact quizzes for their own lead generation.

Liz Lajoie, the financial expert behind Zen Money CFO, attracts more coaching clients by helping them find their Zen Money Financial Style with her quiz.

With five financial archetypes, she ensures that each person who takes her quiz feels confident in their quiz results before offering her main call-to-action: signing up for a strategy session. 

This is a smart offer since she wants to convert more quiz takers and email subscribers into clients. Then she’ll be able to talk more about her coaching programs and see if any of them are the right fit for each person.

Nancy Levin, a relationship coach and podcaster, uses a similar approach but is in a different coaching niche. She uses her relationship-based quiz to attract more coaching clients for group coaching, individual coaching, and membership community offerings.

Since her business model includes many income streams, Nancy uses the quiz to build trust with her new audience member before she starts recommending higher-priced coaching offerings.

Instead, she highlights her lower-priced book called The New Relationship Blueprint. This gives quiz takers the opportunity to dip their toes in and check out her work before making a bigger investment.

Did you notice that the quiz title includes the term “relationship blueprint” and the book includes the term as well? This was done intentionally to create consistency with her messaging. So smart!

We’ve seen how quizzes can work in the financial and relationship coaching niche, but what about the business coaching niche? Valeri from Built to Soar Coaching shows us how it’s done with her Business Flight Test quiz.

With her quiz, Valeri is able to determine what stage of business growth each quiz taker is in so she can properly give recommendations and tools based on their quiz results.

At the end of her simple personality description, she talks about what each person needs in order to be successful and gives them a call-to-action button to help them take the next step with one-on-one coaching. This button brings quiz takers to her Contact page so they can talk about what coaching package might be the best fit for them.

No matter what your goals are, you can create a unique quiz that helps your audience understand where they currently are and what support they need to get to where they want to go. That’s where you come in as a coach.

In your personality description, quiz results, and follow-up emails, try to give suggestions and tips as if you are currently their coach. Even if they haven’t signed up for your coaching program yet, it’s a great way to show them what kind of value you can provide them. Then, when they are ready to make an investment, you are the first person that comes to mind.

Depending on the pricing of your coaching, you might follow a more long-term strategy and build relationships with client leads until they’re ready to make the investment and commitment to bettering their situation.

So how do you build your quiz to ensure you can give value to each quiz taker today as they assess which coach they want to work with?

Include videos for a stronger personal connection: Coaching can be a deeply personal thing. People want to feel like they can trust you, so showing the face (aka you!) behind your coaching brand is incredibly important. If you want examples of coaches who do this really well, look at Marie Forleo, Shaina Leis, and Angel Richardson.

Give a preview of your coaching philosophy: Just like any other profession, coaches work in different ways. No two coaches are the same so it’s important to showcase how you like to coach your clients. How do you specifically help clients achieve their goals? What do your coaching sessions look like? What can they expect to take away from your coaching interactions? You can easily add this information to your follow-up email sequence.

Recommend a coaching package: If your audience is interested in figuring out which coaching package is the best fit for them, they can take your quiz to get their answer. First, create an outline for each coaching program or package you want to offer and create a customer persona for each one. Then, use those customer personas as quiz result options for your quiz.

Ask quiz takers to join your Facebook group: As a coach, you’ll want to spend time interacting with your audience. A great way to do this is by starting a Facebook group. When you give them value every week, you’ll be able to book more coaching clients from the group. Since coaching is typically private, it’s a smart idea to keep your Facebook group private as well. You can also ask people to answer a specific set of questions before they join the Facebook group so you’re able to learn even more about them.

As a coach, most of what you’re selling will be an intangible product, meaning that it is hard to quantify as opposed to a tangible product you can touch. If you’d rather create tangible products, it might be a good idea to build an eCommerce shop or digital store.

eCommerce shop 

It’s no surprise that online shopping has become a new normal for many consumers. With eCommerce sales rising above $517 billion dollars in 2018, online shopping continues to grow as a welcomed alternative to local brick-and-mortar stores.

Online shopping is fast, convenient, and can be done with the click of a button, not to mention that you don’t have to leave your house to purchase the products you need.

Since so many physical products are now sold, shipped, and delivered through online retailers, how do you create the best shopping experience possible when opening an eCommerce shop?

There are a few key areas you can focus on. First, you’ll want to define the customer purchasing journey you follow that takes visitors from browsing through your products to having them delivered to their doorstep as a customer. You need to feel confident in what each step looks like and be willing to outline the entire process for incoming customers so they know what to expect.

Since customers can’t visit a physical location, you’ll want to focus on creating a digital storefront with a website that is easy to navigate. Visitors should be able to easily find what they need and purchase your products without needing to ask any questions. This all comes down to your website’s user experience.

When you launch an eCommerce shop, you’ll need to know how to accurately price your products so you have enough of a profit margin to stay in business.

Pricing your physical products for an eCommerce shop

Choosing the perfect price for your physical products may seem difficult. If you set the price too low, you might not be generating enough profit to keep your business healthy. If you set your price too high, however, you could stunt your business growth because the market isn’t willing to pay your prices.

Pricing is a balancing act, especially when it comes to eCommerce, so you’ll want to use a few strategies in order to choose a sustainable price point for each product. This Shopify guide gives ten pricing strategies and formulas you can use if you want more information, but we’ll break down the basics in this article so you know where to start.

First, assess how much it will cost to create the product. This includes any expenses that come from creating a prototype, designing the product, manufacturing the product, shipping the product, and beyond. Don’t forget to factor in labor costs, even if that labor is just being done by you right now. Figure out the expenses involved for each unit you sell before you go to the next step.

Examine the Shopify development cost and learn about all of the features that allow you to manage all of your sales in one place, boost your SEO ranking, and track how well your store is performing.

Now you can think about what kind of profit margin you need in order to keep your business running. Most eCommerce brands aim to have a 40-50% profit margin to help them create steady cash flow and free up more capital to reinvest in the business. 

With your profit margin in mind, you can determine what your price needs to be. If you want to look at your top competitors and see what their prices are, that competitor research will help you understand where your brand fits into the market (whether it’s a premium-priced brand or on the more affordable side).

If you need to cut your costs, here are a few places you can start:

• Cut your production costs wherever possible.
• Create automated systems that help you streamline your labor output.
• Use unpaid (organic) or very low paid advertising to generate new revenue.

You can also choose to raise your prices slightly over time or bundle products together to give you more profit. To read more about how to start an eCommerce shop and build your business model, learn from these guides on Shopify and ConvertKit.

Once you have a collection of products that are priced to sell, you can think about how you want to recommend products to each visitor who lands on your website. One of the best ways to do this is with a quiz.

Use a personality quiz to sell more shop products

Personality quizzes are a great way to empower and educate shop visitors who are interested in your product but want to learn more about it before they become a customer.

When customers are in the “awareness” or “interest” stage of the customer journey, they’ll be perfectly primed to take your quiz. This is illustrated in the Thematic customer journey graphic below.

Primally Pure, a non-toxic skincare and wellness brand, created a quiz to help their potential customers quickly determine which deodorant is their best fit. Since they can’t hold, smell, and test out the products in stores, this quiz helps them feel more confident in their online purchase before it comes to their doorstep. 

With a custom quiz design and stunning quiz result landing pages (like this one), they’re able to brand the entire quiz experience while recommending a product that’s available in their eCommerce shop. 

When someone receives their quiz results, they’ll find a list of reasons why Primally Pure’s deodorants are different from other products on the market and a list of testimonials from past customers who express their love for the product the brand is recommending. 

There are several call-to-action buttons on the quiz result landing page, all leading to the shop page where they can buy the recommended product. It almost feels like you have a personal shopper in your back pocket when you read through their quiz results!

For another eCommerce brand example, ILoveJeans.com uses a quiz not only to help you find your next pair of jeans but also figure out what your body shape is. 

Each of the body type personality descriptions are written in a positive way so every customer feels comfortable in their own skin. Then quiz takers have a chance to shop for jeans based on their body shape. 

When the call-to-action button is clicked, quiz takers are redirected to a shop page with a curated collection of denim jean styles that are perfect for their body type. This is a great way to make sure customers are happy with their purchase before they even have the chance to try your product.

Another great feature is that the brand will help you find jeans from hundreds of different brands all in one place. The quiz helps you narrow down your options while still giving you enough variety so you can find your next pair of jeans.

For something a little different, the coffee subscription box brand Bean Box uses a coffee personality quiz to segment their audience based on their coffee preferences.

When someone completes the quiz, they’ll receive a coffee personality result that’s shareworthy along with a recommended list of Bean Box products they’ll love.

While they include links to buy the recommended product, they also offer a smaller sampler of their products to ensure the customer likes the taste before buying a larger quantity. This is such a great idea!

There’s no shortage of inspiration when it comes to building a quiz to grow your eCommerce brand (and perhaps one day sell your internet business), but I’ll give you a few more ideas to make sure your quiz is unique and stands out from other online shops in your niche. 

Include a special discount: Many eCommerce brands offer discount codes for first-time buyers or new email subscribers, so why not do the same through your quiz? You could even offer a special discount through the quiz that’s unlike any other offer on your website to increase the number of people who will take your quiz. 

Show off your products in a digital showroom: Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, your audience won’t be able to step into a showroom or see your products on display in a physical storefront. That doesn’t mean you can’t still show them what your products look like in action. You just need to get a little creative. Try including more visual inspiration by offering your audience a peek into your digital showroom or catalog of products. They’ll be able to gain so many ideas when they look through an inspiration board based on their quiz results. 

Give them tips for caring for their product: If you are selling a high-end product that requires an investment, you may want to use your quiz as a way to give product preservation tips. Then your customers know how to handle their new investment with care. It also positions your eCommerce brand as a trusted expert and educator instead of a simple retailer or distributor. 

Highlight influencers who use the product: If your product has been purchased by influencers or you’re planning to invest in influencer marketing, it could be a great idea to incorporate these well-known influencers into your quiz. Even if your product hasn’t been used by high-profile influencers yet, you can highlight other mini-influencers who relate to each quiz personality result. Including positive testimonials from brand advocates is always a good idea.

No matter if you are selling physical products, digital products, or services, you can build a more profitable business by utilizing these growth-based strategies. 

It takes a small amount of time to get your quiz up and running, but once it’s live on your website, it’ll run on its own. 

Quizzes have become the main lead generation tool for social media influencers like Jenna Kutcher and entrepreneurs like Kaye Putnam, and it could be your best marketing move yet. 

Make your own growth-minded quiz using Interact 

After reading through this article, you’re more ready than ever to start building your own quiz based on the growth strategies that best fit your custom business model. 

Here are the key steps you’ll take when launching your first quiz: 

1. Choose a quiz topic and title. (how-to guide here)
2. Write personality descriptions based on the quiz results. (how-to guide here)
3. Create quiz questions and answers based on your personalities. (how-to guide here)
4. Set up your quiz inside Interact and match your visual branding. (how to guide here)
5. Craft a follow-up email sequence and connect it your email list. (how-to guide here)
6. Promote your quiz on your website and on social media. (how-to-guide here)

You can complete these steps in as little as a few hours after reading through these guides and signing up for your free Interact account. 

Click here to start building your quiz for free inside Interact!