We’ve spent the past year interviewing business owners, creators, coaches, and marketers who are actively using quizzes to grow their businesses. Not theory. Real quizzes, real results, real mistakes. After over 70 conversations, some clear patterns have emerged about what’s working and what isn’t.
Here’s what we found.
1. Build Your Quiz Backwards
The guests who consistently saw the best results had one thing in common: they started with the results page, not the questions.
Audrey Saccone, who has built quizzes for some of the biggest names in online business, put it plainly: “I like to start from the end instead of starting from the beginning. What are the results and the type of people that I want to speak to? And then what are the questions we’re asking to help us figure that out? versus going from question into result.”
Charlotte Grimmel, a psychologist and founder of The Mindfriend, took the same approach with her self-sabotage quiz. She first mapped out which outcomes she wanted to address, specifically procrastination, perfectionism, and overthinking,and then reverse-engineered the questions from there. She also used the final two questions specifically for market research: “I want to have this insight about them. If the quiz tells me 70% of people want topic X, then I can recycle that and use it for market research.”
The practical takeaway: before you write a single question, get clear on exactly who your results are speaking to and what you want them to do next.
2. Your Quiz Title Needs to Meet People Where They Already Are
A generic quiz title is a dead quiz. What’s working in 2026 is specificity: titles that name the exact thing already running through your audience’s head.
Hannah Brooks, an HSP marriage coach, didn’t name her quiz “Improve Your Marriage.” She named it “How Much Is High Sensitivity Impacting Your Relationship?” The distinction matters. As Josh noted in their conversation: “It’s not exactly ‘am I highly sensitive?’ You’re asking it in a way that’s more of what would actually be on their mind, because they’re thinking about the relationship.”
Vilasini P. Pillay, a content marketer at Direct Energy in Canada who won the Content Marketing Award for Best Content Strategy for her quiz program, used this same principle across a corporate context. Instead of asking “Do you understand your impact on the environment?”, her team created a “What’s My Carbon Footprint?” quiz. Personal, not educational. The quiz is about you, not about the topic.
The test for your quiz title: does it name something your audience is already thinking about for themselves, or are you asking them to care about something they haven’t thought of yet? The former converts. The latter doesn’t.
3. The Quiz Is Replacing Your Website Navigation
One of the biggest shifts we’ve seen is quizzes moving from “lead magnet” to “front door.” The quiz is increasingly the thing that greets visitors and routes them to the right place, rather than a single offer page or a wall of content.
Kary Perry, a social brand coach, restructured her entire business around this idea. After breaking her flagship course into three separate programs, she needed a way to direct the right person to the right offer. She built a quiz for it, and the results were immediate: “I’ve had so many people land on my page, take the quiz, get exactly to where they need to be and enroll in the offerings that I have available.”
Her first quiz had already generated nearly 6,000 email leads. The new one was doing something more important: converting visitors into buyers without any manual intervention. “The fact that I’ve been able to have a visitor land on my website, take the quiz, get in front of my free resources, take the workshop, and then enroll inside my course without me having any interaction with them whatsoever. That’s proof in the pudding.”
Stephanie Lantry, co-owner of the White Eagle Resort in Minnesota, built a cabin-selector quiz for the same reason. Guests couldn’t easily choose between 15 different cabins, so she used branching logic to route them to the right one based on group size and preferences. She embedded the quiz in the running header of every page on her website and as a pop-up on the cabin page. The result: most guests who took the quiz booked the exact cabin they were matched with. She also uses the segment data to send personalized emails when specific cabin openings become available:
“People aren’t being marketed just a generic email. It’s specific to a cabin that they had identified as something that was right for them already.”
4. Multi-Quiz Funnels Are Outperforming Single Quizzes
Several of our guests have moved beyond one quiz to a connected sequence, and the numbers back it up.
Hannah Brooks built three quizzes for her business. The most recent, “How Much Is High Sensitivity Impacting Your Relationship?”, directs people at the end to take her first quiz, “What Is Your Best Next Step to Improve Your Marriage?” About 40% of people who complete the first quiz go on to take the second, an unusually high rate of sequential action. Hannah credits this to the fact that the first quiz raises a question the second one answers.
Kylee Chandler, a podcast growth strategist, builds what she calls “podcast-centric quiz funnels,” which are quizzes that identify where a listener is in their journey, deliver a personalized podcast playlist, and then run them through an 8-email nurture sequence. For one client, a functional writing coach, this approach drove 77% revenue growth in the launch year following the quiz. Out of 140 people who bought her course, 84 came directly through the quiz funnel.
“Even if they don’t buy during that nurture sequence, we’re seeing people are buying eventually. That quiz nurture sequence is proving to be such a great way to keep them in your world.”
5. Instagram Reels + ManyChat Is the Primary Traffic Engine Right Now
If there’s one tactical shift that came up more than any other in 2025-2026, it’s this: Instagram Reel with a “comment to get the link” ManyChat automation, pointing to a quiz.
Sandra Di, a digital product coach, uses this as her primary quiz distribution method. Her most effective Reel is B-roll footage of herself drinking coffee with overlaid text asking if viewers are struggling to figure out their YouTube content style, with a prompt to comment a keyword. She gets over 60% quiz conversion rates and has added over a thousand email subscribers from free posts alone, without yet promoting her quiz on her YouTube channel where most of her traffic comes from.
Charlotte Grimmel described the same pattern. And LaShonda Brown, a tech educator and Canva partner, highlighted a creative variation: she uses quizzes as icebreakers during live keynotes, having audience members scan a QR code, take the quiz during the presentation, and drawing a giveaway winner from completions.
The underlying logic is that ManyChat solves the classic social media problem: Instagram suppresses posts with links, but comment-to-DM automations actually increase engagement signals while still moving people off-platform. The quiz is a more compelling destination than a PDF because it feels interactive rather than transactional.
6. Quiz Data Is Reshaping Business Decisions
Several guests mentioned using quiz result data in ways that went far beyond lead generation, directly inform product development, content strategy, and inventory decisions.
Stephanie Lantry discovered through her quiz that far more of her website visitors were looking for two-bedroom cabins than she had expected. This led to a direct change in her resort’s development roadmap. When a two-bedroom cabin was torn down for renovation, the quiz data influenced the decision to rebuild it rather than go larger, as the team originally planned.
Charlotte Grimmel tracks which self-sabotage archetypes are most common among her quiz takers. When she sees that 70% of respondents land in the procrastination bucket, she knows to produce more content on that topic: “I can speak more about procrastination, they’re going to engage with that.”
Vilasini P. Pillay and her team at Direct Energy have taken this furthest. Over two and a half years and more than 10 quizzes, they’ve built a backend database of customer preferences and answers that now powers personalized email marketing. The result: their personalized follow-up emails generated significantly higher open rates and click-through rates than non-personalized campaigns:
“Basically like sending out an email to everyone and not everyone’s going to be interested.”
7. Results Pages Have Gotten 5x More Substantial
The “you’re a [type], here’s a nice description of you” result page that defined early quiz culture is done. What’s replacing it is a results page with multiple panels of genuinely useful, specific content.
Kylee Chandler noticed this shift in her own clients’ work. During a group coaching session, one participant noted: “Now that I’m into this and we’re putting this all together, I see how it’s so different from other quizzes. It’s not fluffy. There’s so many fluffy quizzes out there that you just get a results name and then it’s like they tell you everything you already know about yourself and that’s it.”
What high-performing results pages look like now, based on what we’re seeing: a description of the result type, what it means for their specific situation, two or three actionable practices they can apply immediately (not tied to a purchase), links to specific free content relevant to their result, and then, only after all of that, a relevant paid offer or next step. Five sections, not one.
Hannah Brooks structures her results this way. For her quiz result on building self-belief, she delivers a video teaching, specific practices to try, links to related podcast episodes, and then, as a soft recommendation at the bottom, mentions a $37 course. The sequence matters: value first, offer last.
8. Quizzes Are Working in Unexpected Industries
Some of the most compelling case studies came from outside the coaching and online course space where quizzes have traditionally lived.
Vilasini P. Pillay’s quiz strategy at Direct Energy won the Content Marketing Award for Best Content Strategy for 2025. Her team has generated over 80,000 quiz completions across 10+ quizzes, covering topics like understanding your energy bill, calculating your carbon footprint, and figuring out which energy plan fits your habits. The secret was the same as everywhere else: make it personal. “We’re just talking to them and having a conversation. It’s written in a way that it’s like a friend asking you: hey, what do you think of this?”
Rick Newman, an award-winning journalist who has written for the New York Times and Yahoo Finance, is using quizzes to gamify news coverage on his independent publication. He sees an untapped opportunity in news quizzes that go beyond trivia to actually ask readers about their own financial and economic situation, what he calls “making the economy personal.”
Stephanie Lantry is running a 110-year-old family resort in Minnesota. Quizzes turned out to be the most effective tool she’s found for capturing leads from website visitors who aren’t ready to call, and for automating the entire experience of introducing the resort’s story and recommending the right cabin.
The Pattern Underneath All of It
Across all of these conversations, one thread runs through every quiz that worked: it’s about the person taking it, not the topic.
The quiz titles that convert are the ones that name something the person is already experiencing, not something the creator wants to talk about. The results pages that get shared are the ones that make people feel genuinely seen. The funnels that convert are the ones that lead with value and make the offer feel like a natural next step, not a sales pitch.
As Corean Canty, a voice strategist and former radio host, put it about the broader shift happening in content and marketing: “Humans want to hear from humans. We have to start with our own story. We have to know how to tell our own story.”
The quiz is one of the few formats that lets you do that at scale. It gives you the specificity of a one-on-one conversation and the efficiency of an automated system. When those things come together, it works. When they don’t, it’s just another quiz nobody finishes.
The Quiz Marketing Podcast is hosted by Josh Haynam, co-founder and CEO of Interact. New episodes release weekly.