Social media followers are notoriously fleeting. You can have 10 million followers on TikTok and lose them overnight because of a ban. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Algorithm changes have been wiping out businesses that are overly reliant on social media for years.
But if you have a large social following and want to move people to your email list so you have ownership over your audience, that presents a challenge. Social media followers want to be entertained, that’s why they are on social media, for fun and distraction.
While I’m sure your newsletter is totally entertaining, a call to action telling people to leave social media and go subscribe to your email newsletter is a dud of a post. You’re not going to get engagement, and most people won’t even see the post.
However, a quiz? That will pop off. Peep the stats on the screenshot below from a reel posted by Advice With Erin (see the reel here).
Functionally what’s happening here is Erin posts reels or carousels about her quiz, uses ManyChat to automate so when someone comments “QUIZ” they get a link to the quiz, then that link takes people to her website, hosted on Squarespace, where the quiz is embedded. Here’s a link to her quiz.
So then people start taking your quiz and answering the questions. In this case Erin has 32 questions because her quiz is locked in and accurate. She leaves no room for error and wants to make sure she delivers value for her quiz takers. And she does.
Then, at the end of the quiz, after people have been able to see that you really understand who they are, because you asked such relevant questions, you can ask them if they’d like to join your email list. In return she is offering you an full in-depth breakdown of your results, but you can skip this if you just want the basic version of your results.
Whether you opt-in or not you are immediately taken to see your quiz result. I got “The Creative Professional” and Erin created six different results for this quiz so each person can have their own unique experience.
Then right away she sends over the full breakdown of your results. Delivering right away on the promise of getting more value by email. And the email doesn’t disappoint, it’s very in-depth and contains strengths, weaknesses, career suggestions, and so much more. So when you get this you think to yourself “yah that was worth it.”
Then, I get a weekly email from Erin’s Hyper-Helpful Newsletter, which contains advice and insights to help me move my career in the direction I want it to go.
FYI, this quiz we’re talking about? It has brought in 140,000 new email subscribers so far, and Erin said it’s the best thing she’s done for list growth. She shared the whole story over here.
The quiz journey from social media to email subscriber is smooth and focuses squarely on your audience member as the center of attention. People really enjoy taking quizzes, and Erin said she’s gotten incredibly positive feedback on the quiz, with zero complains.
If you want an effective and goodwill-building lead magnet to convert social followers into email subscribers, look no further. Erin built her quiz using Interact. We’ve been around since 2014 and have helped over 100,000 creators convert more than 400 million leads.
Interact is built for creators, our pricing scales at a reasonable rate so you don’t get charged an insane amount once your quizzes start to take off. It’s also a low cost to get started, at $27 per month on our Lite plan.
If you’d like a detailed breakdown of how exactly you can write your full quiz funnel that moves people from social media to your email list in a way that both delights and drives subscribers, you can read on and I’ll share what I know.
How to create your quiz to convert social media followers into email subscribers
Step 1: Identify your audiences’ most pressing question
To craft a great quiz you first have to know what your social media audience wants, specifically in regards to what you have to offer. Every day, all the time, humans are thinking about what they want. And in your particular field that’s still true. Maybe they want to look better, to feel better, to have more money, to have more adventures, the list goes on endlessly.
For Erin, the answer to this question was that people always have this nagging feeling that they’re in the wrong career. Like if they could just find the right career then life would be better. That’s an extremely powerful driver, and a quiz that promises to help you find the right career is irresistible.
How did she know that’s what her audience wants? Because they were asking her, literally millions of times through DM’s, in response to her videos, they would ask her how to find a career that felt right.
So she decided to do something about it and create a career type quiz.
That is exactly the same path that all of our top customers have followed to come up with their quiz ideas, it always came from audience questions that people were clambering to get answers to.
Pro Tip: The quiz below looks really simple. That’s key, your quiz has to be simple. But it also has to very clearly cut through the noise and address the question your audience wants answers to. If you can make your quiz simple it will signal to your audience that you understand them, and immediately start to build trust.
Step 2: Create your quiz outcome personas
Quiz results are the answers to the question posed in your quiz title, personified. Meaning that because quizzes are a highly personal medium, you want your results to also be personal. But also to answer the question that your audience wants answers to.
Results can be personified in different ways. As archetypes, personality types, levels of expertise. This goes back to what your audience wants because audiences want different things. Sometimes they want their results in the form of a personality type or archetype, sometimes they want it as an assessment, other times as a score.
Your audience is your audience, they are unique individuals, and you must present them the answer to what they want in the way that best serves who they are.
Step 3: Create questions to determine a quiz takers’ persona
The true test of how well you know someone is whether or not you can ask them good, relevant, thought-provoking questions. When you ask your quiz questions, it’s both a way for you to determine which of your quiz outcomes is right for the quiz taker, and it’s your audition.
What I mean is that as someone takes your quiz (which is a very personal and relational experience), they are having a conversation with you. You are solely focused on them, asking them questions to determine how you can be helpful to them.
If your questions don’t make sense to the quiz taker they will stop taking the quiz. If your questions are too general the quiz taker will lose interest. If your questions are too obvious they’ll know your just trying to sell them something.
The art of asking questions is extremely hard. But if you base your quiz questions off of what you would ask people in real life to determine which outcome of your quiz is relevant to that person then you can’t go wrong. I wrote more about asking questions in this long guide. But if you want the short version you just want to ask people for the information you need to make a recommendation at the end of your quiz and ask it in the way that makes sense to your audience using the words that they like to use.
Step 4: Craft an opt-in form
At the end of your quiz, once people have gone through the questions and gotten to know you, it’s time to ask the for their email address. The best incentive you can offer here is to give them a more in-depth version of their quiz result.
I always recommend leaving this optional, and still showing people their basic quiz result without the email opt-in. That way you only get people who proactively want to hear more from you.
Erin does an excellent job in her quiz, telling people they can get a full breakdown and more resources if they opt-in. If someone has completed your quiz and gotten to this point they are clearly interested in the topic of the quiz, so by offering more on the same topic you just align with what they want. On average, even with the skip option turned on, 50% of people opt in on this step.
Step 5: Create follow up emails for each of your quiz outcomes
Once someone has opted in and seen the basic version of their results, expectations are high for the first email you send them. You want to deliver a lot of personalized value in this email. It can be anything from tips and suggestions based on the outcome, to notable people who got the outcome, to recommendations for products and services.
You really have a lot of leeway with this email because people are super interested and engaged to know more since they just answered a bunch of very personal questions about themselves in order to receive their quiz outcome.
Those are the basic steps to create a highly effective and high converting quiz to move people from social media followers to email subscribers. My #1 suggestion throughout this entire process is to base all of your content and funnel on your actual audience. Either from past conversations you’ve had with people or by user testing, or ideally both. I hope you enjoy creating your quiz!