Chris and Sarah—with their dog, Cali—started a school bus conversion tiny home adventure in 2018. Over the years, they built SkoolieLivin.com from a simple blog documenting their journey into being the largest information resource, classifieds, and community, reaching over 1 million people annually. They have lived full-time for four years in their 148-square-foot skoolie, and they love inspiring others to step out of their comfort zone. Follow their adventures and learn more about this unique lifestyle by checking out their website, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Ever wonder how a niche quiz could change the game for a community living on four wheels? Well, buckle up as we dive into the story of Skoolie Livin’ and their wild ride with Interact’s quiz magic. This case study tells how a simple quiz became their secret sauce for building an awesome email list and growing a community as unique as their skoolie conversions.
Dive in to learn about Skoolie Livin’s top-of-funnel tool to boost sales!
How would you describe what Interact has done for your business?
The Interact quiz we created for our website has been the best email list-building method we have implemented in the last three years. The quiz is a fantastic interactive medium where visitors can engage with our website in a fun way. As a result, the quiz has helped us build trust and loyalty for our brand within our niche.
Key Takeaway: A quiz can create an engaging and fun interactive experience that contributes to customer trust and brand loyalty.
Tell me about your quiz and what purpose it serves your business.
Our Skoolie Size Quiz is a top-of-funnel tool to help our visitors identify the size of the school bus conversion—also known as a skoolie—they should build or purchase.
Who is your target audience? How are they reflected in your quiz?
Our target audience is anyone looking to build or buy a school bus conversion, also known as a skoolie. Generally, these people are interested in the unique, custom experience of traveling in a school bus converted into a tiny home on wheels.
Our audience typically finds us on Google with organic SEO, the second largest being organic Pinterest.
How did you promote and run your quiz? For how long?
We created our quiz in May 2020 and have promoted it to new visitors through a dropdown notification on the top of our website and with a few Pinterest pins. We initially found success on Pinterest in 2018 with our blog due to the DIY nature of converting a school bus into a tiny home. We have a good amount of data showing that Pinterest brings organic traffic consistently over time.
We have a few five-year-old organic pins still directing several hundred monthly visitors to our blog. So, creating a few organic Pinterest pins is the bare minimum marketing we do for any new piece of content.
We made two pins for our quiz, and they drive ten to thirty organic visitors directly to the quiz page each month. That may not sound like much, but it adds up.
- Quiz Pin 1: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/586453182728003362/
- Quiz Pin 2: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/586453182727867228/
Key Takeaway: Pinterest can be a minimal but effective strategy to promote quizzes.
What led you to implement a quiz for your business? What problem has it solved?
We first discovered the power of quizzes after taking Kay Putnam’s Brand Personality Quiz—created with Interact—when we were looking to fine-tune our brand. We saw how an interactive quiz could be a fun way to get specific answers to unique questions.
We first fell in love with the Interact quiz tool after taking Kay Putnam’s quiz as a consumer. Then we saw how effective it could be in building an email list, something we were just starting at the time.
(Shout out to Kay for helping us dial in our brand personality and leading us to Interact!)
We began to understand how the tool worked. Then we brainstormed different questions we could help our consumers answer.
We knew from going through the school bus conversion process that the most crucial decision in building or buying a skoolie is determining what size skoolie you need.
This is a fundamental question in our niche for a few reasons. It’s important to:
- Narrow down the search because school buses come in multiple sizes and formats.
- Consider desired features, like the number of beds, type of kitchen, space for lounging, privacy for a toilet, space for a shower, etc.
- Determine a budget. You could spend anywhere from $3,000 – $25,000+ on converting a retired school bus, or $18,000 to $100,000+ on a finished skoolie.
This information will impact the long-term satisfaction of living part-time or full-time in a skoolie. It can be an overwhelming decision for inexperienced people first entering the niche.
We knew we only needed to help users choose between three sizes: a short, mid-sized, or full-sized skoolie. Then, we could lead them to resources to help finalize their ideas into a floor-plan design or make a finished skoolie purchase.
Finally, people in this stage are often in an imaginative, creative state, daydreaming about what they want their skoolie to be like by checking out other conversions for design inspiration and methods for building in features.
We used Interact to ask feature-based questions using images typically found in different-sized skoolies, supplementing with a multiple-choice format for questions difficult to communicate visually.
Key Takeaway: A quiz can help address fundamental decisions for your customers by guiding them through overwhelming choices.
How has your business evolved since your quiz?
Before this quiz, we did not have an email list. We have had almost 40,000 quiz completions, generating nearly 17,000 conversions to email subscribers.
In 2020, just after starting to capture leads through our quiz, we launched a classifieds section where people can buy and sell skoolies. Since the launch, over 1,200 school buses and skoolies have been listed in our classifieds section. Since we started the classifieds, we have emailed new listings to our subscribers weekly. Building an email list from our Skoolie Size Quiz to promote our new listings had a major impact on driving initial traffic to this new section on our website.
We launched a workbook in 2021 and a guidebook in 2022 and sold several hundred copies in the first week of launching, mainly through our email list—with our quiz as the primary list-builder.
Although we have implemented other list-building strategies since 2022, our quiz remains our company’s leading top-of-funnel list-building tool, providing a consistent flow of new email subscribers daily.
Key Takeaway: Skoolie Livin’s quiz was pivotal in transforming their business, generating a significant email list and driving traffic to classifieds sections.
Wrap-Up
In a nutshell, Skoolie Livin’s quiz didn’t just rack up email addresses — it became the backbone of their whole gig. From making sales to launching new sections, the quiz is their go-to move. So, if you’re eyeing a fresh route in online biz, take a cue from Skoolie Livin’—quizzes aren’t just tools; they’re the real deal. Cheers to quizzes, skoolies, and the hustle!