Does data influence your business decisions? If you’re in the business of making money, it probably should.
Since up to 73% of business data goes unused every year, it’s important to remember that data is more than just a collection of numbers. It can tell a story about your audience.
Without data, you can’t plan properly or make effective business decisions. Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers than companies that do not prioritize data. If you aren’t already tracking data, it’s time to create a plan for data collection.
Think of data as the necessary element that connects your brand with the insights you need to build a relationship with your audience.
Entrepreneurs had to get audience data from time-consuming surveys and tedious forms in the past. They had no way of proving the accuracy of the audience members’ responses even when they did receive them.
Many businesses have now chosen to collect data through delightful online quizzes, providing their audience with a fun experience that’s completely automated. Quizzes encourage interaction, making them more memorable than other lead magnet types.
After someone finishes a quiz, they’ll learn more about themselves while you learn more about them. It’s the ultimate win-win scenario!
If you’re ready to collect more data, let’s talk about why quiz data is so important.
Why use quiz data to make business decisions?
Quiz data can be used to help you better connect with your audience. This can be accomplished by connecting you with the data-driven insights you need to optimize your sales funnels, generate more leads, and attract more email subscribers.
If you aren’t sure whether quizzes will give you the data you need, below are a few reasons to use quiz data in your decision-making process.
Prioritize real audience insights
Do you ever find yourself second-guessing if you’re creating the right content for your audience? To break out of this self-doubt cycle, use quiz data to influence your offerings and decide what to focus on.
Artist Emily Jeffords says her quiz is essential for learning more about her audience. By creating an educational experience through her quiz and follow-up emails, she can guide more aspiring artists toward her paid membership community.
By reviewing her quiz data, Emily can make better-informed decisions about what freebies she should create to further grow her email list. You can do the same with your own quiz.
Monitor audience trends
Quizzes are popular because they’re a form of personalized marketing, meaning you can treat quiz-takers as unique individuals with your content strategy. While your quiz won’t treat quiz-takers as a number, you can use the data collected from their quiz journey to monitor trends while noticing key similarities and differences.
Business coaching duo Caroline and Jason accomplished this with their Business Bottlenecks quiz. After someone takes their quiz, they receive immediate value from the follow-up emails and quiz result landing pages. However, Caroline and Jason get even more value every time someone completes the quiz because they can optimize their main offer based on their audience’s answers.
The better Caroline and Jason understand what’s holding their audience members back, the more they can tap into these pain points in their sales funnel. These quiz data insights have translated into more revenue—nearly $300,000 to be exact! Talk about a great way to fast-track your business growth.
The numbers don’t lie
Most entrepreneurs say creating an ideal client avatar and additional customer personas is the best way to connect with your audience. However, while these methods provide discoveries, no fictitious example is as valuable as the feedback you’ll receive from your actual audience.
When you collect real data through a quiz, like health coach Lyndi Cohen, you’ll realize how the numbers tell an interesting story about what your audience cares about and what they want to learn. By keeping her quiz short, she focused on gathering only the most crucial information before leading quiz-takers to her free email course.
Since Lyndi helps women remedy their emotional eating through a coaching program and app, the data from this quiz helps her strengthen her marketing based on real numbers. The quiz also provides a safe space for women to be honest about their nutritional habits so Lyndi’s data is as accurate as possible.
3 types of quiz data you can learn from
After you create and launch your quiz, you can access your analytics dashboard, which will reveal your quiz data. I did the same when creating my quiz, What Is Your Brand Voice Style?
When inside your analytics dashboard, you’ll see a collection of data, including the number of quiz views, starts, competitions, and leads. While these numbers can help you understand how your quiz is performing, it’s even better to look at the bigger picture behind this data.
Below, I cover the three main types of quiz data you’ll want to regularly track so you can tweak your quiz, content, and offers accordingly. I also go over how you can use each data point to inform your business strategy.
Quiz answer percentage
As a quiz creator, you’ll naturally want to know how people answer each question. By looking at the trends in your analytics dashboard, you’ll quickly see which answers are most popular.
For example, my first quiz question asks what stage of business someone is in. Based on the data below, it looks like most people are in their first year of business.
I could then use this insight to create content for first-year business owners and those a few years into entrepreneurship. Instead of assuming what your audience is thinking, strategically write quiz questions and answers that will reveal what you want to know.
Quiz result percentage
Now let’s talk about the data behind your quiz results. In reviewing your analytics dashboard, you may find that some result types are more common than others.
In my quiz, “The Educator” is the most popular result type by far. Knowing this, I can recommend my best resources and create additional freebies for this type. I can also write more relevant blog articles and newsletters.
Since I created a personality quiz, this data tells me a lot about the common traits and characteristics of my audience members. I need these insights to strengthen my marketing and sales strategies, so it’s a great source of information!
Number of leads generated
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’ll use your quiz to grow your email list. To attract more subscribers, you’ll want to review your analytics dashboard and determine how well your quiz performs.
From 2017 to 2019, my quiz generated over 4,000 leads completely on autopilot (see image below). These leads came from organic traffic on my website, so I was pretty happy with the results.
My quiz lead conversion rate hovered around 38% for this period. However, the first year I offered my quiz, my conversion rate was closer to 42%.
With this information, I could revisit my quiz content strategy to learn about the slight decrease in lead generation and make small tweaks to remedy it. You should do the same when you see changes in the data.
Best practices for collecting quiz data
Once you press publish on your quiz, try not to go into set-it-then-forget-it mode. Too many entrepreneurs get excited to launch their quiz, only to never revisit their analytics or see how their audience interacts with the quiz.
In addition to regularly tracking your quiz performance, there are a few best practices you should follow when using your quiz to generate more leads.
Start with a quiz strategy
Before selecting your quiz questions or creating your quiz types, take a step back and define your overall quiz strategy.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Why am I creating a quiz?
- What do I want the quiz to accomplish?
- What does success look like after implementing the quiz?
If you have a clear idea of what metrics you want to measure and how they will play a role in your strategy from the get-go, you’ll have a better understanding of how to utilize future quiz data.
Segment leads in your email marketing
To take your email marketing strategy to the next level, think about how you want to segment your new email leads. Marketing segmentation is a simple way to group similar email subscribers so that you can send personalized email content based on their interests or needs.
One of the easiest ways to get started with email segmentation is by tagging your new subscribers based on their final quiz result. For example, since I have four total quiz result types in my brand voice quiz, I segment every subscriber who joins my list from the quiz into one of four tags.
I do this by asking quiz-takers to sign up for my email list through the landing page above. These new subscribers are then automatically tagged and segmented in Flodesk, making email marketing a breeze.
Make continual updates to your quiz
I recommend setting aside time to review your quiz analytics and feedback every three to six months, especially in the quiz’s first year. Then, tweak your quiz based on data-driven insights and decide if you need to switch up your offers.
Here are a few things to consider as you continue generating leads with your quiz:
- Is your offer still relevant to quiz-takers?
- Do your quiz-takers fit a new demographic?
- Has your audience changed since you first published the quiz?
- How well is your audience interacting with your quiz?
Once you’ve answered these prompts and reviewed your analytics dashboard, take note of what you noticed and move on to your next business task.
Use quiz data to unlock new business opportunities
Some quiz creators see their quiz data as a main source of inspiration for their content marketing. By understanding how people are wired and what they care about, you can offer better services and products through your quiz.
To get a preview of your analytics dashboard, sign up for a free trial of Interact! Our Growth and Pro plans come with advanced analytics capabilities, helping you optimize your quiz with aggregated audience data and drop-off graphs.
You can use this article as a starting point, but if you’d like to see even more data from your quiz, take a look at our integrations list. When you integrate your Interact quiz with marketing automation tools, there’s no limit to the kind of data you can collect.
The only question you’ll be asking yourself is what to research next.