Converting a social audience into an email list is an interesting challenge because social media is still fundamentally entertainment-based. Even for brands that create a lot of educational content, the way that content is delivered is entertaining by nature. It has to hold attention, move quickly, and give people a reason to keep watching.
Then you ask those same people to opt in for something. You have your freebie, lead magnet, guide, checklist, webinar, or whatever you are using to move people onto your email list. And suddenly there can be this natural mismatch between the entertaining experience people are having with your content and the much more serious educational resource you are asking them to download.
That transition matters. If somebody has been watching entertaining Instagram Reels and then suddenly lands on a page asking them to download a 37-page PDF, the energy changes pretty dramatically.
This is one of the reasons quizzes have worked so well for our customers at Interact for such a long time. A quiz carries the entertainment value of social media into the lead magnet itself. Who doesn’t love a quiz?
People want to find things out about themselves. That desire for self-understanding goes back to the earliest recorded philosophers, and it continues to show up over and over again in modern culture. There was a stretch in the 2010s when quizzes were repeatedly among the most popular pieces of content on Facebook, and people still take them today for the exact same reason.
The really smart expert-led businesses using quizzes as lead magnets are combining the best of both worlds. They get the interactive, entertaining experience of a personality quiz, assessment, or diagnostic, where somebody learns something about themselves, and they combine that with an email opt-in that connects directly to their email list.
Interact integrates directly with Flodesk, Kit, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, HubSpot, and more than 20 other platforms. So when somebody takes the quiz, they can go directly onto your email list and be segmented based on the outcome they receive. You can then follow up differently depending on what that person actually needs.
But the email integration is only part of why this works.
The other reason quizzes work so well is that they let you answer the questions your audience is already asking you when the real answer is, “It depends on who you are.”
This happens all the time when you are an expert. Somebody asks you a question and you immediately realize that you cannot give them a blanket answer. Before you can answer properly, you need to know who is asking.
What is their situation? What are they struggling with? What do they want? What have they already tried?
You basically need to say, “Wait, wait, wait. Who are you?”
Not in a who are you? kind of way. In a who are you, really? kind of way.
Which, by the way, was the name of a great quiz Jenna Kutcher made years ago: the Who Are You Really? Quiz.
But I digress.
A quiz allows you to collect the context you need and then provide an answer that actually fits the person taking it. That is how you carry the entertaining quality of your social content into a lead magnet without sacrificing the usefulness of the experience.
People want to better themselves.
This is innate. Put a group of people in a room for five minutes and eventually we are going to start talking about how to improve something about ourselves. We want to be healthier, communicate better, have better relationships, build better businesses, make better decisions, or understand ourselves more clearly.
But people do not necessarily want to be left on their own to figure out how to do that.
They want guidance from someone who knows what they are talking about.
And guess who the expert is?
You are.
By providing personalized expert guidance through a quiz, you are helping somebody understand where they are and what they should do next. If that guidance is genuinely useful, people are grateful for it. That is where the email opt-in makes sense.
It is not, “Give me your email so I can market to you.”
It is, “Tell me a little bit about yourself and I will help point you in the right direction.”
Another great example is Dr. Sasha Hamdani, The Psych Doctor MD. Her quiz helps people identify their biggest ADHD struggle.
Her social content does a really good job of combining education and entertainment. She brings levity to a difficult subject while still being highly informative, and that has helped her build an audience of more than a million people and appear on shows like The Mel Robbins Podcast and Armchair Expert.
The quiz acts as a bridge between that social audience and her email list. The person does not suddenly go from watching an entertaining Reel to reading a textbook. They continue interacting with Sasha’s expertise through an experience that still feels engaging.
And I want to be clear that I do not think quizzes should be your only lead magnet.
You need the vegetables too.
Maybe the vegetables are a two-hour live webinar, a downloadable guide, a workbook, a checklist, or a deeper educational resource. Those things can be extremely valuable, especially for the people in your audience who are ready to sit down and spend more time learning from you.
The quiz is the dessert.
And when you put quizzes into the mix alongside your other lead magnets, it is hard to argue that they are not the most entertaining option. They are interactive. They are personalized. They are about the person taking them.
They are fun.
I have been running Interact for 15 years, and I have learned that there are basically two types of people in this world. One type loves quizzes.
The other type is grumpy.
And the grumpy group is very small.
People you would never expect will tell you, “Oh yeah, I always take those quizzes whenever I see them.”
The expert-led component has also become even more important as AI-generated content has become ubiquitous.
People do not just want to take a random quiz they found somewhere online. They do not want a generic assessment that could have been generated in 30 seconds and published by somebody they have never heard of. They want to know that the guidance came from you.
Your reputation matters.
Your experience matters.
Your judgment matters.
People want personalized guidance from an expert they trust.
This is basically the structure of the hero’s journey. There is a hero trying to figure something out, moving through a challenge or trying to get somewhere better. And then there is a guide who helps them navigate the journey.
Your customer is the hero.
You are the guide.
The quiz gives you a way to guide them at scale.
That is why quizzes are so effective at growing email lists, especially for expert-led businesses that already have substantial audiences on Instagram and other social platforms.
Customers have generated more than 100 million leads through quizzes built on Interact. At its core, the reason this works is very simple.
A quiz does not force people to leave the entertaining world of social media and suddenly do homework.
It carries the experience forward.
They get to learn something about themselves. They get personalized guidance from an expert they already trust. And you get to turn some of the attention you have already earned into an email audience you can continue serving for years to come.