This episode features Interact Digital Marketing Manager and Host, Jessmyn Solana, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, and Ron Sefcik. Join us as we dive into Ron and his wife, Jess’s, quizzes on their travel blog Unearth the Voyage. They are currently in the process of implementing different quizzes for each content silo in their blog.
Ron Sefcik, together with his wife Jess, co-founded ‘Unearth The Voyage‘, a travel blog spotlighting outdoor adventures across North America. Alongside Unearth The Voyage, Ron and Jess also run the marketing agency ‘Ron and Jess Marketing’ where they help wedding professionals grow their businesses and live the life they’ve always wanted.
Learn more about Unearth the Voyage: https://unearththevoyage.com/
Follow Ron and Jess on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unearththevoyage/
Hi guys and welcome back to Interacts Grow podcast. So great to be with you all. As always, I’m your host, Jessmyn Solana, and we have a very special episode this week because we are trying something new. We have our first guest on grow. I also have Jackie with me. I forgot to mention that. I’m sorry, but everybody, please welcome Ron.
Ron, thank you so much for, for joining us this week. I’m super excited to be here. So, first and foremost, I guess, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your business? Give us the full rundown. Sure. So, my name is Ron, and along with my wife Jess, we run a travel blog. It’s called UnearthTheVoyage.com, and we write a lot about… Outdoor adventure travel. So hiking, camping, national parks, that kind of stuff. The things that we like to do. We’ve been doing that since 2017. And alongside that, we also run a marketing agency called Ron and Jess Marketing. Oh, I love it. The most creative marketing name ever.
That’s usually the response I get. They’re like, wow. So you’re Ron and Jess, you made a marketing company called Ron and Just Marketing. So yeah, which the only reason, yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, we actually switched to to that name. So it wasn’t like, it wasn’t like we started with a super simple name.
We’re like, no, we’re going to keep it. Like we had a more complicated name and we’re like, that’s too much. We’re switching. It’s just going to be Ron and Just Marketing. I love it. We met Ron at the Nashville travel summit and that was his joke on stage, which is why I repeated it to the name
exhibit our creativity. Just like, right off the bat, you know, and when we met you at the conference, you actually came up to us because you were like, we already have a quiz. Right. Like you guys had already implemented this, which was really cool for us because we were going into, we were going into that conference thinking you know, we’re meeting totally new people.
I, we know Nina, we know she’s a customer but that was like a fun surprise. Yeah. You guys already have me converted. So it was just a friendly conversation. We just got to become friends, which is awesome. Ron, tell us about the different types of quizzes that you use. Because when we were talking about this, you have quite a few that you’re promoting all at the same time.
Yeah, actually we’re, we’re working on expanding the number of different quizzes that we utilize. And we started using interact. Probably about three months ago now, it was, it was earlier this summer and we wanted to utilize it to capture like just more names and email addresses for the purposes of our email marketing.
And this is all specifically for the travel blog, not yet incorporated it into what we do with the run and just marketing, but for our blog, we had tried kind of like newsletter opt ins and things like that before, but just because of the nature of how our traffic operates, it’s predominantly just organic traffic that comes from Google and places like that.
Our, like, new users is always significantly higher than, like, our repeat readers. And so we didn’t ever really have a lot of success with the newsletter type thing. We never put a lot of, like, time and energy and stuff into it because a lot of the readers that were coming to the website were not repeat readers that were particularly interested in what we were doing in any way.
But email marketing was definitely, like, a Big section of like kind of our business as a whole that we wanted to like expand on and grow with a little bit. And so we thought for a little bit about maybe other ways to be incentivizing people, you know, to be trusting us with their contact information and how we might be able to provide more, you know, value and things like that through email marketing.
And the quizzes became a really good solution to that. So essentially what we do is that for each kind of like silo or like group of content that we write about on the blog, that’s usually centered around like a particular theme. We’re creating quizzes that relate to specifically that topic or that theme.
So, for example, a lot of them are people that were reading about things like hikes or various different tours, or, you know, fun stuff that they could do at national parks. And we realized that a lot of these people, based on the keywords that they were searching and the articles that they were reading, were trying to answer a question.
in some way. They were trying to figure out which hike or which tour or which whatever that they could go on. So we just created quizzes for each of these pillars of content that walk people through a short series of questions, asking them, you know, if it’s a hike, you know, okay, are you going to go with kids?
Like, How long do you want to hike? Do you want to hike one mile or do you want to hike 15 miles? Like all the things in the information that they would have gotten in the article anyway. It just provided such an easier way for this decision to kind of be made for them and it worked beautifully. It’s a really, really big incentive for people.
Believe it or not, people love just being told what to do as opposed to reading like a 3000 word article about something. And so creating very specific quizzes that relate to like what they’re actually reading right now, or at the very least, like the content silo that they’re within has been like a game changer where the opt ins are really good.
That’s a really cool use case, because if you, if you weren’t a customer when you came up to us at the conference and you were asking something like this, I probably at the time would have encouraged you to use one quiz with branching logic where it started out with, like, what type of adventure do you want to go on a hike versus a river, river, river rafting, whatever I just made an AI quiz about river cruising, which And then based on if they say hike versus river rafting, it goes into, you know, what region of the world or of the U.
S. is that in, right? But I can already see like when you’re saying this that that would cause people to just bounce, right? Like they, they’re already reading a hiking blog, like duh, they want to go on a hike, right? Versus they’re on the river rafting blog, let’s send them that path. So I really like how you Decided to break up the quizzes and use multiple versions because they’re that much more engaging for each of the blogs you’re putting them on.
Yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s like we, we kind of came to the conclusion that like, like you mentioned, if they’re reading this article, like they’ve already decided that much already. And if I offer them something that’s a higher level than that, it’s almost kind of a step backwards in their research and what they’re doing.
So the incentive almost goes away completely. Whereas this was a way in which we could provide, like, a step forward with them and get them even closer. It’s also helps to that based on whatever answer that they give, we’ve created all different email sequences and, like, they actually receive an email immediately after completing the quiz that is specific to whatever answer that they got.
Which helps even more. So, like, if they’re trying to choose which particular hike they want to go on, and they end up with, okay, this one, like this, this is the perfect hike for you. Our email automations will immediately then send them an email that says, hey, here is a custom guide for you. That is specific, not just a hiking, but that hike.
Whichever one it is that you ultimately were selected for, which then further kind of like adds more incentive to them to actually go to their email, open it, read it. Like it’s, it’s adding even more to what they were already given now at this point. And that really helped too. Yeah. Did you guys know you wanted to create multiple quizzes?
Or did you start off with one and you were like, actually we should just do this for each category or like each like type of, you know. Like, I don’t know, how do you, how do you call it, like natural or national park, like type of hiking versus like water versus so on and so on. Yeah. That’s a good question.
That’s something actually that we knew right away. Oh, nice. Kind of the, yeah, kind of the idea of making them very specific to each, I refer to them as content silos. There’s quite a lot of different names, but like, I was like, did he say category or what did he Yeah, just like we, we had a couple in mind already that we knew like, all right, we’ve already written a lot of content about this.
A lot of it is for like hikes, or we’ve also done them about like flow trips for various different rivers. So there’s articles like for each of the different rivers and why that river is different. And then like, if you wanted to go kayak or whatever on that particular river, why would you choose this one?
Like over a different one, we already had several of these different silos built out and we knew that. If we were able to tie them that closely together that are often rates and like, would be a lot better. We would be able to help people a lot more than what we, you know, otherwise would. So we kind of knew from the get go that this was going to be a situation in which, like, we would have to do it once to, like, figure it out.
And then once we had figured out, like. How we wanted to do it. It would just be kind of repeat that process for each of these different content silos. I just want to repeat to anyone who’s listening, that’s wanting to make multiple quizzes, do what Ron did and start with one, figure it out, and then start multiplying, you know, making more quizzes and using them.
I think that’s super strategic in the way that you did that, because I’ve met so many customers who try to make multiple quizzes at one time, and it just leads to overwhelmed burnout and nothing ever gets done. So definitely start with one. I love that. I get super overwhelmed very quickly, so I have to, I’m a very, like, methodical thinking person, so if I don’t do it that way, it just won’t happen at all.
So it’s like a necessary way of me working. Yeah. Ron, the quizzes that you’re using, are they like general hikes in the U. S., or are they like different hikes that you could take within Yellowstone? Like, how granular do these different quizzes get? They’re specific to an area, so if I was doing one for hikes, yeah, I would probably do, like, one singular park.
Mostly just because, like, again, all of the traffic coming through, this is organic. And so, like, I have, and we could totally get into this later of, like, how we, like, embed the quizzes and the, you know, the way that the tech side of it actually operates. But because of how we have that set up, I know that the quiz is only appearing to people that are like.
For example, like, already looking at particular hikes for Yellowstone, whether that’s like a best hikes in Yellowstone post, or like, an easy hikes in Yellowstone, or like, hikes with kids, whatever the case may be any of these variety of different articles that probably already exist. It’s going to be specific to that area though.
I think the largest 1 that we have now covers, like, an area that’s maybe about half a state. But there, you know, you would be deciding where you were going to go for one of those things, no matter what. So it’s already like, that’s as granular as that’s going to get just because that one’s actually four rivers and they’re spread out.
They’re not any closer than that. I love that a lot. That’s really, sorry. Go ahead. No, go for it. Go for it. Oh, no. I was just going to say, because specifically in the travel industry, I think what’s tough is like, you know, you don’t want to do the generic. Well, where should you go to next? You know, and it’s, I just love that you guys are like, well, we already know we’re good at, like, talking about the hikes that we do.
We know we’re good at, like, talking about the different rivers we’ve already been to, so it’s like, now let’s create a quiz so that people, one, you have, like, the credibility because you’ve already done it and you have, like, blog posts all on it. It’s just like, okay, that’s great that you guys wrote about it, but, like, now which one should I go to?
And you’re able to help people figure that out so that they could have. their own experience and get to do it that way. I think creating the audiences in that way really helps with like the business side of things too, because obviously like we would do these things anyway. I love going on hikes. I love going on float trips and kayaking, stuff like that.
At a certain point, if it’s going to be my job though, I have to figure out how to monetize it in some way. And with everything that we’ve done, either with the blog or with the marketing, we’ve always found that like, like the more that we can help people. The better it’s going to operate, like then like the revenue and the ROI and all that stuff just kind of comes with it.
If we focus on helping people as much as we possibly can and creating quizzes that are already that granular and then developing audiences out of that that are also like a very specific kind of audiences help with kind of the business side of things too. So, for example, if you were recommending, you know, like, tours for Yellowstone or something like that, say, you went to Yellowstone and you went on, like.
10 different guided tours and you’re like, well, this one was cool for this and this one was cool for that, and you made like a quiz for that to help somebody decide if they even wanted to go on a tour in the first place. And if they did, maybe which tour provider or which type of tour would be best for them.
Having it already be that granular not only helps with like the opt-in rate because it, it’s actually helping people in some way. It also helps with like your affiliates and stuff like that on the back end too, because when you do go to recommend a tour to somebody, you’re pretty, pretty confident that that is actually the right one for them based on the information that they answered in the quiz, and they’re of course going to do a little bit more of their own research to make sure that this is actually what they want to do.
But so long as you’ve actually done it, and you’ve built your quiz appropriately, and you’re making good recommendations. It’s likely that they’re probably going to so affiliates convert significantly better than what they otherwise would. And it also helps with just other partnerships and stuff too.
Because if you use that same example, instead, if I built this entire email community of people that I know, love to go to Yellowstone, because that’s how they came to this in the very 1st place. They are also the type of people who would probably prefer to take a tour as opposed to doing it themselves because some people do.
That’s also a really good audience and community then to start approaching the tour providers who you’ve probably already worked with because you already went there and went on all those tours and stuff. And now be able to come back to them and say, Hey, how’d you like to sponsor an email? Because now I have this big list of like several hundred people that all want to know about going on a tour in Yellowstone, which is what you do.
So there’s obviously a much larger incentive for them too. So it helps on the business side of things too, which is great. It becomes a win win then. And you have like physical data. You could show them like, look, I have this list of people. Here’s how many people said they’d love to do a tour. Yeah. And if you are, depending on what kind of affiliate linking and stuff like that, you’re already putting in there.
And the tracking IDs and stuff that come with that, you could probably approach them with that data too and say, look, these are the bookings that I have already sent you, these are the bookings that I’m sending to your competition. So like, let’s talk about that. Like, can you provide something similar, you know, if, if I was linking to that, because it’s a different kind of tour that they don’t operate, they say like, well, would you consider expanding what you offer and, you know, obviously people want this, they’re, they’re already booking it, but.
You know, you could do that instead. It just opens up a lot of doors for like, those kinds of relationships too. Right. Right. Ron, to sort of flip it. Is there an opportunity? I’m just being curious here. Is there an opportunity for the tour provider or for like, Yellowstone, the national park or the destination to share the quiz on your behalf to help grow the audience?
Or is it really you bringing the audience to the destination? That’s a good question. I’ve honestly never really thought about it from that side before. Yeah. My gut instinct would say that there would be, as far as NPS, I have, I have no idea what goes on with NPS. I have never worked directly with them before.
To be fair, so I don’t, I don’t really, I, my gut would be no, that that would be crossing some kind of lines between like, a public service entity and like a private businesses at that point. As far as the tour providers, or like, whoever it is that you’re linking to, maybe. I would assume that they would be less likely to do that just because what if somebody goes through the quiz and then the determination based on their answers is that you’re not the right to a provider for them.
I just linking to your competition and they probably wouldn’t want to do that. Right. Like the destination as a whole is promoting people coming to Yellowstone. They don’t necessarily care which to a provider would be used. They just want people to come to that destination. So regardless, the results somebody would get, it would still be in that destination, just dependent on a different provider that they’re using.
So yeah, curious thought on how that works. The other thing I wanted to ask you was in the beginning, you had said that you were really trying to grow your email list because you’re, you’re working with like first time readers or people who, who aren’t coming back for more, once you sort of like give them the value and sell them on the idea of the right to where that they should take, they take that to where they absolutely love it.
Does your email sequences go into like other, Okay. Tours like that, that they could explore. So like, I guess my question is, has that improved your retention at all by, by starting so granular and then maybe allowing them to branch out after. Yeah, definitely. So, and I can go into some of the numbers and stuff of like what we’ve seen so far, if you want.
But our open rates have always been really actually, I can look at some of them. So we’ve been going, I said, probably about three months now at this point, it’s been predominantly focused around one of our content silos. So. Exponentially could be expanding from there. I’m still in the process of building the other ones because we wanted to have a look at a little bit of the singular data 1st and then, like, expand from there.
But if you considered this approximately, just kind of what we’ve been able to obtain from, like, 1 content silo within the span of 3 months, we have, like, a little over 300. Active subscribers, that’s not including like, you know, bounces have already been removed. People that accidentally typed their email address wrong or something.
Inevitable unsubscribes from people who got what they want and don’t really want any additional information, which is fine. We don’t want to bother people that don’t want more. But even after that, just like continuous subscribers now that are opening, I think our average open rate is around 35%. Which is good.
I was hoping for anything above 20%. I think the travel industry standard is somewhere around 20%, if I’m not mistaken, based on whatever most recent data that I was looking at. So to be a little, you know, well, above that, we were, we were very, very happy with that. And to have hundreds of subscribers within, like, the 1st, couple of months has been great and answer to your question of, like, kind of expanding and carrying on from there.
We do send them like an initial email. That is a custom guide for. Whatever, hike, river, tour, you name it, like whatever original quiz. Answer that they got, but then after that, we usually follow that up with a sequence of emails, which is part of what’s taking a little longer to pray. That is also related to that same topic.
So, if it would be, if we go back to our example of, like, hiking in Yellowstone or something, we’ll create additional follow up emails that go to that person in the next, you know, several weeks after that spacing them out every few days again. So we’re not annoying anybody or anything, but just providing them more value.
So saying like, hey, if you’re going to go on a hike. Okay. Here’s our hiking packing list. These are the things that I like to bring with. You might find them useful too. And then a couple of days later of, like, here are some, you know, other hiking resources. So it could be, like, you know, if it is for Yellowstone, like, here’s links to the pages, like, on the Yellowstone website of more information about these hikes.
And, like, since this is the 1 that you are going to go on, here’s links to directly, like, maps and, like, you know, parking visitor information that you’re also going to want to know before you go. And then we just try to keep expanding on that to where it almost kind of just becomes like an email mini course in a way that they’re just getting a lot more like free information that’s going to help them plan.
We try to go through and logically put the information together as best we could so that like, as you were planning your trip. This is kind of the next thing that you would be thinking about so that it’s always on pace with what it is that they’re probably doing. I think that has helped a lot with, like, our overtime retention rate and stuff like that, because the original goal was to bring them in by being able to provide more information to them.
But the reason for them to stay was to ultimately be viewing us as some sort of an authority or like just a general source of information about that topic. Right? Yeah. I love that. I love it. So, Ron, you had approached our table because you’re promoting all of these different siloed quizzes on the different blogs, all running simultaneous simul simultaneously.
And so it makes total sense as to why all of these quizzes would need to be available all at the same time. The issue you were experiencing was within our dashboard or within your Interact account, you can promote one quiz at a time through the pop up function. So can you tell us a little bit about the, the struggle that you ran into with that and sort of your workaround that you came up with so that you could be promoting all of these different quizzes through pop ups on the different blogs all at the same time?
Yeah, definitely. That is 1 of the things that we dug into 1st, because like I mentioned before, we, we knew in advance that this is the way that we were, we were going to want to do it. And we do both a pop up and like, an embedded version of the quiz within each article. So I, I needed them, like, multiple places and I needed multiple quiz going at the same time.
Our interact subscription includes like a number of quizzes, which is nice. I can build them all at the same time. But as you mentioned, there was a limitation. Specifically just in terms of the pop up, embedding wasn’t really a problem. We could just use the embed code and just put them wherever they needed to be.
But I really wanted to have that pop up too, just because our readers, like everybody reads a little bit differently. Some people are just annoyed by pop ups and it doesn’t matter what it says. They just close it immediately. Other people need that little bit of an attention draw. So it we, we wanted to be able to kind of cater to both readers a little bit.
People that like. Liked the in content view versus ones that kind of needed to be pulled out of that a little bit more and have a pop up or something different happen. And so, as I mentioned for the embedded ones, that was easy enough. We just went through and embedded them. I started by actually embedding them in each article that was relevant, like, to that particular silo.
In the end, because of the way that we chose to do, like, our thank you pages and stuff like that after the quiz, we opted away from that and started just creating, like, a call to action, like, reusable block. And WordPress, that was like really easy for us to keep throwing in there. And then just created a dedicated page for each one of those quizzes.
The pop up had to function a little bit different though, because as you mentioned, we had to get more than one going at the same time. So for that, we just use an additional plugin. I’m sure there’s a variety of ones that we could use. We ended up using one called brave which is a paid plugin, but it wasn’t typically Terribly expensive for the year and that really just gave us the functionality just for the pop up placement because we already had the embed codes.
All I really needed to do was take the embed code from interact and instead of embedding that actually in the post, just embed it in the pop up window instead and. That made it really, really easy because part of the other functionality that Brave already had was choosing which posts or which sort of things you wanted this pop up to appear on.
And one of the things that you could choose by was by category. And we already had these content silos categorized as like the same sort of thing so that they were connected just within WordPress. And so that recommended posts and everything else operated the way that it was supposed to. So once we Just copied the embed code from interact over to brave, then it was just a matter of going into the brave settings and saying, okay, for this one, I want it to pop up for anything that falls within this category, which has also been really helpful as we continue to add more content to those same silos, because I don’t have to keep redoing that.
Tech, like I’m already going to tag them as that category anyway, and then they’ll automatically just start receiving that same pop up. I just have to remember to throw the reusable block in there when we’re actually formatting the post. Very cool. Oh, that is so cool. Did you notice a difference or do you even look at these stats of where the quiz takers are coming from?
The pop up versus the embed block that you’re adding in? No, that’s not something that I’ve dug into. I. Honestly was a little bit distracted with the conference and stuff recently. And so I’m kind of just circling back to this because we had everything built like for the first silo. We’re like, all right, let’s put all the emails together.
And we’re going to run it for a little while and look at data. That kind of ran straight into the time where I started prepping for my presentation for the conference. So I’m just now coming back and circling a lot of stuff. So as of right now, I don’t, I don’t know what the opt in difference has been between the two.
Okay. Yeah. Interested. Because I guess another question of like a follow up to that is the embed block that you’re adding into the quiz, what does it look like on the blog post? Is it happening multiple times? Is it the top, the bottom, the middle? I only put it in once just because we are also Mediavine publishers and so there are other ads and things like that on there and I don’t really want to distract away from the content too much and make it difficult for people to read.
I just want to make sure that those opportunities are there. If that’s something that the, that the reader wants. So I do only put it in once and we normally put it in. I say, I like, I do all this stuff. I don’t, there are people who, I don’t, I don’t put it, I don’t put in bed blocks in, in anything. I figure out the tech and then people who are more reliable than me work on these things.
But it is, it is put in once for each post and it’s within probably the first, like fourth of the post. It’s not the very first thing we give them a little bit of like their initial answer and like the content that like. They originally came there for, and then presumably if they’ve read past the first little bit, they are liking the information.
And then we give them that say, Hey, do you want to just keep reading this? Or do you want to take the quiz and have me just tell you what to do? Yeah. Last question for me on the tech side of this within interact, you have the pop up option. You also have an announcement bar option, which you would run into the same issue of, I’m sure there’s a WordPress plugin or different plugins where you can have the announcement bar and then use either the code or the link from interact to use.
Any preference on why you’re choosing pop ups over announced in bars? Would you try announced in bars? What do you think about that? That’s a good question. So that’s something that we had thought about too. That is something that to my knowledge we can still do through brave because they have like a Variety of different kind of in bed placements for different things, pop ups, just one of them.
You can do an announcement bar or something like that. Ultimately, I think we decided not to do that just because again, we are also a Mediavine publisher. So we already have like advertising bars and stuff like that at the bottom. And I didn’t want there to start becoming just like too many things on the screen.
Most of our traffic also comes from mobile. And if I put the announcement bar at the top. that is going to affect like some of the accessibility to the menu and just kind of site navigation as a whole. It would do a better job of keeping it on the screen longer. So it would in some way, shape or form likely probably improve our opt ins a little bit.
I probably have to test it a little bit first and see if there was any sort of like negative impact on sort of just user experience as a whole. That would kind of overcompensate, I guess, for, like, the benefit that we’re getting from the additional opt in. So, for now, we’ve just left it as, like, an actual pop up.
And then the bed well, that. It’s like, it’s interesting because you know, we actually like talk about this all the time in terms of like how to promote your quiz and we never really know the best way to answer it. But hearing you talk about kind of working through like, well, I know what I already have on the page.
That’s so different than us being like. You know, embed it here, put a pop up, put an announcement bar because it’s like, you’re right, like you need to think about what you already have on, like, you know, and that’s even like, what does, what do your like blog posts look like? How many images do you have in there?
Do you have a side like menu? Do you have a top menu? Because all of that does matter in terms of like where you put your quiz. And especially in your case, since you have multiple, you. Do you need to kind of put it on different places of the website rather than just having one main quiz, like on the homepage or something like that?
Yeah, we don’t like link to it in our sidebar or anything like that. It’s just where it’s embedded and then also the pop up and for the part where it’s embedded, it is formatted quite a bit differently than like it. It matches what’s with the rest of the page so that it still feels like part of the same website.
It doesn’t look like this is an ad or this is something different. It still feels like part of the same website. But there’s like a background color to it. That’s different than like anything else. And like little things that we did to make it stand out kind of like just enough. Right. I’m definitely going to think about that question differently.
When people ask, I’ll be like, well, what do you have on your website? Yeah. Just throw it back at them and be like, well, answer your question with a question. What’s already on the page. Yeah. Cause you’re right, Jess. I would just say, I mean, it depends, right? Like think about your users. The fact that, you know, people are coming from mobile Ron as opposed to desktop, right?
Like that makes sense. These people are on the go, so they need something easy and quick. So rather than saying, it depends. Yeah. Analyze like, where are your people coming from? What have you tested before? What looks the best, what would you prefer as a user, right? Coming to your own site. Yeah, and you had some really good points too, when we talked to the conference about like, you know, how are you getting your quiz out there of just like printing QR codes spend so much time inside of the digital space.
You start to forget that, like, the real world is like, actually even there. But that was a really, really good suggestion because so many of the things that we do are actually location based. I live here in St. Louis. And so if I was to write about something here, We don’t write a lot actually about here in town, but if I did, and I wanted to go like I don’t know, best coffee shops or like best coffee shops to work at, or something like that, I could create a quiz for that, actually print out a QR code for it, go around to a bunch of the coffee shops, which all have like bulletin boards and stuff.
And then just put a little text over the page. That’s like, love this coffee shop. Do you want to find more? And then just, you could be pulling an opt ins that way. And that’s, you know, a completely different source of, you know, subscribers aside from just the website and Google or Pinterest or whatever.
Yeah. And I was even thinking, I remember this conversation and I was even thinking like, especially you being your own ideal customer, right? Like you’ve done these tours yourself where, which coffee shops are you hanging out in to grab breakfast before these hikes? Drop a QR code for the hike quiz there, you know, doesn’t necessarily have to be a coffee shop quiz at the coffee shop But people who are going on these hikes on these on these outdoor adventures, right?
They have to do other things Are they at gyms? Are they at coffee shops? Are they at grocery stores? Are they in like we work like co working area type things? Yeah, lots of opportunities to grab people out in the real world and not just from online bring them into your online space Very exciting. Yeah Yeah.
Cause also too, if I’m walking by and I like open a QR code and actually take the quiz, that’s, there’s more interest there than if I were to like click on something that I scrolled past on like Instagram or something, you know, I love that. Yeah, definitely. There’s been so much focus on just like, how do we, how do we reach our people?
Like in the digital space that like, not that that’s not important, obviously that’s the focus of what we do, but now it’s like. Let’s not forget that they’re in the real space too. Like we can, we can also talk to them there as well. I love it. I love it. I do also, so this isn’t really a question, but I want to call out how you have the perfect example of all weekend.
Me and Jackie were like, create a quiz based off of content you already have. Like, create, create a quiz based off of like what you’ve already written, and this is just a perfect example of that. Not trying to like recreate new blog posts to include a quiz in there, you know, like taking what’s already performing and then like attaching a quiz to it.
Beautiful. Ron, I don’t think you used Interact AI to build these quizzes, right? Did you do it completely on your own? I did do it completely on my own, yeah. Can you Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just gonna ask, can you share a little bit about the process? Like, where did you, cause this was, I think, the first quiz that you had ever created, right?
So you knew what you wanted it to be about. You knew the goal of it, what you wanted it to do. How did you go about actually constructing the quiz in NTRK? What was that like? So the functionality obviously of it is amazing. I did try other options. So Interact’s not the only quiz builder that I’ve used.
It’s the first quiz that I’ve built, but I did try other ones. And I was like, this doesn’t, it doesn’t really need to do what I needed to do. And Interact did all of that beautifully. And so I was just like, perfect. Here we go. This is what I was looking for in terms of how I actually constructed it. I think I just kind of worked backwards.
So I started with the first silo and I was like, okay, here are the things that we’ve already written about and the things that we’ve already done. So these are the potential answers that I could end up recommending for somebody. And I started with that just kind of like in a Google sheet. I do everything in Google sheets.
So I just put all of those in one column on one side. And I’m actually working through this with a client right now, actually, because we’re working on incorporating this same concept into like. For our marketing clients too. So we’re doing the same thing right now, which is start with a Google sheet and say, okay, here are the potential answers of what it could be.
And then we just started kind of working in rows backwards and thinking like, okay, what are the difference between these things? So again, if it was like, if we go back to our example of hikes in Yellowstone, I would just write all the hikes that I’ve been on and then just start thinking like, well, I know you can bring dogs on this one, but I know you can’t bring dogs on this one.
So there’s a difference. And so then I just put a question like. Is it dog friendly? Like, are you going to hike with your dog? Like, okay, I know this one’s relatively short and this one’s a super long 1. so maybe I’ll do like a distance thing. And I just kept doing that. Until I had it worked out to where there was basically only really 1 answer that was going to fit with, like, all of the questions anymore.
And I sort of like, color coded them and I just made, like. Each one of the possible answers a color and then I just kept like assigning that color in the rows next to it under each of the questions and just waited until I only had one of each color and I was like, okay, it has to match up now and then I just wanted to interact and then I just constructed it the other way, started with the questions and put all the branching logic and stuff together and it actually went pretty smooth.
That sounds so organized. I love it. Anyone who needs quiz help, call Ron. How long do you Ron? That process. Building the actual quiz, that’s tough. I could probably do it now in like 30 minutes, maybe. Something like that. Does he know what I’m doing. It would be tough to give, for me to give it an exact time for building the first one just because we did change it a little bit.
I started by having the answers so Paintract also gives us the option for like each of those custom thank you pages based on the answer that the person receives. That’s great, and I started doing it that way, and then I thought about it a little more afterwards, and I think we’d actually run it for a couple of days first before I was thinking about how do I, how do I incentivize people to go to their email more because I’m going to send them more stuff, and I want them to like, start reading these, so how do I provide even more value to give them a reason to like, want to do that?
And the solution that we came up with was sending them a custom guide for whatever answer that they got. And then in order for me to do that, I had to switch around and use just one. I actually redirect to a different, just like one thank you page now, which doesn’t actually tell them exactly what their answer is.
So I, I, I do step out there a little bit and potentially annoy people just slightly and tell them. I do have your answer for you. You have to go to your email to see it. Okay. And that’s really their incentive that gets them there. And then once they’re there, they’re like, oh, wow, it comes with this whole guide and everything.
Great. This is cool. And now I can just plan my whole trip. So slight annoyance followed by like significantly more value than what they thought they were going to get. And because I had to switch it around a couple of times like that. It did end up taking me a little while to, like, get it all finalized.
So, last question. I feel like I said this already, but I really do have one more question. So, on the thank you page itself, is it one, everyone seeing the same thing? How are you segmenting in your email system with the actual guide that they should be getting if they all end up onto the same result page?
Oh, good question. So there are, you can, when you’re building your interact quiz and you’re integrating with your E. S. P. your email service provider, you set an action for each of the answers that someone could potentially get. I use mailer light for everything just because I really like it. And I’ve used it for a long time.
So I set that action to put people in different group segments. Within MailerLite, and then I named each of those group segments within MailerLite the answer to whatever particular answer that they got for that quiz, and then I built automations inside MailerLite that tells MailerLite if somebody goes into this particular group segment, initiate this automation, and then that automation sends like the custom guide for that, so that I know that it’s going to the right person.
As soon as that happens, And they’re sent that initial guide. MailerLite then has another automation that I set up that actually removes them from that group and then just puts them in one total group. So, if I had, like, a just these are all the people that are doing hikes in Yellowstone group, they get pulled from those individual groups and put into just that larger pool.
Because from there on out, all of, like, the follow up information that we send them is relevant really to anybody who’s, you know, hiking in in Yellowstone, for example. So MailerLite actually moves a lot of it around. Wow. Really cool. So are the triggers in MailerLite are a combination of the answers they’ve chosen?
Like it would be like, I don’t know, answered question 1 with response A, question 2 response A, question 3 response A, then send them through this flow? No, so the groups within MailerLite are only based off what their final answer, or like their The result that they were given. So you saw multiple results.
They just all say, thank you. Everything always redirects to one standard. Thank you page. So as they go through the quiz, when they start the quiz, they’ll get asked the questions, they’ll be redirected to a thank you page that says, Hey, your results were sent to your email. The answer that they received is still logged by interact.
So then interact tells mailer, like, Hey, this is the answer that this person got. So put them in this automation. Okay, cool. Yeah, I just want to reiterate that so anyone listening could follow. You have multiple results within your interact account, which will tell you this is the hike you should take.
But all of those results are redirecting to the same page. So they all see the same thing, but in the back end, you’re able to tag them based on the results. Got it. Yes. Yes. You explained that way better than me. I only… Ron, that’s a lot of work. Because I wish that you just meant you had one thank you result for everybody.
That makes total sense. Yeah, no, just one thank you page that they all see. But yeah, on the, that’s one of the really, really nice features about Interact is that you can set that action condition based on the actual result that they got. Not just like when somebody completes this quiz, what do you want to happen?
Right. I need more control than that. I know when somebody gets this answer from this quiz, this is what I want to happen. I always, I always tell people, I’m like, our customers do the craziest things I’ve never even imagined. I would have never thought of that. But it’s so clever because it’s like, yeah, I want them to go into their inbox to get this info.
So they understand the value of like, Being on my email list, but it’s like, okay, well, if I give them the result, they might be like, cool. Peace out. Yeah. And it’s always like 50 50. You know, I never like, it’s always like, well, I can’t really tell you to do one or the other. I don’t really know. So I don’t know what would be best for your audience.
Yeah, I think it’s going to be very, very situational based on the quiz that you’re using for specifically the way that we’re using it. We couldn’t figure out a way to let them know that, like, look, I’m going to email you something because, like, I’m going to provide you way more information. I’m going to give you a custom guide for there wasn’t really a way to, like, cram all of that in there.
So we just kind of had to take the leap of, like, you know what, we’ll just design the text so that they have to go there. And then we’ll have way more room within that initial email that we send them to then further elaborate on that and be like, Hey, thanks for coming here and opening this. I appreciate that.
Here is the information that I promised you. Also, here’s a bunch more free information that you didn’t even know you were going to get. Right. Right. Plus come back tomorrow. I’m going to send you more and it’s just like continuous. I love it. I love it. Well, Ron, thank you so much. Jackie, do you have any last minute questions before we ask our absolute last question?
Our third last question of the day. I won’t do it. All right. Last question for you. If you could describe how Interact Quizzes or well, yeah, in your case quizzes, because you have multiple, has helped your business in three sentences, what would it be? I would say it has substantially improved our ability to provide custom help for our readers.
Then what we would have otherwise ever been able to do. I love it. I love it. And can you also just for those who are listening in, say out your actual URL, like website URL, like where they can find you online. Sure. Yeah, definitely. So you can find the blog is just HTTPS. It’s unearth the voyage. com.
And that’s usually the quickest way to get ahold of us through just like the contact page there. Anybody who is interested in like the marketing side of what we do. Also a really easy one. It’s just Ron and Jess marketing. com. Love it. Okay. That was my last question. Are you an interact affiliate Ron?
Cause you need to be for your own just marketing. We definitely, definitely, you are, you are ready. No, no, we definitely need to be because I said we have with clients are ready that basically what I did was I took a lot of the information that. You know, that we’ve just talked about and what we’ve been doing on our own and just shared that with some of our clients.
And it’s like, hey. I could set something similar of like this for you guys, and I’m interested to see how that’s going to go, because that’s something that we are going to do in conjunction with paid traffic. I’m going to see how different that data ends up looking, because everything that we’ve experimented with so far on our travel blog is strictly speaking, organic traffic.
So I’ll be interested to see kind of like, the difference in the numbers and whether or not I would imagine. That like our cost per click in comparison to like our click through rate with organic traffic will probably be different. I believe, though, that, like, our actual completion rates and stuff like that should be relatively similar because if somebody is interested, they’re interested once they’ve started the quiz, the odds of them finishing it should probably still be relatively similar.
The only difference is going to be how they’re presented with this in the 1st place. So that should be interesting to see. Yeah, very exciting. You’re getting an application from me right after this. All right. And for those who are listening, thanks so much for joining us. And we’ll see you next week. Bye.
Yeah, thank you for having me, guys. This was great. Thank you. All right, stay on.