This episode features Interact’s CEO, Josh Haynam, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, Digital Marketing Manager and Host, Jessmyn Solana, and Social Content Manager, Jesy Nelson.
In this episode we will cover part 2 of Tackling the 3 Quiz Marketing Barriers: Connecting Your Email!
- Why is connecting your email platform a barrier?
- Do you really need a welcome email sequence for your quiz?
- How many emails are enough?
- Best practices versus minimum viable? Which is better?
- What are the top 3 things you should have to connect your quiz to your email platform?
Ready to put our AI-powered quiz maker to the test? Learn more here!
Hi guys, and welcome back to Interact’s Grow podcast, where we talk about all things marketing and business. And to help you actually grow with us today, we have all four of us, Josh, Jackie, and Jesy. Hopefully by now you know who everyone is. If not, you have to go watch our more previous episodes.
And guys, last week we talked, we sort of introduced the idea: The main three quiz marketing barriers that mostly our customers, but people interested in quizzes face when they’re thinking about using this in their business. So last week we talked about why quizzes are a marketing barrier and then actually writing your quiz and how to use AI to get there and, and mostly to get there faster and easier.
This week we’re talking about the second thing, which is connecting your email. So I am going to start it off with Jesy, cuz we did talk about this a little bit yesterday, just on a regular call, kind of coming up with these questions of why is connecting your email market. Platform a barrier for quizzes?
Yeah, so I think first and foremost, the biggest barrier is the tech part, is people have a lot of trouble jumping between their RM or their email marketing platform and interact software and understanding what information needs to go where, how to set up the triggers to send over the correct results for the right people, and just segmenting all of that perfectly.
And then I think the second kind of part is understanding how many emails to send, and how to get in contact with these people once they’ve subscribed and opted into your quiz. And because there’s so many different opinions and options for all types of industries and different types of businesses and all of that, I think people get kind of confused and overwhelmed, and that’s where they get stuck with what to do.
Totally agree. I think that especially for the tech, you know, when you see the quiz, setting it up is so easy. But once you have to start kind of getting into the nitty gritty, what feels like, you know, more code, I guess you could say it, it starts to feel a little bit overwhelming, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing.
Josh, you. What No one, I think has said the king of quizzes, but you smarted this company and in your time writing your own quizzes, helping people set up their quizzes, do you really need a welcome email sequence for your quiz? Yeah, I think Jackie said this perfectly before we hit record, but I think it really depends on what stage of business you’re at.
So for a lot of people, I actually don’t recommend trying to set up, you know, unique sequences depending on the outcomes and do all these follow up sequences. It’s just like, add people to your list. If you’re just trying to get started and you’re working with people manually to get clients on board, I would rather have you just put people on a list and then email every single person who joins your list with a personal note after you look at their brand and you check out what they’re doing.
Cause at the beginning, right, it’s like you need every opportunity to be as big as you possibly can get it to be. Then once you start to scale and you can’t do that anymore, just literally time-wise, that’s where I think you start to build out more and more. And I think the biggest error that people make right, is you just kinda.
you miss the point of what the personalization is supposed to be doing. It’s supposed to be automating what you would do if you had time to help every single person one-on-one. But I think people come in and they’ll take a course, or they’ll watch something from a big influencer who talks about email sequences and follow ups, and they’re like, oh, I gotta do that.
So they’ll try to just create it from thin air and what ends up getting created is not what the customer actually wants versus, and like we’re doing this again from the ground up and like Jackie and Damaris have been helping me. We’re starting over with our AI operating. There’s no automation. It’s completely manual.
Somebody writes in like, Hey, I want to quiz with AI. I email them after looking at their site, or Jackie does, or Damaris does, and we’re like, Hey, I saw your site looks like you’re doing X, Y, Z. And then slowly, over the next year or two, we’ll start to develop emails that are automated. Like I have one automated email, but we’ve gotten like 600 inbound inquiries so far.
So it’s like one email out of 600. That’s a good ratio. If you hold yourself to that, like if you respond to 600 emails manually, then you can add automation. That’s what I would love to tell people.
Do you think…you made me think of a question. Do you think that there is this correlation that people make with automating everything in your business and virality, like being viral?
So you have to set up your automations in order to, you know, make sure your business is ready. For all these people that are gonna come in, but when you are starting off right off the bat, you won’t always hit a viral quiz or you won’t hit like a viral post that will lead to your quiz and so on. Well, I think, I think everything else won’t be in place either.
It’s the same thing for us, like just again, to bring it back to interact. We do not want 10,000 people submitting our AI form right now. We don’t have the product built. And just because we’re a software company doesn’t mean that we’re different from somebody who’s creating courses or coaching programs or anything else.
Like you still have to develop that product. So if you go viral from day zero, you get a million people on your list, you don’t know how to serve them, they’re all gonna churn, which is way worse because now all these people have a bad taste in their mouth about your brand versus you get five a month for five months, then you get 10 a month, then you get 20 a month.
Then you can build up all the other aspects of your business. So I think that, you know, it’s like putting the cart before the horse, right? It’s like you put all this stuff, you have all this stuff in place, but what’s gonna end up happening is that 99.8% of it is going to be wrong because it’s not what people actually want from you, and you might completely pivot your business.
Our AI offering has changed like 400 times in the last four months. Like every single day it changes. So I talk to our engineers and they’re like, well, what should we automate next? And I’m like, don’t automate anything yet because we keep changing it. If you automate it, then we’re gonna have to go rebuild the thing from scratch.
It’s gonna take forever. So that all ties back around because I think people, including myself, everybody does this. Like you get in your head that like, oh, I should think about all these things that might happen or that I think are gonna happen, and then most of them don’t end up happening. So you’re just wasting time building out automations that aren’t right for your audience or that you’ll never end up using.
Not to mention the money that you’ll need to invest because. Not every software talks to each other natively. You’ll have to set up something like a Zap. And I don’t know how many times Jesy and Jackie, I’m sure you see this all the time, where people say, do I have to use Zapier to actually set up this automation with this software that you don’t, you know, natively integrate?
Almost always. And then, Zapier makes you pay, right? At some point you have to pay for a certain amount of Zaps, and if you’re not at that place yet where you could see the return, it is a lot harder to want to set up a quiz, set up all these automations. If you’re like, I don’t know what money I’m gonna actually make back from this.
Now, Jackie, you set up our coaching. Was that last year? Two years ago. So much time last year. Last year again, actually, yeah, we’re in 2023. Girl. Are you sure? Yeah. Confirmed last year. A little bit of both. It was a little bit of, you talked a lot about the whole coaching program was based off of getting your minimum viable quiz out there, but ever since I’ve been here since 2017, we talked about all these best practices that you should implement into your quiz to have the most successful sort of, you know, quiz conversion rate.
So my question for you is, which is better: minimum viable or all the best practices that we put into place for our customer?
Yeah, I would say minimum viable all the way, but minimum viable could be different based on where you’re at. So like if you’re just starting out with your business, right? Then minimum viable is just the quiz.
I would say, like Josh was saying earlier, don’t spend the time right now trying to build out all of these automated things when you don’t know the questions that are going to be asked or the services, right? The value that your audience is really looking for. So get the quiz out there, see if it even works, right?
Make sure people are going through the quiz that the topic aligns with something that they’re interested in. And then start building upon that over time. And like Josh said, five emails a week, 10 emails or, or month, right? Like just start slowly building it out. But if you’re further along, right, and I don’t know, maybe you’ve practiced with your quiz already or you have a verified offer that’s selling really.
And you’re ready to set it on you know, like scale up and set it on autopilot, then that’s absolutely the time to spend a little bit more money and time in building out the full, perfect sequence, so to speak. But that’s only because that’s already been tested, maybe not through a quiz, but in some other capacity where you know how to answer those people’s questions, you know, what it is that they need and how you can help them.
So this, anybody can answer this question. I’m sure we’ll all have something different to say. , how many emails are enough post quiz?
Well, I was gonna piggyback on what Jackie was saying because in my head, emails are a diminishing return medium, meaning like, email is not a way to grow your business.
It’s a way to engage people that are interested in your business, and some percentage of them will end up buying from you. So if you think about it, it’s like an upside down pyramid. Like it gets smaller and smaller over time. And kind of the point of email is to figure out who wants to buy now, who wants to buy later.
It’s not a way to get new customers, which I think is a huge misconception because everybody sells it as get customers with email marketing. I think the way that you get customers is with a snowball of demand and the way you get a snowball of demand is, Delighting your first users who then tell the next group of people who then tell the next group of people.
But at the core of that, you’re constantly having to make sure your users are delighted with their experience. And I think there’s also a huge misconception that like social and content and things like that are the way that you grow.
I think that only works if you’re doing like kind of what we’re doing on this podcast where it’s like we’re talking about our experience, delighting users, and then that creates really compelling content. If you’re just going out, like trying to be like, oh, I’m gonna make the perfect email sequence. It’s gonna sell, I’m gonna grow my bit, like it doesn’t. Those are all diminishing returns, all of them. I think the only thing that is a growing return is delighting a user and delight.
I think the definition is just like, delivering a better experience than they expected, and every single time you do, that’s growing, that’s creating that snowball. Everything else you do is diminishing. And so I think it, it’s just however many emails you need to be effective at converting some group of people to buy, but understanding like every time you send an email, like that’s, that’s you’re cutting, you’re cutting into, you know, your possibility.
It’s a diminishing return rather than like, oh, if I have more emails, then I’ll make more sales. People are gonna share these emails with each other. When’s the last time when someone forwarded you an email like, this was a great email, you should read it like this. No, this doesn’t happen. I wanna add to that how, depending on who you talk to, you’re going to get different opinions and advice.
They’re all right and they’re all wrong, if that makes sense…really it’s like anything else in marketing where you have to test it out. You have to see, you know, What your audience actually responds to. You know, do they love getting emails from you once a day? Yes, that’s great, but are you getting a ton of unsubscribes as you, you know, start getting people onto your list and sending that out?
That’s something that you have to pay attention to. So if you were advised to do five emails in the first five days, but you’re noticing a lot of unsubscribes, that should tell you, actually, maybe my audience doesn’t like that and I need to pivot and, and try something.
Jesy, I know that you’ve sort of seen a lot of different softwares out there that we integrate with directly, that we don’t integrate with directly. And you’re one of our, I hate this word, techiest, people…
I would not agree that I’m one of the techiest, but okay. Maybe not compared to engineering, but I will say, I know I always run to you when I’m looking at stuff that I don’t know how to use.
When you are sort of seeing what people are doing, our customers are doing, when they’re connecting their email marketing platform, what are some of the challenges that you notice when they’re actually working with the tech and trying to connect their email platform?
I would say there’s a pretty big range of what issues people run into, but I think people just get overwhelmed.
They look at our help center that, you know, has a video tutorial and everything to follow step by step. And then they’re comparing it to a help doc from their email marketing platform. I think they just get kind of lost in understanding that they just need to follow step by step what to do. You know, in our example, we use something else, they can’t relate it back to their quiz.
And I think people just get really overwhelmed. Like people come into office hours in the community and they say…I don’t know how to connect this to MailChimp, you know? And then they share their screen. I literally have our help doc up on a screen next to it and we walk through it step by step. And that’s it.
I think people start to jump around and that’s when they get kind of lost and they think they’ve done it all wrong, or if they mess up on any part of it, then they have to scratch the whole thing. And I think people just get overwhelmed is the main part. Yeah. So, and just that, oh, go ahead. Can I just add to that, it also, like, tech doesn’t work sometimes, so I think that’s where the overwhelm comes in.
You’re following this video and it doesn’t look exactly like what you’re seeing because maybe a UI change, maybe the tech, there’s a bug, it’s just broken, right? And so I think that happens all of the time. So just being able to like, take a break, a deep breath, walk away, reset it, kick it, you know, whatever it needs can help.
But like, if it’s not identical, then you can overlook it. Cuz also Jesy, right? How many people have reached out of like, oh, it’s not connected, it’s not working. But really all you had to do was publish your quiz. That’s the one button that you missed, right? Mm-hmm. . So it’s just, yeah, where the frustration can take over when it doesn’t necessarily need to.
Yeah, and I think, from the product side, right? Like if it makes you feel better when you’re writing code, which I, I do a minimal amount of, but it’s the same problem there too, like engineers, like, I think people think that engineers know how to do everything and they are smart people, but this, the problem that ends up happening most of the time in coding is like, you forgot to put a comma or a colon, and that’s why your whole code doesn’t work.
And I do think it’s like flexing a different part of your brain too, where so much of our lives, like if you’re creating content, like you’re thinking about like 85 things at once and you put them all into one, whereas you set up a tech integration, it’s like Jesy said, you literally, and I still do this even though I’ve done it like a thousand times, I’ll literally go step one. Cool. That worked. Step two. Cool. That worked. Step three. Cool, that worked. Step four, that one didn’t work.
Why didn’t it work? Try it again. Step five, right? Like it, it has to be super linear and super slow. It’s kind of like meditating, honestly. Like the thing about it, as you’re meditating time, like you can, you can tell yourself, you meditated today if you do a tech integration, because it is the same thing, like you have to just do one thing at a time, and if you try to do multiple things, it won’t work.
And I think it’s different depending on the type of person you are. I like the whole step by step one thing at a time checking. And then there’s some people that are like, okay, now I’m in my email marketing platform, and they’re like, oh, okay, I’m gonna connect result one. Oh, well I’m here, let me write an email for people who are gonna be result one, you know? And then it gets messy. I was gonna add that.
Coming from our end, right where we’re not an email software, but we integrate with email softwares. There’s like a generalized jargon that’s used in the industry for each type of thing, but depending on what platform you use, they could call some of those things, different words.
So like, you know,organizing someone by a contact field could be the same exact thing as a tag in another platform, but coming from our end, it’s hard to generalize our software to really speak to that. So it’s easy to understand, especially if you see everyone say tag, and you get in there and the platform you use doesn’t have tags.
You know, something like that or, I think it’s MailChimp that uses Merge Fields that took me forever to understand what a merge field was, which is basically a contact field. And I think that is part of where it comes from. So anyone can jump into this. I was gonna call out a specific person. I feel like anyone really could answer…
What are some of the resources that we have on our end that can really help people based off of what platform they’re using to set up their email platform.
Yeah, this reminds me of a funny conversation. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who used to be in tech, and then he’s since moved to the medical field and he was like, you know, all that like jargon.
I don’t remember any of that. And I was like, yeah, like we make up our own language in tech for no apparent reason. These things don’t mean anything. Like a tag just means like, you know, this type of person, a merge field just means like some information about this person. The contact field just means some information about this person.
Like if we just called it what it actually was, like this is information about this person, this is their email, this is their name. Like it would be so much simpler and so I can definitely empathize because it is just so confusing coming into it. You’re like, why is this written in a different language for no apparent reason?
It doesn’t need to be. And so I think it is tough. I think the best approach that I’ve seen is to learn your system and learn a particular path in your system. Like everyone knows this. When you’re selling software, you only highlight like two features, even though the software has 4,000 futures because.
A customer doesn’t need to use everything. We don’t use everything on the softwares we use as a business. I don’t recommend that everybody uses everything on our integrations. I would say learn what works for you in terms of what you’re actually trying to do. Like I’m trying to make sure I know everybody’s favorite pizza topping.
And that’s really important to my business because I sell pizza. Okay? Make sure that’s in all your systems. Make sure you know what stupid vernacular your system calls that, whether it’s a tag or a merge field or a custom field or whatever. Just make sure you know exactly what that thing is and then just kind of do that every time you do an integration and ignore all the rest of it because there’s just way too many things you could do and they’re all confusing.
And I think everything you just said, Josh matches what we were talking about last week with, you know, the barrier of your quiz idea. Like you think of something, you have this idea, this would be a fun quiz, but then you try to write it and you’re like, wait, cuz it’s like this different level of thinking.
So like in tech, you think the button should be called this or be placed here or do have this specific function, or you already know in your head that you want it to perform a certain way, which it doesn’t do. It could never do that, but you think that would be an easy function for it to perform. So you try to find a workaround.
And so I think the same sort of like mindset block that we talked about last week happens in tech as well because it is a different level of thinking.
And I think just to go back and answer, I think your original question was about what resources we have. We have help docs for every platform pretty much, and there’s step by step tutorials, there’s video tutorials. And on top of that we have a customer support live chat that they will walk you through it when you get stuck. And in our community as well, if you have questions, you can always pop in there for help.
Exactly. Love it. Thank you. Thanks guys. So my last question to wrap us up, we talked a lot about minimum viable, so exactly what you need to get your quiz up and running, just to get it out there to your customers or to your audience so they could get started, you know, taking your quiz, get on your email list.
What would you say are the top three things you should have to connect your email platform once you get to that?
Good question. I would say know what you want to do with that information. So if you know, I, you know, it’s very important to me to send a personalized follow up email to every person that takes this quiz and I want to send their results. Cool. Like, know, know how to do that. If, you know, I’m just trying to get leads, I just want them to go onto my list. Cool.
You know, If you know, I have this really in-depth follow up sequence for each outcome, and I am going to have that filtered based on how they answer some particular question in the quiz. Great. You know that, right? I think knowing what you’re trying to do, and this is like the approach that I take to this day when I’m creating any sort of quiz follow up sequence, I just write it in a notebook because as soon as I get on the computer, I’m just like, oh, there’s too many options.
And I think it’s really helpful to just know this is what I’m trying to accomplish, and then you just go and execute it and it can keep you out of that, that overwhelmed trap of like, oh gosh, so many options. And I think if you’re just starting out, it is totally okay to have one email that goes out to someone that opts in your quiz.
Send them an email about their results or summarizing it or something and start there and add them to your, your like regular newsletter list. That’s totally fine. You can always build from there, but as long as they have a quiz and one email, I think you’re good to. Or even none, like, just write that email yourself.
Right? Like, if you’re just, just, just starting out, like I was saying, I responded to the first 600 people who opted into the Interact AI myself. So it’s like, I think that, and like you listen to how I build this or any other show, it’s like every entrepreneur does that, I think it’s highly recommended on my part.
And then, yeah, I think then, then you go to the one or you can start with the one if you know exactly what you are, you’re gonna say anyways. Yeah, I would say minimum, minimum, minimum viable. Just sign up for Interact AI. We will write your quiz for you. We will put it in your quiz builder, and we also connect it to a CSV file, which means all of the le you can collect leads right then and there.
But they’ll just be gathered in a CSV file in your interact account that you can export and then use when you’re ready to start sending communications and, you know, automated sequences and all that. That’s actually a really good point because you don’t necessarily. an email platform right off the bat, at least to use an Interact quiz.
You could still collect analytics, you could still collect that data and information about your customers, but it’s basically hosted inside of Interact where you can download it as a CSV file and upload it into an email platform when you’re ready. Or if you do go with the strategy of emailing them personally, one by one, you still have that in a database. It doesn’t get lost. It doesn’t get, you know, put into the abyss of the internet. It will still be loaded there.
You don’t necessarily have to directly integrate it into your email platform just yet. And actually as you talked through that, Jess that’s like a great, that is a great best practice for anyone that doesn’t know what they’re wanting to send to their leads right away.
Because when you export that CSV, you can see how they’ve answered every single one of your quiz questions, which will just give you an idea of who this person is. So before you even connect with them or before you even like, Actually email them. Right.
You know a little bit about them so you can figure out what you might want to say in your email to Jackie versus Josh versus Jessmyn versus Jesy. Right. Like each one of us could get something very different based on what we told you in the quiz. There’s something that I, I feel like people don’t know about either. I know I said I was gonna wrap this up, but we’re talking about CSV files. We might need to do an episode on our quiz analytics because it is a really great thing to know.
I believe you have to be on the growth plan. Josh, correct me if I’m wrong, in order to see the answer choices that people choose, but if you later wanna decide to tag people, you can download people based off of, okay, who picked answer C in question one. Download all those people, put them in a group or like their own email list, send them a note and so on.
So you can continue to reuse your email list even long after that person took that. Yeah, totally. And I mean, gather, gathering that information is so valuable. Like, you know, when you download that file and it has all that information about people like that, that tells you a lot. And it’s, it’s hard to get people to, to open up like that, you know?
That’s what we’re experiencing with the AI stuff. It’s like, it’s hard to get somebody to describe what they’re looking for and what they’re trying to find, but quizzes are notoriously good. Getting that information. And so it’s extremely valuable, especially in those early stages where you do want to know exactly who each person is, cuz you’re also testing like what are they gonna respond to?
Like you might try a hundred versions of your first email and I don’t know, everybody responds to one type of email. Perfect. Make that your automated email, then pop that into place and then build from. Love it. And we didn’t say this, but I just wanna say it. Most people already have a newsletter that’s going out, or like a weekly email that’s going out.
So that’s also an option. Just funnel them from the quiz into that email sequence. Mm-hmm. . Because if your quiz topic aligns with what you’re talking about in your newsletter, then that would be a great direction to point somebody in. Yeah, it can get better and segmented in different newsletters for different people, but don’t worry about that until you need to worry about it. Just start with what you currently have.
Mm-hmm.Okay. That’s it…and then, I’m just kidding. Well, guys, thank you so much for hopping on and talking about this with me today. Next week we are going to talk about the third and the last quiz barrier that we’ve seen.
If you guys who are listening have anything else that you’re like, actually, this is something that I get stuck on, let us know and we’ll come on here and talk about it. But next week we’re gonna talk about actually getting your quiz up on your website and promoting it to your audience.
Josh, Jesy, Jackie. I just realized we’re all J’s on here. But thank you for hopping on as always, and for those who are listening. We’ll see you next time. Bye bye.