You look at the numbers in your email marketing dashboard. They’re flatlining. You’re looking around frantically for something to breath life back into your email list.
First, you tried making a million PDF downloads to get people interested. You got a few bites, but then they almost immediately unsubscribed. No go.
Next, maybe you decided an email challenge would be more engaging. You spent a week or two putting together amazing content and then shared it with the world… only to hear crickets.
In desperation, you put together an entire eBook to show that you were giving an insane amount of value. After all, if it’s worth money but they’re getting it for free, surely people will give you their email address!
Even that didn’t work, though.
Now you’re wondering if anything can revive your floundering email list. You need to pull out the Jaws of Life and drag your email list out of the wreckage, give it CPR, and resurrect it from the ashes. But where do you find a tool that can do that?
Let me introduce you to opt-in quizzes.
You may have seen those personality and IQ quizzes from Buzzfeed circulating around Facebook. Things like “Which Avengers superhero are you?” and “Can you score 100% on this vocabulary quiz? 96% of people can’t!” You may have even taken a couple of these quizzes because they looked fun. This is exactly what you can do for your audience!
With an opt-in quiz, you’re engaging your audience as you offer them a chance to become part of your email list and get even more value and fun. You can create personality quizzes, ‘IQ’ assessments, and all sorts of cool quizzes. Using the right quiz builder, you can boost your email list without making a bazillion PDFs, email challenges, or anything else like that, but you can also repurpose those materials to add even more value after people finish your quiz.
Ready to learn more and find the best quiz builder?
What to look for in the best quiz builders
There are a number of quiz builders out there and they all seem to have something a little different in their features list. The quiz builders I’ve personally used are Interact, Thrive Quiz Builder, and brandquiz. Before we look at any of the specifics, let’s talk about what you should look for when evaluating the best quiz builders:
1 | The best quiz builder offers a connection to your email marketing service
If the quiz builder doesn’t connect to your email marketing service, it’s kind of useless, right? The quiz builder needs to not only connect to your email marketing service, though, it also needs to integrate enough to make it valuable. You may need to get a little creative sometimes, though.
For example, when I was setting up my Dubsado vs. 17hats quiz in Interact, I realized that I couldn’t tag people in ConvertKit when they subscribed. The only options were to add them to a sequence or form or to update a field in their subscriber profile. After playing around with it a little bit, I discovered that there are two easy workarounds for this: you can create a form to capture the subscribers (they never actually see the form) and then you can attach that form to a tag, segment, and/or sequence like normal, or you can create a custom field and create an automation that adds a tag when that particular field updates to match.
Some quiz builders also let you use 3rd party services like Zapier to connect to your email marketing service if they don’t have a direct integration. If you really want to use a particular quiz builder but they don’t have a direct integration, see if this is an option. Most good quiz builders, like Interact, though, will have integrations with the major email marketing services.
2 | The best quiz builder has multiple ways to display your quiz
I love having a variety of options to display your quiz. Some quiz builders, like Interact, offer several different built-in display options. With the ability to display your quiz as a pop-up, announcement bar (think Hello Bar), embedding it on a web page, and even sending it directly to Facebook, having multiple ways to display your quiz is powerful.
You can still get creative with display options, too. For example, I couldn’t get the Thrive Quiz Builder to pop up the way I wanted it to, so I used a third-party pop-up plugin to embed the quiz and turn it into a pop-up that’s Just Right. Don’t be afraid to play around with this sort of thing!
Decide what the most important display method is for you and keep that in mind as you compare quiz builders.
3 | The best quiz builder has the ability to create different quiz types
The quiz builder you choose should be able to create different types of quizzes. I mentioned earlier that there are quiz types like personality and assessment quizzes. These quiz types function a little differently from each other and it’s important to understand the difference so you know what to look for.
- A personality quiz maps the different quiz questions to relate to different personality types. The quiz calculates the personality based on the answers selected. An example of this is our “What’s Your Creative Entrepreneur Superpower?” quiz.
- An assessment quiz is the ‘IQ’ type of quiz. It tests the quiz taker to see how many questions they can answer correctly. An example of this is a “How Much Do You Know About Marketing?” quiz.
- A scored quiz is a subset of the assessment quiz. It displays the quiz results a little differently from the standard assessment quiz, giving a ranged score. An example of this is a “Can You Make Enough as a Creative Entrepreneur to Quit Your Day Job?” quiz.
Some quiz builders also have different tools available along with quizzes. Interact, for example, also lets you create polls and surveys; brandquiz lets you create surveys, calculators, lead pages, and more. That’s just an extra bonus, not a necessity, but if those are tools you would otherwise pay a separate fee to get access to, it’s something to keep in mind.
3 | The best quiz builder is flexible
You should be able to customize the quiz you create in ANY quiz builder. If you can’t, you probably don’t want to use it. After all, if the quiz is littered with someone else’s branding, that’s kind of weird!
This is something I really appreciate about Thrive Quiz Builder and brandquiz. Both of these quiz builders allow you to customize just about everything about your quiz layout! You can change the colors, the positioning of quiz elements, and all sorts of other things. Any quiz builder worth its salt will at least let you white label (use your own branding), though. Honestly, sometimes having all of those elements to play around with can just prolong the quiz building time, so as long as you can at least white label, you’re good to go.
4| The best quiz builder offers branching logic within the quiz questions
This feature can be surprisingly powerful! If, for example, you’re creating a quiz that includes a question asking how long someone’s been creating artwork, if they say they’re just starting out, you can probably skip a question about what medium they use most since they may not even know yet. Folks who’ve been creating art for a while will still get value out of that question, so that’s where your branch is.
What branching logic allows you to do is take the person who answered that they’re just starting and skip over any questions that don’t apply to them. That way, the people who are equipped to answer them will still see that question, but it won’t bog down the beginner. Not all quiz builders have branching logic but Interact and Thrive Quiz Builder do and this feature is definitely part of what sets them apart from a lot of other quiz builders.
5 | The best quiz builder has quiz analytics
Knowing how well your quiz is performing is key! A good quiz builder should able to show you not only how many subscribers you’re getting through your quiz, but also where you’re losing people. When you’re equipped with this kind of data, it can be crucial when it comes to improving your overall quiz.
If 90% of people are dropping out of the quiz when they get to Question 3, you’ll know that something’s wrong there. Maybe your phrasing is off or it seems like it comes out of left field. Once you’re aware of the problem, you can run some experiments and figure out how to fix the issue. This is why quiz analytics are so important and if the quiz builder you’re considering doesn’t include solid analytics, you may want to reconsider. Good quiz builders (like Interact and Thrive Quiz Builder) include stellar analytics reporting.
6 | The best quiz builder includes GDPR compliance
In the age of the awful GDPR roll-out, this is important to anyone who may have website visitors and clients from the EU. If the quiz builder you’re considering doesn’t have GDPR compliance options, you should probably look elsewhere.
7 | The best quiz builder has an option to skip opt-in
This may seem like an odd thing to recommend including when choosing the best quiz builder, but hear me out. Have you ever taken a fun quiz that you just want the results from, but you’re required to give your name and email address? It’s frustrating! There’s a good chance you just exited out of the quiz browser tab in disgust and didn’t go back to that site for a while.
You don’t want to give that experience to your audience. The goal is for them to keep coming back to your site and maybe they’ll opt into another quiz or offer that’s even more enticing later on.
Another facet of this issue is that even if they do subscribe in order to get their results, nothing says they’ll give you legitimate information or that they won’t send your emails to spam, which decreases your email address’s deliverability. This can land you in more spam filters, for one thing. Just as bad, it can mean that they sit in your email list purgatory for ages, artificially inflating your email list size and potentially making you pay for ‘subscribers’ who don’t actually exist!
You can experiment with the option to skip the opt-in if you’re wary of losing email subscribers by turning it off. See what quality of email subscribers you get with it turned on for a month and then see what happens when you turn it off for a month. If you’re still getting the same number of quality subscribers from your quiz, leave the skip option turned on in your quiz builder to improve your user experience.
8 | The best quiz builder is mobile responsive
When you’re checking out quiz builders, you’ll want to make sure it has responsive design on mobile. If the quiz displays at too large a size on mobile or if it doesn’t resize so that there’s a way to exit out of it, you’re going to lose people. A good quiz builder like Interact will include mobile responsiveness, though, so this shouldn’t be hard to find.
9 | The best quiz builder has social sharing options at the end of the quiz
If you’ve created a fun or informative quiz, people often want to let their friends know and then compare results. You can encourage this (and thus get your quiz spread even further) by using social sharing options. Quiz builders like Interact offer basic social media sharing options like Facebook and Twitter and some, like Thrive Quiz Builder, offer additional social media sharing options. While this isn’t strictly necessary, it can be a great way to get more eyes on your quiz and, in turn, more people on your email list!
10 | The best quiz builder has retargeting options
This is something that also isn’t strictly necessary but is extremely useful if you plan to use any paid advertising in the future. If you connect a tracking pixel like the Facebook Pixel to your quiz, you can use that data to retarget quiz takers and display the most appropriate ads to them. This can save you money in the long run and many quiz builders like Interact have made it possible to add several different types of advertising pixels to your quiz. If this type of thing is important to you, make sure to get a quiz builder equipped with this feature.
How to determine the best quiz builder for YOU
Okay, so now we’ve talked about the different things that you’ll want to look for in a quiz builder. Let’s do a quick comparison of three different quiz builders so you can get an at-a-glance look at them side-by-side.
| Features/Quiz Builder | Interact Quiz Builder | Thrive Quiz Builder | brandquiz’s Quiz Builder |
| Email Marketing Connection: | Connects with most major email marketing providers | Connects with most major email marketing providers | Connects with MailChimp and with others via Zapier |
| Display Options: | Has a number of display options | Has embed option | Has embed option |
| Flexibility: | White labeling and image customization | Complete customization | Complete customization |
| Branching Logic: |  | |  |
| Quiz Analytics: | Solid analytics | Solid analytics | Has analytics; extent TBD |
| GDPR Compliance: | | Somewhat | TBD |
| Mobile Responsiveness: | | | |
| Social Sharing Options: | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn | Full suite | TBD |
| Retargeting Options: | Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel | | Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel |
A few questions to ask yourself when choosing the best quiz builder for you
1 | Does the quiz builder connect to your email marketing provider?
2 | Does the quiz builder offer the quiz type you’ll use most?
3 | Is the quiz builder interface easy to learn and use?
4 | Will the quiz interface itself appeal to your audience?
5 | Can you test out the quiz builder before paying for it? (and if not, do you know others who use it and can vouch for it honestly?)
By knowing what features are most important to you in a quiz builder, you’ll be better equipped to choose the best quiz builder for your individual situation. Not every quiz builder is the right fit for every entrepreneur and business, after all! The three quiz builder examples I shared here are just the ones that I’ve used and which I’m confident in recommending. Don’t take my word for it, though – test them out and see which is the right quiz builder for YOU.
Want to learn more? Check out these other posts about quiz builders and how to use quizzes to grow your email list:
Leave a comment with your thought about quiz builders! Here are a few suggestions:
What’s your biggest frustration with quiz builders?
What are your top two questions about using quiz builders to boost your email list?
Have you tried quiz builders before? What was your experience?
