How to use a quiz to grow your email list of ideal customers in 6 steps

 

When you offer an easy and fun way for your ideal customers or clients to learn something or get inspired, you can fill your email list with your dream audience without having to manually post every day.

A quiz is an easy way to help diagnose a problem or guide your ideal customer or client to a solution WHILE gaining trust and growing your email list. A quiz is, essentially, a lead magnet.

Lead magnets are freebies or tools you offer your audience in exchange for their contact information; they give you their email address, for example, and you send the freebie their way with the understanding that you can follow up with communication later.

You may have seen or use lead magnets like:

  • templates

  • guides

  • checklists

Read more about lead magnets

These are great! But a custom quiz can be super fun and effective for you and your ideal customers. Here’s how to start growing your email list with a quiz:

Step 1: Pick a problem

Identify a situation in which you help guide your customers or clients. It may sound like:

  • Which _ should I use?

  • I need inspiration.

  • I don’t know how to pick the right _ for me.

  • Where do I get started with _?

  • What’s wrong with my _?

This will be the basis of your quiz; it can help guide your audience to a solution or starting point.

Examples

  • I need recommendations for books about money mindset

  • How do I know which fabric is right for my project?

  • I don’t know which flowers I want in my bridal bouquet

  • How should I set up my daily schedule to feel inspired and creative?

  • I want to start Montessori at home with my child.


Step 2: Write down questions

What follow-up or clarifying questions would you ask a client or customer that help you guide them forward to a solution or recommendation? What do you need to know about them to best be of service?

Examples


If you help clients start Montessori at home, you may need to know:

  • the age of the child

  • their budget

  • their goals

  • how much space they have to work with

If you’re a florist, in order to best help a bride nail down their bouquet order, you may need to know:

  • her budget

  • her favorite colors

  • her wedding aesthetics

  • what her dress looks like

  • the date of her wedding

Step 3: Pick results

What do you want your audience to see when they finish their quiz? What results or solutions will you offer? The quiz results should be ideas, tools, offers, or next steps your audience can take after finishing the quiz.

Examples

  • Montessori-at-home kits or product recommendations with Amazon affiliate links (generate you a passive income)

  • A recommended bouquet arrangement with a list of flowers … and a link to schedule a free consult with you



Step 4: Create an online quiz

You have lots of options for how to create a quiz as a lead magnet, but I like:

With both, you create quiz “logic,” so that answers to quiz questions correspond with certain results.

Example

If your bride client were to select light pink and rust orange as her two main wedding colors, you may want her quiz results to suggest poppies or garden roses. An aspiring Montessori mom who selects her budget in your quiz should get results that reflect toys and tools in her price range.

Step 5: Collect leads

Remember, your ideal outcome of your quiz is to collect email addresses and/or get your ideal audience interested in what you have to offer (read more on how to use forms to collect leads here). They just experienced a little “win” or had some fun with your quiz, and now you can move them forward in their customer journey and even collect their contact information.

You have a couple options here:

Collecting “leads” or contact information for people who are a good fit for your offer is the true function of a lead magnet. But people really like the instant gratification of seeing their results right away. If you share their results instantly, make sure to include a call-to-action (CTA).

Examples

  • Add this to your cart

  • Schedule your free consult

  • Learn more

  • Browse our products

  • Book with discount code XXXXX

If you choose to send results via email or SMS (text message), make sure you set up an automation so results are sent instantly without you having to do anything manually.

Automation means your email service provider (ESP) — like Mailchimp, Flodesk, or Klaviyo — or SMS platform (like Simpletexting) will automatically send out an email with quiz results when someone enters their information on your quiz form.

More on email automation

Step 6: Share your quiz

Now, you need to put your quiz where your ideal customers’ or clients’ eyeballs go, like:

  • LinkedIn

  • Pinterest

  • Instagram

  • Facebook Ads

  • Your blog

Use a call-to-action that tells your audience exactly what to do and what they will get.

Examples

  • Take this 3-minute quiz to find the perfect Montessori products for your home and child

  • Discover your dream bridal bouquet in 2 minutes; click to take the quiz

When people start to see and take your quiz, you’ll grow your email (or SMS) list of ideal customers or clients without having to lift a finger. Share your quiz multiple times on multiple platforms for best results. And don’t be afraid to change it up and try again!



Was this helpful?

If you feel more prepared or inspired after reading this post, check out upcoming free trainings for women creatives:

 

Watch your lead magnet grow your email list

 

The dream:

Wake up in the morning, and with your first cup of coffee, check your email to see a dozen new ideal customers added themselves to your email list because they can clearly see they NEED what you have to offer.

For my clients with lead magnets (and for me!), this isn’t just a dream; this is reality.

Seriously. Just this morning, one of my How To Hustle gals told me her first lead magnet grew her email list by 20%.

What’s a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is an incentive you offer to your audience in exchange for their contact information (usually an email address) and permission to send them marketing emails.

When someone downloads your lead magnet they’re telling you:

  • they’re a good fit for your offer

  • they want what you sell

  • you can show up and stay top-of-mind in their inbox

That’s why lead magnets can be such a game-changer for small businesses; you go from a trickle of new subscribers to a flood of ideal customers or clients hopping onto your list on their own.

 



How to make a lead magnet

Start with a problem you can solve

A good lead magnet:

  1. Solves a problem for your ideal customer

  2. Is specific

  3. Is actionable

  4. Is immediately available

  5. Shows your value

So, we should with a list of pain points or desires we help our customers or clients overcome or satisfy.

When your lead magnet takes your ideal customer or client from problem to solution, they experience a win with you and are much more likely to want to book or buy with you later on (because you proved your worth!)

An FAQ list is the perfect place to start brainstorming lead magnet ideas; those are the things you know your audience wants to hear from you.



Use a search engine

Don’t have an FAQ list? That’s okay. Here’s what to do:

  • search some of your keywords on Google, YouTube, or Pinterest

  • note the questions that are autosuggested when you type in your keyword

  • make a list of the common search terms

  • address 1 with a lead magnet

For example, if you’re a branding designer, you may see that people are searching for the best fonts for a website. Lead magnet ideas might be:

  • Quiz: Which font is right for my brand?

  • 4 Brand Mood Boards with Fonts to Inspire You

  • 25 Best Fonts for [Industry]



Make it actionable

Your lead magnet should deliver some kind of result for your ideal customer or client, so you want them to be able to take action and have a mini transformation when they use it. Here are some examples of different types of lead magnets

  • A template takes all the work out of creating something

  • A guide tells your ideal customer exactly which steps to take to get an ideal result

  • a checklist breaks down everything they need to achieve an ideal outcome

  • A recipe makes cooking or baking easy and actionable

  • A pre-loaded cart makes it convenient to shop

  • A giveaway or challenge keeps your audience accountable and makes it fun to take action



Using + troubleshooting your lead magnet

Share it somewhere your ideal customers’ eyeballs go

Your lead magnet needs to be easily accessible for you to start seeing your ideal audience hop onto your email list. I recommend hosting it on your website and making the link available on social media.

Your calls to action in your social media content should prompt your ideal customers or clients to download your lead magnet, like:

  • If this tip was helpful, download the whole guide to ___ at the link in my bio

  • Get a link to the pre-loaded shopping cart in the video description

  • Click the link below to enter the quarterly giveaway

Be consistent with your calls to action; people may need to hear/read it more than once before they actually click and download!



“People aren’t downloading my lead magnet. What do I do?”

If you’re not seeing people click and download your lead magnet, don’t panic. Chances are that 1 of 2 things happened:

  • you haven’t talked about it enough

  • you aren’t addressing the right pain point or desire yet

First, stick it out with your lead magnet for another couple weeks and consistently use it as your call-to-action in your content. Then, if you’re still not seeing much traction, go back to the drawing board and do some keyword research to create a new lead magnet.

The reality is that some lead magnets just flop, and it may take a couple tries to make one that really grows your list.

Pro Tip

After people download your lead magnet, you should automate an email to deliver the tool, then enter your new subscribers into a welcome email automation or “drip campaign” to orient them to your brand.

See more about automation here


Women creatives, here are some upcoming free trainings you may like:

 

4 steps to getting more clicks on your small biz website

 

“How do I get more clicks on my website???”

This is one of the most frequently-asked questions I get from women with small businesses.

They work hard on a product or service, put it up on their website, ready for people to book/buy, but then ….. nothing happens.

There are a lot of reasons people aren’t clicking around on your website, but in this blog post I’m going to address 4 of the best ways to overcome small biz site obstacles:

 
 

01 Make it easy to navigate

Fact: If a website visitor can’t figure out these 2 things on your site in about 4 seconds, they’ll tend to click away:

  1. what you offer them

  2. what to do next (where to click/look)

This is called user experience, or UX. Good UX = more eyeballs, clicks, and income.

So, it’s important that you make your landing page/homepage (wherever you’re taking people from social media/emails/content) really easy to navigate. Keep it visually simple, and try only to include a few key ingredients:

  1. a high-quality image

  2. a value proposition (more on this below)

  3. a call to action

  4. your brand/product name

Two things you can do to test your UX:

01 Have a friend, family member, or trusted colleague navigate your website with you.

You want to know how they use the website and whether they know what to do with it. Do they take action? Do they click around? Where do their eyeballs go? What do they want to explore? What gets their attention first, second …?

Pro Tips: Make sure you pick someone who will be honest with you, and someone who hasn’t already spent a bunch of time on your website!

02 Use HotJar to see how visitors use your site.

I love HotJar; it’s a free tool that shows you how visitors scroll/click/interact on your site. This tells you a lot about what they care about, and what you need to change to make the UX better.

HotJar gives you:

  • recordings

  • heat maps

Try it here for free

02 Create a lead generator

A lead generator (or “lead magnet”) is a free offering your website visitors can get in exchange for their contact information.

When you collect email addresses/phone numbers from your audience, you ensure that you can get in touch with them beyond social media.

This is important for 2 reasons:

  1. It’s dangerous to put all your eggs in the “social media” basket; if something happened to your account, you could lose access to income

  2. You can move your relationship with your ideal customers forward by communicating with them in a more intimate space, like via email or text message

All you have to do is:

  1. Identify a problem your ideal customer has you can help them solve

  2. Make a guide, checklist, or video that can help them experience that “win”

  3. Offer it on your website as a download in exchange for their info

And, boom! You’re growing your contact list, so they can show up in your inbox ready to book or buy!

See my quick guide to lead generators here:

03 Make a clear value proposition

Your value proposition is the #1 most important sentence you can write to market your small business. PERIOD.

A value proposition tells your audience exactly why they should look, read, pay attention, book or buy. It’s (usually) 1 sentence that tells them:

  • what you offer (your product/service)

  • for whom it is meant (ideal customer/client)

  • the problem you solve or pleasure you offer (benefit/outcome)

Your website homepage/landing page should feature your value proposition. That’s what will get them the info they need to stick around in those critical first 4 seconds.

Value propositions don’t usually come easy; it can be tough to boil down what you do to 1 clear sentence. The first step is really nailing down your ideal customer! Get help right now with the signature Ideal Customer Workbook:

04 Calls to action

Your website visitors are much more likely to stick around, click, book, or buy if you tell them exactly what to do!

Don’t leave it up to chance or for them to connect the dots … under your value proposition, give your audience a call to action, like:

  • Register for this free workshop

  • Join our online community

  • Schedule a 1:1 on my calendar

Good CTAs are:

  • direct

  • specific

  • action-oriented

  • a reminder for the audience of what they’ll get when they take action

When you implement these 4 steps on your small business website, you can start seeing:

  • your email list of ideal customers grow

  • more traffic and clicks

  • a bigger online community

  • more booking and buying

  • payments in your bank account

If you’re feeling icky about or stuck on what to write on your website, start by going through this quick workbook (PDF download) designed by me for women like you with small businesses:

 

Upcoming events you might be interested in:

 

Making a lead magnet to grow your small business email list

 

A couple weeks ago,

Instagram went down for a few hours … and all hell broke loose for the small business community.

Scheduled posts? Nope.

Almost-finished Reels? Gone.

All those followers/potential customers you’ve gathered? Nowhere to be found.

It all disappeared into the spinning-circle void, and for those couple of hours, small business owners panicked, wondering how they were going to reach their ideal customers if they didn’t have access to the app.

It’s during times like these when we remember how important it is to have our customers’ email addresses: Email addresses are data that you own. No one can take that from you, no matter how funky social media gets.

Plus, email is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to motivate ideal customers to book and buy.

 

Enter: Lead magnets

Many of my small biz clients have a list of email addresses they got from orders and invoices, but you can grow a list of ideal almost-customers with a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is an incentive you offer to your audience in exchange for their contact information (usually an email address).

A good lead magnet:

  1. Solves a problem for your ideal customer

  2. Is specific

  3. Is actionable

  4. Is immediately available

  5. Shows your value

You can offer a lead magnet on your social media or website, inviting your audience access to it in exchange for their contact info. They can fill out a form and get redirected to a page with a download, or have a download sent directly to their email. A lead magnet is usually a PDF or a video.

From your ideal customers’ end, it may look like this:

  • Visiting your Instagram profile

  • Seeing the title of your lead magnet in your bio

  • Clicking the link in your bio, which takes them to a page on your website

  • They enter their email and are automatically sent your lead magnet

Then, you add them to your email list and send them great marketing emails, so you:

  • stay top-of-mind

  • stay engaged

  • create a connection

 

3 types of lead magnets

Lead magnets can take endless forms, but here are 3 types that you can put together quickly with just the info you’ve got in your brain:

Checklists

Checklists help your reader make sure they have all the tools they need to get a specific result, like:

  • A Shopping List for My 10-Ingredient Seafood Stew

  • All The Tech Tools I Use To Run My Virtual Assistant Business

  • 10 Sustainable Mother’s Day Gift Ideas

Templates

A template takes the work out of making a digital product. Think: Fill-in-the-blank, like:

  • The Formula For A Great Behind-The-Scenes Instagram Reel

  • 20 Contract Templates For Your Product-Based Business

Guides

A guide walks your reader through a process to solve a problem and get a specific result. To make a guide:

  1. Pick a specific problem your ideal customer has that you can help them solve in a short period of time (try 5 minutes)

  2. Break it into actionable steps

  3. Write it out so it’s easy to follow for someone who doesn’t have background knowledge

Here are a couple of ideas:

  • How To Create A Beautiful Gallery Wall In Your Home With Photos You Already Have

  • 5 Steps To Getting Rid Of Your Tension Headache

 

Once you have a lead magnet,

… you can post it on social media (like in your bio!) and invite followers to enter their email addresses to get the free tool.

Then, all you have to do is follow up with emails to:

  • stay top-of-mind

  • create a connection

  • motivate your ideal customers to book and buy

If you’re one of the many small biz gals who feels

overwhelmed

icky

inauthentic

… when doing marketing, you’re invited to an upcoming $5 workshop to learn what to say in your marketing while doing good together (100% proceeds donated to a nonprofit of our choice)