How to Segment Your Audience and Generate Sales with a Quiz Funnel

Each day, we categorise people based on how they act, look, speak and dress, which then dictates how we interact with them. That's why we speak differently to our grandma than we do to our friends, or colleagues.

Businesses do a similar thing in a process called segmentation. By gathering data on customers, you can split the audience into subgroups and tailor messaging, products and services to provide a better, more personalised customer experience. Quiz funnels are a great way to do just that.

In this article, we'll look at how you can use quiz funnels to segment your audience, while engaging potential customers and converting leads into customers. We'll also show off some successful quiz funnel examples to serve as inspiration for your own campaigns.

What is a marketing funnel?

Before we talk about quiz funnels, it's important to outline what a marketing funnel is more broadly. A marketing funnel is a model that symbolises the process potential customers go through from first becoming aware of your brand, thorough to finally purchasing a product or service.

Businesses—particularly online businesses—use marketing and sales funnels as a tool to better understand customer needs along each stage of the customer journey. It brings visibility to the ways you connect with your customers, and helps you measure the success of your overall strategy.

You'll find slightly different variants of the marketing funnel online. They have been adapted to fit just about any industry and sales type, from real estate to ecommerce. However, it's generally agreed that there are six stages:

1. Awareness: A potential customer gets to know about your brand.
2. Interest: They gain more knowledge about your brand, products and services.
3. Consideration: They turn into a prospect, and continue to learn.
4. Intent: They show interest in becoming a customer, but are yet to decide.
5. Evaluation: They decide whether or not to buy from your business.
6. Purchase: They finally decide to become a customer.

The reason it's a funnel is because new leads drop out as they progress through the cycle. So while you may have 10,000 potential customers at the Awareness stage, you may only get 500 paying customers from that cohort.

Conversion rates at the end of your marketing funnel depend on the traffic source you're dealing with and the industry you work in. As a general guide, a conversion rate of around 4-5% is considered good.

What is a quiz funnel?

A quiz funnel is a type of marketing funnel that segments visitors into categories by interest, need and challenge they face. Respondents fill in a quiz and are sorted into different segments based the criteria you've defined.

Upon completion of the quiz, respondents reach a conversion point. What this looks like depends on your business goals. Usually it's either asking for contact details to grow an email list, or delivering product recommendations to generate sales.

For example, let's say you're a yoga studio owner that wants to build a quiz funnel in order to segment your audience and bring in more leads.

You could make a 'Which yoga style is right for me?' quiz asking about the respondent's goals, interests and challenges, then alongside recommendation, you could direct them to signup for the class that suits them best.

Quiz funnels are about capturing leads by offering recommendations based on their quiz answers_—_this could be a link to a blog post, a product you sell, or a consultation with one of your team members.

The benefits of a quiz funnel

The main benefit of using quiz funnels is that they allow you to segment your target audience and offer a more personalised customer experience. But they provide a range of other benefits for your digital marketing strategy:

• They boost your conversion rate: Leads are more likely to engage with your content marketing when it's engaging and valuable. By directly addressing their needs and offering a solution, you show that you're knowledgable and understand their pain points, which leads them to be willing to buy from you.
• They demonstrate your expertise: In a world with thousands of businesses in each industry, it's crucial for small businesses and entrepreneurs to establish authority within their niche. Quizzes aren't just lead magnets. When you provide a thoughtful quiz with helpful recommendations, you demonstrate your position as an expert in your chosen field.
• They naturally lead to sales: A customer who lands on your quiz is looking for a solution that meets their needs. If you can make a recommendation or provide a resource that assists them with that, it feels like a natural progression to purchase from you.
• **They are highly shareable:** There is a reason Buzzfeed was able to build their entire business on building online quizzes. When quiz-takers share your quizzes with family, friends and co-workers, it acts as a form of word-of-mouth marketing and spreads awareness of your brand, while widening the pool of leads.

Curious how to segment customers? People can be divided based on either demographic or psychographic features. Demographic questions include things like age, gender, income and location, while psychographic factors related to needs, values, attitudes and beliefs. It's also common to segment your audience based on their position on the buyer's journey.

How to create your quiz funnel

The quiz funnel process isn't as simple as creating an online quiz. You need to think about, and map out, the entire process. Here are the steps you'll need to create your quiz funnel:

1. Define your audience

The first step to designing a quiz funnel that converts is defining your audience. The more you understand the pre-existing needs and motivations of potential customers, the better you can address them through your quiz questions (and the higher chance of them converting to customers).

Customer personas are a great way to define your intended audience. A customer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer. It is based on data you collect from research and web analytics, and helps you visualise who your intended audience actually is.

By taking the time to create specific, detailed personas, you'll gain a better sense of important data like their likes, habits, demographic details, pain points, purchase triggers and more.

While it may take a long time to develop detailed customer personas, your quiz funnel will lead to far more conversions if you do. Being able to locate pain points, needs, and trusted brands will help you avoid problems and give your customers what they want.

Don't have enough data to develop a customer persona? You can use a quiz funnel to gather that initial data first, then build the persona with the information you've collected.

2. Identify your goal and quiz topic

Once your audience is defined you need to identify what you want to achieve with your quiz. Do you want to grow your email list? Increase sign-ups? Push sales of a new product? Maybe all the above?

Whatever your broad business goal is, this will be achieved by offering value to the potential customers that land on your quiz. Think about the pain points you defined in your customer research, and how your product or service solves them.

Once you find a marriage between pain point and solution, your quiz topic should be fairly obvious. If you are unsure about specific pain points, use search terms as extra inspiration.

Nutrafol's hair wellness quiz captures this relationship well. As a hair wellness company, they know potential customers are looking for personal recommendations to help achieve their goals. So they embed a quiz on their homepage that asks about their frustrations and offers immediate solutions*.*

The value proposition goes both ways. While customers learn more about their hair problems and are offered relevant products to help meet their goals, Nutrafol learn relevant information about their audience to segment customers and deliver more personalised content.

3. Design your quiz questions

Quiz design is more complicated than simply using a quiz builder to compile a list of random questions. You need to organise the questionnaire and ensure you're meeting certain outcomes and gathering useful data.

Typically, quiz funnels are made up of 7-10 multiple choice questions. The aim is to engage the audience, while providing insights into the three main areas: their goals, problems and budget.

• Goal questions: focus on identifying the customer's broad goal. Understanding this is critical so you can identify relevant products and services to recommend. Aim for at least 1-2 of these.
• Problem questions: pinpoint customer pain points. Understanding these also allows you to directly address these obstacles by offering solutions, information and expert insight. Segment customers based on their unique pain points (e.g. growing an email list vs finding an affordable email marketing tool). This should be the main part of your quiz.
• Budget questions: give you insight into how much each prospect is willing to spend to solve their problems. You can then use this to segment leads based on price brackets, and market only affordable products to them.
• Demographic questions: offer personal details about your customers so you can determine the general characteristics of your audience. Things like gender, age, location and ethnicity all influence the ways you market to people, as well as which solutions you offer.

4. Build an awesome quiz

Nobody likes filling out a poorly designed, boring looking quiz. If your quiz isn't well designed, you risk losing customers to survey fatigue. If you want people to trust you and give you their email addresses and business, your quiz has to be compelling and fun*.*

Here are a few things to keep in mind when building your online quiz:

Choose a catchy title

Just like writing an article, you need to make sure you have a title that draws people in. Consider the obstacles your customers face and what might peak their interest when picking a title.

Sometimes this will be straightforward (e.g. this quiz will help you build your ideal wardrobe), other times it's better to have something a bit more engaging (e.g. what type of _____ are you?).

Write a compelling results page

Your quiz lives and dies by its results page. This is where you pay off the trust your leads showed by filling in the quiz in the first place. Don't be like Game of Thrones and fail them right at the last minute.

Include an engaging heading, visuals that fit the result, and a description tailored to their answers. You might also add a CTA to a specific product or resource, or even insert opt-ins to your email list—as long as it aligns with the quiz results and makes contextual sense.

Set up the right automations

Between your website, form builder and email marketing platform, your quiz funnel includes a lot of moving pieces. By using automations you can make sure your data gets wherever it needs to, without having to update everything manually.

With a tool like Paperform, you can set up integrations and seamlessly connect to all your favourite apps, including your CRM and email marketing platforms. With over 3,000 supported app integrations, you're sure to find an automation that can help you cut down on busy work, and concentrate on other parts of your business.

Nurture leads after the quiz

The work isn't done once your quiz is complete. The entire point of a quiz funnel is to move potential customers through to become paying customers—and if they've joined your email list or purchased a product, it's up to you to continue that relationship.

Think about what offers you can provide on a regular basic. Discounts? Resources? A new product that will blow their minds? Keep in touch with your customers regularly, but ensure that providing value is the forefront of all your communication.

Make sure it's visible

If a quiz is available but there's no one around to fill it in, does it even exist? You need to make sure those ideal customers can find your quiz, and give you the data you need to better serve them. You could share it on social media or consider taking out ads to improve your chances of making your quiz a successful lead generation channel.

5 quiz funnel examples

Now you know how quiz funnels work, all you need is a bit of inspiration to get started. To help with your own quizzes—and to show what works—we've curated a list of five real-life examples.

1. Eye Buy Direct

Finding frames that fit your face is always a nightmare, particularly when using an online eyewear retailer. To help customers narrow down the search, Eye Buy Direct leads visitors through a Fit & Style Quiz.

The quiz starts by filtering leads by gender and glasses type, before going on to ask a range of questions about everything from face shape and style preference to the ideal shape, size and materials. You can even insert your exact measurements.

Once completed, Eye Buy Direct leads respondents to a results page full of product recommendations available for immediate purchase. This kind of virtual shopping experience is a great strategy to convert web visitors into customers.

2. Encircled

Encircled is a fashion retailer that uses a fun personal style quiz to offer customers personalised clothing recommendations. While they do ask demographic questions about size and budget, they frame questions based on personality and lifestyle.

As visuals are important for their industry, they include images alongside questions which are specifically asking about style. This is much better for respondents as they don't have to rely on text descriptions—they have the visuals right in front of them.

Before receiving results, respondents are asked to opt-in to their email list. This is a common tactic, and because customers are already invested at this point, results in high conversion rates. After accepting this, folks are taken to a custom landing page showing suggested products from their store.

3. Good Pair Days

Wine-drinkers want a delicious bottle of wine that's perfect for their preferences. But, the problem (that Good Pair Days is well aware of) is that most amateurs don't know how to define what that taste actually is. That's why their palate quiz is so perfect.

Good Pair Days leads all potential customers through this thoughtfully curated quiz. By doing so they demonstrate their expertise on the subject, while also displaying to respondents how they solve their pain point: don't know what wine you like? We do.

The engaging copy is the real star here. While the quiz covers necessary questions, it does so in witty and unexpected ways, like asking whether you like butter thinly or thickly spread on toast, or prefer white or dark chocolate.

As a last step—and to unlock recommendations—respondents are asked to enter their email address and create a profile. One this is done, they're directed to a landing page that seconds as a checkout, which is a fantastic way to add value while encouraging a purchase.

4. Sephora

The folks at Sephora understand that hair care isn't a one-size-fits-all deal. To solve some of the confusion, they put together a personalised quiz to help customers find the right products for their particular hair types.

They get straight to the point. The questions here include the respondents hair type, their biggest concern, and what kind of product they're looking for. That's all. By keeping the quiz short in this way, you can keep customers engaged and reduce drop-off rates, leading to more quiz completions.

The results page is a standard product recommendation page. They also offer a discount to respondents, which is a smart strategy to offer value and encourage leads to push through to a final purchase.

5. Beardbrand

Lead generation quizzes work best when they're thoughtful and engaging. Male facial hair retailer Beardbrand does this with a Buzzfeed-style personality quiz that's quick and light-hearted, while also providing value through product recommendations.

Beardbrand collects standard information about the facial hair and grooming habits of respondents. Where they differentiate the quiz is by asking left of centre questions like what activities, alcoholic beverages, clothing and car brands respondents like.

Before reaching the results page, Beardbrand asks respondents to join their email newsletter. Crucially, they provided a short explanation of the benefits, including a hint at a discount for completing the quiz. The results page is full of eye-catching visuals, as well as relevant products and resources.

Over to you

By now, you're ready to set up a quiz funnel for your business. Remember, your starting point must be defining your goals and researching your audience. Only with a clear understanding of these elements will you be able to create a quiz funnel that actually converts.

Be sure to check back in on your quiz periodically. You should refine questions based on responses you receive, and look for any trends that suggest you can make improvements (e.g. if there's a particular drop-off point).

Ready to get started? With Paperform's versatile suite of tools, you can look after the entire quiz funnel in one place. From building a powerful and beautiful conversion page and online quiz, to integrating with your CRM and automating your email marketing, Paperform has you covered. You can give it a go yourself with the 14-day free trial, no CC required.

This post was written by a guest author named Allie Decker, the head of content at Omniscient Digital and a Senior Content Manager at Shopify.