How to Boost Conversions with a Marketing Assessment

Picture this: You walk into a store and a salesperson approaches you.

Do they immediately start pointing out specific products? Or, do they get a conversation started by asking a couple of questions?

Exactly.

Online, these questions can be asked through marketing assessments.

Marketing assessments help create a personalized experience and easily guide your visitors to the next step in your sales funnel.

The questions that sales reps ask can specifically target the type of product you’re looking for or take a more general direction. Based on your answers, that salesperson is able to give you tailor-made advice – helping to build trust and massively increasing the chance of a sales transaction later on.

This article will introduce you to marketing assessments, give ideas and examples, and walk you through how to implement them.

In an online environment, there is no “salesperson” that can give your website visitor some advice. Online trust is created by offering useful content: Blog posts, tips, testimonials, white papers, etc.

The problem with this type of static content is that they can only be personalized to a certain degree. There is no person asking your visitor questions. But it can be done!

That’s where online marketing assessments come in to help you guide your site visitors to the next step in your sales funnel.

What is a marketing assessment?

The term “assessment” is often replaced with words like quiz, questionnaire, form or calculator.

You could say that a marketing assessment is simply a list of questions aimed at guiding a site visitor to the next step in a sales funnel (conversion!).

At the end of such an assessment some highly-personalized feedback is presented to the respondent based on how they answered the list of questions.

An effective assessment does the following:

• Respondents learn something about themselves. (What do I need?)
• Respondents learn something about you. (What do you offer, your products, services or brand in general)
• You learn something about the respondent. (Preferences, what they’re looking for, …)

You could say that a modern assessment is a mix between a standard survey and a quiz: A survey collects useful data (point 3 above) and a quiz is built to teach you something (point 1 & 2 above).

Why use assessments in your marketing?

The interactive experience that a well-built assessment can provide will increase the engagement of your website visitors and lead to better conversions.

For example, this Demand Metric study, which proves that interactive content (like an assessment) manages to double conversions. (Compared to static content such as a regular signup form).

(image source: CMI)

A study about interactive content by Content Marketing Institute revealed benefits such as a longer attention span among website visitors and better retention when working with assessments.

According to Adweek, quizzes are the most shared type of content on social media. And when we go check the top 10 of Facebook’s most shared posts of 2017, we find 2 quizzes!

3 examples of businesses that use marketing assessments

1. Carecareers: Career Quiz

Mike Field, National Manager at Carecareers, built an assessment to create awareness around jobs in the care industry. The results of the quiz show how meaningful these jobs can be and direct potential job hunters to the right job opening.

• Goal of the Career Quiz: Create awareness around the way a job in care can fit into your life and make visitors feel more at home by providing easy content that is friendly and quick to take (using nothing but pictures). People feel understood by the outcome of the quiz and get a sense of direction in finding that new job.
• Results of the quiz: The quiz has been up and running for almost 7 years and has been taken by over a million Australians. Since the quiz was translated in multiple languages, it has been taken numerous times by foreigners as well.
• Additional insights: The quiz got its initial boost through paid campaigns via Adwords, focussing on questions with a low threshold like “what career is right for me?” that would get people to wonder and take the quiz.
  • Translating the quiz enabled Mike to increase their audience tremendously.
• Tip for fellow marketers: Use a lot of pictures. They work on everyone and people can interpret them differently, adding extra meaning to your content.

2. Eneco: EVSE Calculator

Hanneke van der Heijden and Rik de Vette work for Eneco Netherlands, one of the largest producers and suppliers of natural gas, electricity and heating in the Netherlands.

They are part of a development team for new products and built a calculator that indicates the cost of an EVSE (home charger for your electric car) to website visitors.

• Goal of the calculator: The primary goal is to provide a simple, accessible source of information that gives you the content you need without too much hassle. They did this by sending visitors a very specific price proposal after a limited set of questions.
  • The secondary goal is to get first insights in who prospects are for this product.
• Results: The assessment was launched along with a 6-week Facebook ads and Google Display campaign. They aimed for 200 responses and managed to collect over a 1000 in those 6 weeks.
• Additional insights: Building the entire calculator themselves helped them to test and quickly adapt along the way.
• Tip: Create a “quick first version” of your assessment and send it to a handful of people in your target audience. Based on their feedback it’s easy to quickly adapt and optimize, getting you better results.

Jaiya: Erotic Blueprint

Ian Ferguson works as a business developer and marketer for missjaiya.com. Jaiya is an internationally recognized sexologist who worked out the framework of erotic blueprints that help people discover and talk about sex and their sexuality. Ian built the Erotic Blueprint Quiz to playfully generate leads.

• Goal of the Erotic Blueprint Quiz: To build a substantial subscriber list via an ongoing lead generator.
  • Secondly, provide immediate gratification by automatically emailing prospects personalized, valuable content around their sexuality and erotic blueprint.
• Results of the quiz: Because of the sexual nature of Jaiya’s content, options such as Facebook ads aren’t a possibility. Their quiz gets shared through affiliates, podcasts and blog posts.
  • The quiz has been up and running for less than a year and brings in 5000 new leads organically each month. During campaign periods these numbers go as high as 20.000 new contacts in just 30 days.
• Additional insights: By incorporating more advanced calculations in the backend of the quiz, they could build more accurate profiles and optimize personalization. Which enables them to send more targeted content in their follow up.
• Tip: By providing your audience with an outcome as subtle, detailed and specific as possible, you’ll get better results and more leads throughout the process.”

What type of questions should you ask in marketing assessments?

The biggest challenge when you’re making an assessment is making sure you collect enough valuable information with a minimum number of questions.

A great way to get a head start there is by talking to your colleagues in sales. See how they start a conversation with a prospect.

For example: A content marketing agency could get the following question from a new lead: “I need more leads for my company and I’d like to know more about how content marketing can help me with that.”

Now a good sales-rep won’t just dive in head first, mentioning what services they offer and how much it will cost, instead they’ll ask a couple of additional questions:

• What are you currently doing to attract leads?
• What’s your biggest challenge with your current methods?
• What is your current cost per lead?
• What or how much are you prepared to invest in this project?

These are great questions to include in your next marketing assessment (not least because giving the answers to a sales associate will help them convert that person into a customer faster and more effectively).

Automate and add logic

It’s these kinds of questions that you’ll want to include in your assessment as well. In many cases, this asks for a bit of automation and question logic. Make sure that your follow-up questions are connected to previously chosen answers and skip any unnecessary questions automatically.

True, this can get very complicated very quickly! But keep in mind that you shouldn’t try to solve all of your prospects’ questions in a single marketing assessment. The target of your questionnaire should be to inform in the first place, to help guide your lead to the next step in the funnel.

The end of the assessment is not the end of the conversation

The data you collected is valuable because it enables you to reuse it in the follow-up conversations you can have with your prospects.

Add value by following up with…

• An automatically generated personalized PDF-report based on the prospect’s outcome of the assessment.
• Automatically emailing such a report works especially well in b2b scenarios where it takes a bit more information than an email to give personalized recommendations to potential clients.
• A call to action in the last screen of the assessment to schedule a meeting with the most relevant person within your company.
• A manually crafted email, that is personalized to the exact needs of high value prospects still works like a charm. Be sure to follow up after that initial email, increasing your response rates by 4 to 10 times.

Assessments enable you to reuse content in an interactive way, to spread information more effectively and to get tons of new leads. Definitely worth a try!

About the author:

Stefan Debois is the founder and CEO of Survey Anyplace, a tool that enables you to make fun surveys, quizzes and assessments. By providing respondents with a better experience, you’ll get more and better data in return.

Next to kitesurfing, Stefan is passionate about the potential of technology to build professional relationships via online channels and on an international scale.

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