What does everyone say after they complete an online personality quiz?
Facebook comment reactions to the results people received from their 16 Personalities online personality test.
People start screaming from the rooftops about how accurate their results are. They share the quiz with their friends and then dive deeper into the website to gain greater insights about themselves.
If you're a marketer or online business owner using a well crafted personality quiz, you now have their full attention...
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Whether such personality quizzes are accurate or not, isn't a debate I want to get into today.
Instead, I want to show you how to create personality quizzes that effectively capture new subscribers, point them to your most useful content, and help boost your product sales. To do this, I'll walk you through multiple personality quiz examples that are doing just that across several online industries.
If you've ever discarded the online personality quiz as a marketing strategy that only works for websites like BuzzFeed or Playbuzz, this post is going to change your mind...and your bottom dollar too!
1. Build Your List
Just to prove upfront that personality quizzes don't belong exclusively to the ad revenue realm of sites like BuzzFeed, I'm going to start this post off by bringing out the big guns to back me up: Derek Halpern and Ramit Sethi.
Both are giants in the internet marketing space and both use personality quizzes to generate new leads and actively segment their email lists...
What Type of Entrepreneur Are You?
Social Triggers is the blog of expert marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern.
Derek uses the What Type of Entrepreneur Are You? personality quiz on his website to segment new visitors into solopreneur subgroups that have very different needs:
The Social Triggers online assessment lead generation page used to segment new online visitors into different entrepreneurial personality types.
Derek's online personality test presents a series of 6 questions asking quiz takers about their age range, career stage, online business interests and personal qualities.
At the end of Derek's quiz, he shows an opt-in gate forcing people to subscribe in order to receive their results:
Derek Halpern's entrepreneurial personality quiz opt-in gate.
Based on taking the assessment several times, I've discovered 4 entrepreneurship personality types Derek will assign based on how you answer the quiz. They include the:
- Skilled Creator
- Jack of All Trades
- Trusted Expert
- Publishing Maven
In each personality type description, Derek showcases an example of a person with your personality type "who turned their [unique traits] into [profit / success]."
At the end of the description, Derek also presents a free, 15 page eBook specific to each personality type that new subscribers can instantly use to start building the right online business for their needs:
The Social Triggers post assessment "Jack-of-All-Trades" personality type result. The personality description offers an example of someone like the quiz taker who succeed as well as a free eBook to get started doing the same.
The end result of Derek's personality quiz is a highly segmented audience eager to take action on his entrepreneurship recommendations.
Dereck knows exactly what premium offers will resonate best with each group and can send targeted content to continue building trust with his new subscribers.
Do You Know Your Earning Potential?
I Will Teach You To Be Rich is a best selling book and blog from personal finance and info-product maverick Ramit Sethi.
Ramit is a master when it comes to finding what people want through his market efforts and the online personality quiz has become one of his leading tools to do this.
The I Will Teach You To Be Rich homepage uses an entrepreneurial personality quiz as the spearhead for Ramit’s lead generation and audience segmentation efforts:
Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich homepage featuring his Earnings Potential personality quiz.
Ramit’s “Earning Potential” quiz doesn't look like a personality quiz at first, but it leads new visitors through a series of 7 multiple choice questions that ask them about their spending habits, career aspirations and financial security situation.
The quiz promises “a custom report based on your unique strengths" and will show you "how to start making extra money – in as little as an hour.” After completing the quiz, visitors are required to pass an opt-in gate to get their results:
Ramit Sethi's post quiz opt-in gate.
When a target visitor completes Ramit’s quiz and receives an entrepreneurial personality type like The Hustler, it fuels aspirations that they too have what it takes to start their own online business:
Ramit Sethi's The Hustler personality description received after completing his Earnings Potential quiz.
But here's where Ramit's personality quiz strategy is different from the Social Triggers example: everyone who takes the quiz gets the same entrepreneurial personality type – THE HUSTLER.
I’ve taken Ramit’s quiz several times now and no matter how I answer it, I always receive the same outcome. The only difference between results is a minor change to Ramit’s post quiz recommendations.
The 2 different result pages I've discovered from taking Ramit’s Earning Potential quiz several times are as follows:
Recommendation Set #1:
The Hustler quiz results: recommendation set #1.
- Start an online business: Ramit provides a video excerpt from his Zero to Launch premium E-Course.
- Start freelance consulting: Ramit provides a video excerpt from his Earn $1K On The Side premium E-Course.
- Find your dream job: Ramit provides a video excerpt from his Find Your Dream Job premium E-Course.
- Learn how to save an extra $1,000 a month: Ramit provides a free PDF download on how to manage your personal finances and a link to sign up for his free Save $1,000 In 1 Week Online Challenge.
Recommendation Set #2:
The Hustler quiz results: recommendation set #2.
- Pay down debt: Ramit provides a free PDF download on how to manage your personal finances and get out of debt.
- Find your dream job: Ramit provides a video excerpt from his Find Your Dream Job premium E-Course.
- Start an online business: Ramit provides a video excerpt from his Zero to Launch premium E-Course.
- Negotiate a raise: Ramit provides a video excerpt from his free How To Hack Your Day Job video and blog content.
As you can see, the results are super similar. The benefits of this innovative personality quiz strategy for Ramit are 3-fold:
- The quiz still allows Ramit to segment new subscribers and send them targeted offers in the future.
- There's a limited amount of content he needs to create compared to more traditional personality quizzes that have multiple results (like the Social Triggers example).
- The single result is aspirational and filters for target customers that identify with the qualities of Ramit's hero personality type. It's telling people what they want to hear about themselves while introducing them to premium E-Courses in the recommendations.
Create Your Own List Building Personality Quiz
Pick either Derek Halpern or Ramit Sethi's personality quiz strategy as a model to base your own lead generation, personality quiz on.
Derek's traditional strategy is more authentic since it actually assigns people different personality types and gives them alternative advice based on their results.
To do that, you'll need to create 3 or more personality types, descriptions, and custom action recommendations for each one.
By comparison, Ramit's unconventional strategy (using just one aspirational personality type) requires creating much less content before launch.
To do this, ask yourself: "What aspirational personality type in my online niche would be equivalent to Ramit’s The Hustler in the entrepreneurship market?"
For example, if you sell cookbooks or have an online business around food, perhaps you can create a personality quiz that results in telling people that they’re a TRUE FOODIE.
Personality tests can be a lot like horoscopes in the sense that they only describe flattering qualities that could apply to anyone who reads them.
This makes the Ramit-styled personality quiz much simpler for you to recreate within your own industry. No matter how anyone answers the quiz, make sure that there’s only one flattering answer that paints the picture your target customers want to acheive.
To make your results customized, offer different sets of action recommendations on your result pages that will benefit any who apply them.
Here’s the basics on how to build your own lead generating Personality Quiz:
- Create a 5+ question personality quiz that offers a “custom report” to visitors based on their answers. Because the goal is to build your email list, visitors must pass through an opt-in gate to get their results.
- Create 2 or more results that show either different personality types (Social Triggers example) or present the same aspirational personality type, but provide different action recommendations (Ramit Sethi example).
- Regardless of the model you use, make sure your recommendations are packed with awesome value so subscribers get quick wins and associate them with you. If you're in need of opt-in offer ideas, consider using an online challenge or check out these 12 examples.
Of course, Thrive Quiz Builder was designed to make doing all of the above quick and easy for you.
By modifying one of our list building templates, you'll have your quiz questions, dynamic content results and opt-in gate up and running faster than you can ask What Kind Of Entrepreneur Are You? 😉
2. Boost Your Sales
It turns out that personality quizzes are also a great way to help E-Commerce businesses market their products. I'm now going to show you 2 online businesses that use the personality quiz as a tool to not only offer product recommendations, but make more sales.
What's Your Ugly Sweater Alter Ego?
Get Ugly Sweaters is an E-Commerce website dedicated to solving the world’s ugly sweater needs.
Get Ugly Sweaters uses a clever personality quiz to help their potential customers find the perfect ugly sweater for their alter ego. Visitors are led through a series of 5 multiple choice questions that both entertain and offer ugly sweater recommendations based on a person's answers.
The splash page for the What's Your Ugly Sweater Alter Ego personality quiz.
The conversion goal in this E-Commerce example isn’t to build the email list, but to make a sale. That’s why instead of presenting an opt-in gate at the end of the quiz, a link to the recommended ugly sweater checkout page is provided:
The "Festive Flirt" Ugly Sweater product recommendation based on a visitor's answers to the Ugly Sweater Alter Ego quiz. I always knew Santa was running a shady side-hustle...
Now, there’s no need to make personality quizzes for silly products deep and meaningful.
If you’re selling something fun and funky like ugly sweaters, your personality quiz should feel more like a game. Questions in the What’s Your Ugly Sweater Alter Ego quiz are light and funny to match the product.
The quiz took me less than 30 seconds to complete and resulted in a product recommendation that made me laugh and will definitely turn heads at the next Thrive Themes Christmas party.
Conversion Optimization Principles Still Apply
Although the personality quiz is a great way to boost product sales, people won't purchase anything if they can't find the buy button.
Note the almost invisible anchor text link to the Ugly Sweater checkout page (Santa's Hos) in the screenshot above. Make sure you use a much more visible Buy Button on your dynamic content results page to ask for the sale.
Also, avoid hard to read font colors on your quizzes while you're at it!
Discover Your Inner Herb Nerd
If you’re selling a more serious product like herbal teas – something people actually ingest – your quiz should definitely have a more professional appeal like Traditional Medicinals uses:
A hip, but serious Plant Personality Quiz example offering herbal tea product recommendations based on a visitor's quiz answers.
The Herb Nerd Plant Personality Quiz walks visitors through 9 simple yes or no questions to match them up with the herbal teas that are right for them. The questions are fun and hip, but still emit a professional appeal that make you trust them.
The level of design they put into their quiz also makes you stop and smell the herbal teas too!
A custom results page with herbal tea recommendations after taking the Herb Nerd Plant Personality Quiz on the Traditional Medicinals website.
When you click on one of the product recommendations on the results page, you're brought to a pre-checkout page where you can either click the "Buy Now" or "Learn More" buttons.
The Nettle Leaf pre-checkout page on the Traditional Medicinals website. This page was loaded when I clicked on the Nettle Leaf product image from the quiz results page above.
For ingestible products, people often want to learn more about the goods before feeling comfortable enough to buy. That's why redirecting quiz takers to a pre-checkout page for Traditional Medicinals likely converts better than sending customers straight to a checkout page.
Create Your Own Sales Boosting Personality Quiz
If you run an E-Commerce business, creating a personality quiz to help you sell more products is pretty straightforward:
- Come up with 5+ multiple choice personality questions that will result in product recommendations based on a visitor’s answers.
- Assign 5 or more of your best selling products a personality description that will be displayed along with a product image and buy button on each results page.
You can use Thrive Quiz Builder's dynamic content results feature to show a customized product recommendations to visitors based on their quiz answers. - Depending on the seriousness level of your product, you should select a tone of voice for your quiz that's appropriate for your business.
- At the end of the quiz, provide a buy button on each of your recommended product result pages sending customers directly to checkout. This will minimize the number of steps between the end of the quiz and the sale.
3. Connect New Visitors With Your Most Useful Content
If you don’t have products available on your website yet, you can still use personality quizzes to help segment your new visitors and point them to content they'll find most useful. This approach will boost engagement by addressing a visitor’s unique needs straight away.
What's Your Fitness Personality?
One website I discovered using this strategy is a general fitness blog called Very Well Fit.
Very Well Fit provides workouts, healthy eating tips and weight loss advice to fitness newbies. Just by looking at their monstrous navigation menu below, you can see the site has so much content, it can overwhelm new visitors:
The Very Well Fit drop-down menu...SO MANY CHOICES!!!
To address this, Very Well Fit created a blog post quiz to discover what someone's “Fitness Personality” is. After determining someone's fitness type, the quiz suggests useful content for readers based on their answers.
The What's Your Fitness Personality? blog post wuizon the Very Well Fit blog.
The quiz uses 10 multiple choice questions to determine someone's fitness personality (like "Hard Worker" or "Free Spirit"). A personality description is also provided with the type name detailing the pros and cons of a quiz taker's likely exercise habits:
The What's Your Fitness Personality? quiz results section. Notice that the personality description addresses the pros and cons of each type with links to useful articles.
What I like about the Very Well Fit “Fitness Personality” quiz is that it's trying hard to provide readers with a more customized content experience. The description includes anchor text links to articles that will help people both reinforce their good exercise qualities and combat their negative ones:
Missed Engagement Opportunity
The unfortunate thing about Very Well Fit’s personality quiz is that it’s buried on a hard to discover blog post. That's a missed opportunity in my opinion. New visitors need a tool to quickly find the Very Well Fit content that's right for them or they'll get frustrated and bounce.
Instead of posting your personality quiz on a blog post, make it available on a popup lightbox that targets new visitors to your site. This would work much better to direct your newbies toward articles that would benefit them instead of drowning in a sea of content they don't understand yet.
Pointing new visitors to customized content is a good strategy to address their personal needs. They'll quickly discover the content they find most useful, which will increase the time they spend reading as well as the chances they'll share it with friends.
Create Your Own Useful Content Personality Quiz
Although Very Well Fit has the right idea trying to customize content for each visitor's needs, here's how you can use the personality quiz to do it more effectively:
- Create multiple personality types for your niche along with descriptions for each of them.
- Create 5+ multiple choice questions that will assign quiz takers to one of your personality types based on their answers.
- Within each of your personality descriptions, link to 1 to 3 useful blog articles for that particular personality type .
- Use a plugin combo like Thrive Leads + Thrive Quiz Builder to target new visitors with a personality quiz popup lightbox.
- Create social sharing badges for each of your personality type results to boost the likelihood people will share your quiz across their social networks.
Over To You
There's no argument that personality quizzes are one of the most engaging and shareable forms of content on the internet. But instead of assuming they only work for sites like BuzzFeed, be a clever marketer and put the personality quiz to work for your online business.
Take the examples you’ve seen here to create a personality quiz that will boost your list, increase engagement and sell more of your products.
What's the title of your new personality quiz going to be? Let me know in the comments below.
Free E-course: How to Use Quizzes to Boost Conversions
We have a full Thrive University course to teach you the ins and outs on how to use quizzes to build your email list, get more social shares and boost sales.
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Great guide! Looking forward to implementing this.
Cheers Christ!
Hi Matt,
Very informative post…
Since you guys brought out Thrive Quiz Builder, I’ve been wondering how I can apply quizzes to my websites… This post answers that and more.
Thanks!
Thanks William…glad to hear the post helped spark some new quiz ideas for you!
I’m wondering how we can create GDPR compliant quizzes and still get people to subscribe. Because if they have to tick a box that they want to receive my emails the conversion rate for that won’t be so effective…
Hi Peter, we’ll have some content addressing quizzes and GDPR on the blog very soon.
Awesome post, Matt – thanks! It’s also freakishly uncanny how often Thrive blog posts appear on the very day that I’m thinking about or working on the very thing you explain in your posts. As the comedian Jerry Sadowitz once said, “Magic, or coincidence? You decide!”
I have the same experience… I would be thinking about something and then a few days after, there would be a post on the blog about it…
Thanks William…we aim to serve!
Thanks Matthew!
That’s the cool thing about prioritizing consistent, value-focused content creation on your blog…you’re bound to create some just-in-time articles for some segment of your audience, almost every post. 😉
This is just Magnificent! thank you so much for such rich and enlightening guidance.
Cheers Luis!
Is Facebook going to frown upon or penalize a site that uses personality quizzes for shareable content as a result of the Cambridge Analytics debacle?
Hi Kathryn, I think it’s safe to say that the many benefits of using quizzes on your website will remain independent of what Facebook thinks of you. Facebook’s organic reach is practically non-existent and they’re not likely to turn down your money if you pay for traffic.
I think you’re right, thank you. Plus, if your quiz comes from a credible site and the site’s content is relevant to the quiz, the strategy should continue to be effective.
Yes, that’s also a good point. A focus on high value content whether it’s a quiz, blog post or something else is always going to be a good bet.
How do the quizzes comply with the GDPR coming next month?
Hi Luciche,
We’ll have some detailed content addressing quizzes and GDPR on the blog very soon.
So should I wait to create my first quiz until you all post this on your blog?
Or go ahead and take the time to create it?
Hi Jeremy, go ahead and create your quiz!
Check out Shane’s update post on how we’ve modified our different Thrive Themes plugins for GDPR compliance as well as this Quiz Builder Knowledge Base article on how to specifically make your quizzes compliant for GDPR.
Here’s the TL;DR:
The quiz data is now anonymized as long as you don’t use it for segmentation. But the moment you use the data for segmentation, you’ll need to ask for consent and your opt-in gates must be optional. The Knowledge Base article will walk you through how to do that.
Hi Matt,
Your article about personality quizzes is amazing! Thanks for showing us what quizzes are, how others are using them and how we can use them ourselves. What’s great about quizzes is that the amount of time needed to create a good one is relatively small but the ongoing payback is large. Keep up the great work!
Cheers Mark! I agree, quizzes done right can definitely be a small time investment / big reward project for your website. Thanks for your comment!
I love this post and have a couple of sites that I think could really benefit from a personality quiz. My problem is the time to create the quiz and implement it. Anyone have recommendations on where I could hire someone to develop a quiz for me?
Thanks David! My recommendation for you is to keep your personality quiz simple.
Derek Halpern and Ramit Sethi’s quizzes are only 6 to 7 questions long and although their results are customized to someone’s answers, the results don’t actually vary that much.
That means you can get your own personality quiz up and running with a lot less work than appears went into it.
OMG! I love this post!!! vERY INTERESTING!
Thanks Karla!
best practice is right at the beginning of the home page… i guess follow what the best guys are doing. I would just be afraid that users/prospects will miss reading more of my website
You can definitely test that Nathaniel. I would use Thrive Optimize to test 2 variations of your homepage that have the quiz above and below the fold to see which gets more of the conversion goal you want from your homepage (email signups I’m guessing).
Very interesting thank you for sharing
No problem Meike!
I really like this article. I appreciate your effort. Your writing style is unique and interesting Keep it up.
Many thanks Rachel!