How to Beat the Content Slump Around the Holidays With a Quiz

Holiday burnout is a real thing for marketers. 

In preparation for the busy holiday season, many entrepreneurs feel stressed and overwhelmed when it comes to boosting their holiday sales, from Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, to every holiday deal in between.

To reach your new revenue goals, you may need to test a new strategy you haven’t tried before.

Let’s make the holiday shopping experience more delightful and marketing less stressful with an online quiz!

Quizzes are a strategic way to quickly reach your short-term sales goals, but it can also help you build long-term relationships with your community.

Think of your quiz as the entry point into your brand, introducing your audience to everything you have to offer in a memorable and fun way. Then, they’ll have an opportunity to sign up for your email list so you can continue the conversation.

When your quiz and email marketing strategy are working together, you’ll be able to make holiday magic with more sales than years prior.

If you’re looking to beat the content slump and raise your profits, a quiz could be your holiday advantage. But first, let’s talk more about why you may want to build a quiz. 

Quizzes can help you make a long-lasting connection with your audience by delivering personalized content based on their unique needs. Your audience members don’t want to feel like another number; they want to be seen as the multi-faceted individual they are.

With a quiz, your audience will walk away with key takeaways that give them more insight into who they are. By sharing a list of their strengths and acknowledging the challenges they face, you’ll be able to create a quiz that’s memorable and incredibly useful.  

Here are some of the other benefits of creating an interactive quiz.

Consistent lead generation is the cornerstone of a healthy business. It’s hard to sustainably grow your profits without a steady flow of leads, but it’s less about quantity of leads and more about quality. Quizzes can help you with this.

Laylee Emadi, a business educator, uses a quiz to help her generate new leads for her signature course. No matter if you sell products, services, or both, you’ll be able to generate more leads on autopilot with a quiz.

In addition to generating more leads, you’ll be able to turn more followers into subscribers when you use a quiz to build your list. Other lead magnets result in an average conversion rate of around 5-15%, whereas quizzes average around 45-55%. Talk about a significant difference!

By following LaShonda Brown’s example, you’ll be able to personally connect with quiz takers who want to hear from you for the long term. Since LaShonda is focused on growing her affiliate revenue, she’s able to use a quiz to highlight tools she uses and promotes. You can use a quiz to grow your list of warm leads, too!

Unlike other freebies and lead magnets, a quiz provides your audience with a fun, interactive experience. Interactive content gains two times more engagement than static content, helping you turn this surge of trust into more sales.

For example, designer Sibila Ribeiro takes her quiz takers on a brand building journey where every question unlocks their design preferences. As a result, her quiz takers feel like they are in charge of their own destiny. You can accomplish the same thing with an online quiz.

If you’re feeling inspired to take action and start building your own quiz, let’s talk about the elements you’ll need to create. 

First, you’ll begin by choosing a topic that resonates with your audience before you create the content of your quiz. If you’re creating a quiz for the holiday season, you may choose a topic with a holiday theme.

However, make sure your topic relates to your niche and industry. That way, it can be valuable during the holidays and long afterward.

Once you have a quiz topic, let’s jump into the next steps!

Quiz titles are often written as a question. This helps your audience determine whether they are interested in answering the question or not. If so, they’ll likely take the time to complete your quiz.

The most popular quiz titles look a little something like this:

You can fill in the blanks with your own topic, or create a quiz title of your own.

Then, you’ll need to write a short description that tells your audience what your quiz is about, who it is for, and what they’ll ultimately learn at the end. You can also include how many questions are in the quiz or how long the quiz will take them to set better expectations.

After using your quiz title and description to create your quiz cover page, you’ll want to create your end results next. It may seem a little backwards to do this before creating your quiz questions and answers, but I promise it will make the whole quiz-building process much easier.

I usually recommend choosing between three to five quiz result types so you don’t overwhelm yourself with work or confuse your audience. For my quiz, I created four distinct personality types and wrote a small description based on their most common personality traits.

If you want to go above and beyond with your quiz-taking experience, you can create custom quiz result landing pages to delight your audience. This will give you more room to educate your audience, give them unique insights, and build trust before they visit their inbox.

Now that you have your quiz results, you can begin to brainstorm a list of questions to ask your audience. This may be a fun place to mix in holiday themes if you’d like, but think about adding questions that will add long-term value to your quiz.

If you’re not sure what kind of questions to add to your quiz, you can look at these quiz templates for inspiration or this list of 50 Quiz Questions You Should Be Using.

It’s recommended to use seven to 10 quiz questions, so be sure to narrow down your list and choose your favorites. Then, revisit your quiz result types and write an answer option that connects to each one.

For example, in my quiz, the “Intentional, Artistic, Thoughtful” answer option connects with The Storyteller result type. This means that anyone who chooses this option will be one step closer to receiving this corresponding quiz result at the end.

You’ll do this for all of your questions until you’ve completed your quiz content, but you aren’t finished quite yet. You won’t want to skip this essential part of your quiz funnel: your follow-up email sequence!

Once someone finishes your quiz, they’ll need to provide their email address (and opt into your email marketing list) to receive their quiz results. It’s important to nurture this new relationship with your subscribers through an email sequence. You can use Zapier to connect Flodesk and Interact to properly segment your audience and send these emails (or follow this tutorial to connect Flodesk and Interact without Zapier).

To create your follow-up email sequence after the quiz, follow this formula:

Seriously, it’s that simple! Be sure to add as much value as you can to these emails before you add your subscribers to your regular newsletter.

If you want to add a limited-time offer or holiday discount to your quiz email sequence, it’s a great way to add urgency to your emails. Otherwise, you can send other holiday-related emails straight to their inbox now that they’re on your email list. Keep reading for more ideas!

As part of your quiz email follow-up sequence, here are a few offers and ideas you can use to raise brand awareness and grow your profits as you convert more email leads.

Instead of beginning your holiday marketing strategy with a sales pitch, think about how you can bring value before you ask for the sale. This can be done by sharing holiday content, including a list of curated resources, a set of lessons learned, or some personal reflections around the holiday season.

To make a more personal connection with her subscribers, Hannah Brencher hosts an advent challenge around the holidays every year. This email challenge is highly shareable, helping her reach more people so others can learn about her brand before her end-of-year sales kick off.

Everyone loves having an opportunity to save money. With so many great deals happening around Black Friday, it’s important to find ways to make your shop stand out. One way to do this is by offering a holiday discount or bonus offer for those who buy during the holiday.

If you want to re-engage subscribers after Black Friday, take this example from Natalie Franke. Natalie decided to give a special discount to her loyal email subscribers during Small Business Saturday. When offering this discount, be sure to add the discount code in the email so it’s easy to access.

Need an email template? Try the new Flodesk holiday sales collection to put your offer front and center—and get more sales. 

Are you planning to host a virtual or in-person event during the holiday season? A quiz might be the perfect way to attract potential attendees. Holidays are a great time for gathering people together, and when you connect your quiz with email marketing, you’ll be able to seamlessly sell more seats to your event.

In preparation for the holidays, Style Society decided to offer a number of styling workshops at their studio. By doing so, they’re able to foster the creativity of others in their local community and introduce their brand to more potential buyers. If you wanted to host a virtual event, you could also use holiday imagery to spruce up the design of your event. (Pun intended!)

To beat the content slump around the holidays, you can use an interactive quiz to enhance your email marketing strategy. In doing so, you’ll be able to personally connect with more people in your audience and turn passive visitors into loyal subscribers.

To get started, sign up for a free trial of Interact so you can start building your own quiz! And sign up for a free 30-day trial of Flodesk so you can reach your quiz takers again and again with email marketing. 

Then, watch this Flodesk University video tutorial (created by me!):

How to Use A Quiz to Grow Your Email List