Podcast Episodes – The Quizmakers

Sure, quizzes are great for marketing. But don't forget how awesome customer support to grow your business through word of mouth recommendations. Boris and Mike share their secrets behind their 'founders-first' customer support culture - that has helped scale their quiz maker start up with zero paid marketing.

Mike and Boris – co-founders of the popular quiz maker Riddle.com answer their favorite customer questions about how to build successful quizzes and personality tests. You’ll learn everything from the perfect quiz length and what questions to ask to crafting the ideal lead form – and everything in-between.

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Mike 0:00
Hi there, my name is Mike – I’m one of the co-founders of Riddle.com and in this episode of The Quiz Makers, I am going to be interviewing and chatting with my co-founder and our CEO, Boris Pfeiffer.

Boris 0:10
Hey there, Mike.

Mike 0:12
Hey, Boris. Welcome back. So in this episode, Boris, you and I were chatting that ever since we started The Quiz Makers podcast, we get a lot of questions from people who are interested in using quizzes for marketing. But often, they’re often some of the basic fundamental best practices

Boris 0:31
I’d be happy to answer these and they’re not just feedback to our podcast. Mike and I also man our tech support chat on Riddle.com – it’s an interesting fact that despite having thousands and thousands of users, we’ve never hired a customer support team. We believe that if the founders and the lead engineers help in customer support, you end up getting a much better product. It’s been hard on us, but I think it helps, Mike.

Mike 1:02
Absolutely. Sure, sometimes we might be at the pub having a beer – and hear the support chat ‘ding’ on our smartphones, we quickly answer it. So it does distract us but the amount of positive feedback we got from users and also just great questions that lead to “Oh, these are features we should add.”

Anyways, that’s enough of Riddle. Let’s go talk about quizzes and marketing and all that good stuff.

So I’m just going to work through our list of the top 10 questions. One of the most common questions I’ve seen is “I want to make a quiz for marketing and I want to collect lead – what’s the ideal number of questions to have in a quiz?”

Boris 1:40
That’s pretty easy to determine. It depends on how complicated these questions are and how easy to answer for one, because you want to keep the quiz under two and a half or three minutes to answer. That’s about the most time people have attention for on the internet these days.

One caveat – if you’re doing a scientific research type of quiz, such as doing a medical quiz like “Do you suffer from anxiety?” People may be much more interested in that result and be willing to spend 10 or 20 minutes.

But for light-hearted quizzes – “What city should you live in?”, a good guideline around 10 questions is an ideal number, plus or minus. If you’re doing a personality test, sometimes you need a few more to score properly. But definitely try to stay under 15 is my guideline. We’ve seen much longer quizzes, but we don’t think they work that well.

Mike 2:42
No, it’s true. I would actually would say eight to 10. And a good way to test this is once you finished your quiz, just ask your Aunt Sally or your Uncle Bob to take the quiz and just time them (because if you take it again, you’ll know the questions). You will be much faster, you want someone completely new to the quiz to find out “How long did that take?”

And if they come back and say, “Oh, it took me about six minutes, then you know that you might want to shorten it down.

Okay, that leads into the next question. We’ve covered questions. Now how many answers? Should you have per question?

Boris 3:18
I would say four answer options is what people expect to have. There’s an additional benefit in having four if you use images, for example, it makes a nice 2×2 grid for the answer options. But four is what you see in most common multiple choice tests and quizzes – one correct and three wrong answers. So I would always try to stick to four if possible.

Mike 3:42
Yes, I absolutely agree. And there’s another benefit as well. Generally, 50 to 60% of your quiz takers will be on a smartphone. The fewer answer options you have, the more condensed your quiz will be. It’ll stay nicely on one screen.

Contrast that with adding six to eight to 10 answer options. Your quiz takers might need to scroll it.

Okay, next question. So should we use images in a quiz? Or should we stick to text only questions and answers?

Boris 4:12
I would always try to mix it up, have image questions followed by text questions, and then throw in another image question – it makes it a lot more interesting than just text. Sure, it may not be suitable for all quiz types. But if you can, in your eight to 10 questions, try to have at least one or two image based questions in there.

Mike 4:36
Definitely. And I would actually probably go 50% text / 50% image questions. For the image questions, maybe add a couple of GIFs or a video clip – just something to mix it up and add some energy and animation beyond just static images. But again, it depends on the subject. If it’s a very serious topic, you might want to avoid that.

Okay, this is a very popular question we get. How do you write a good quiz title?

Boris 5:09
This is probably the hardest thing to do when writing a quiz. If you’re doing this right, you’re going to spend as much time finding a good title as writing the rest of the quiz.

And the title is the most important thing – because it’s what you see when people shared a quiz on social media. It’s on the page where you embed the quiz. It gets people to click and start the quiz. So you have to get them hooked into the quiz.

Mike 5:37
It’s like the cover of a book. You know, when you’re looking at a bookstore, what jumps out at you? We’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, but we all do. So it needs to have a good image and a great title.

Boris 5:49
One other thing with titles – make them personal. So, for example, use the word you in the title.

If you’re doing quizzes or by lists, try to use odd numbers. There’s been lots of experiments and white papers written that odd numbers work better than even numbers. So instead of saying “Which of these six countries should you spend the rest of your life?”, use seven.

Or explore – you know, the “Seven most popular holiday vacation spots you can’t miss” works a lot better than explore the “Six most popular holiday spots”.

I honestly can’t explain the science behind it. But it’s common knowledge.

Mike 6:34
Now, that works. The other one – people have a tendency to say top 10s – like “Top 10 reasons to do this”. And I think people just kind of tune out.

But using odd numbers – let’s take “7, 9, 13 things you didn’t know about the Apple iPhone”. That just seems a bit more genuine and people go wow, that must be really interesting.

As we mentioned, don’t underestimate the power of the word ‘you’. Instead of “The dream city quiz”, you could go with “What city should you live in?”

That’s not it’s still not a great title, but just adding the word you makes it more personal.

And there’s one other trick. Challenge your audience. So instead of just saying, oh, here’s “The Harry Potter quiz”. Imagine we add the word you -“How much do you know about Harry Potter?”

That’s okay. But then you can also say “How much do you actually…” or “How much do you really know about Harry Potter?”

Just that one emotionally charged word, again, has a big impact. And it’s human psychology. Who knows what’s going on?

The last thing I would say is keep everything short. I think under 60 to 65 characters is your ideal quiz title target length.

Boris 7:53
Good advice – you probably see this in a lot of ads for video games on your phone. Underneath the “How much do you actually know about Harry Potter?” title – you could put a little byline saying “80% of quiz takers fail to get 100%”… something like that. Or “only 2% of quiz takers answer everything correctly”. You see this in a lot of in game apps where they said there’s a puzzle, and hardly anyone can solve this.

Yeah, it challenges people who say, “Well, I’m gonna be one of these 2% that gets everything correct.” And they’ll share it because they’re so happy.

Mike 8:33
Perfect. Okay, next.

So if you are using quizzes for collecting leads, and potential customers (and they are brilliant at that)… we’ve talked about that ad nauseum.

How many fields should you put into a lead generation form?

Boris 8:50
As few as you possibly can is always the best answer. Don’t go overboard.

Again, it depends on the type of quiz of course. And I think we’ll talk about this in the follow up question about what are the best quiz types for lead generation. But the more involved your users are by your quiz, the more fields you can probably ask for.

But ideally, if you can get by with just name and email, just ask for name and email. And remember, if you like you can collect and store all the quiz data along with the form. If you’re smart and asking the questions, maybe you can find out two very smart questions, things that you otherwise would put into the form so you don’t have to add many fields.

For example, let’s say for whatever you do in marketing, it’s really important that you know if someone’s under 20 or over 50, and those are the two brackets you really care about. Now, you could easily put a drop down into the lead form, “How old are you?” But people may not really want to answer that.

Or you could also have a question in the quiz like “Have you ever used TikTok?”

The chances that someone over 60 says yes are very low, while someone under 20. Very high. So you could use that question to determine the age range. And there may be others – whatever the data point, you can probably come up with a good quiz question to find out things.

Mike 10:18
That’s perfect. And one thing to avoid if you’re working for any medium to large company. If you are collaborating with other departments, they will often want to add lots of questions. So legal might want to put in five checkboxes saying “Yes, I agree to this.” and “I agree to that.”

Marketing might want to have an extra five fields for consumer research. Try and fight that as much as you can, because with each extra field, your conversion rates will drop dramatically.

Okay, let’s transition to something you mentioned it already. But speaking of leads, what is the best type of quizzes for generating leads?

Boris 10:57
The highest conversion rates will always be In quizzes that get people the most involved – these are personality tests. Because the personality test is all about you. You don’t have to prove you know anything like you do in a quiz. You do the test because you want to find out something about yourself. Like the “What kind of dog are you?” personality test we talked about that in the one of the previous episodes?

You’re not doing this to tell someone else what type of dog you are, you want to find out for yourself. And because you’re so involved, filling out that form, (which is just another question) after a couple minutes of quiz taking has such a much higher chance to be filled out.

If you do a quiz, like the one you mentioned Mike, that challenge you like “How much you really know about Harry Potter?”, they may also have a better chance than something light and fluffy that doesn’t really challenge you.

That would be my suggestion. Go for conversions with personality tests or in really challenging and difficult quizzes, where people really want to know how they how they ended up.

And you could promise them on the lead form that you’ll send them all the answer explanations and a follow up email (which is something our quiz maker supports), then you will also have a good chance.

Mike 12:19
Yes, because then people are saying, okay, I’ve taken this quiz, I’m going to get something of value. I’m going get all the quiz answers.

That’s awesome. Especially if it’s a really challenging quiz.

Okay, let’s transition slightly. So quizzes and personality tests are some of the best converting formats. One question we are often asked is, “Well, what about opinion polls?”

Because many publishers or businesses will use opinion polls in their content just to get people’s opinions, like the name says.

But are they good for gathering leads?

Boris 12:57
To an extent- the people there are not that involved. So your CTA (call to action) needs to be super strong.

Why should someone fill out the form? Maybe promising them to send them the poll results after the poll is over? If it’s a very engaging poll, that could be interesting. It would have to be a poll that really captures their interest and where they totally want to know what other people think. So let’s say you’re, you’re running a crypto exchange or currency exchange, and you have professional traders, and you’re asking for opinions: “What do you think? Where do you think Bitcoin is going to be a month from now?”

As a trader, I would be super interested in hearing what the other thousands of traders that take the poll think – it would give me a good snapshot. And yes, I would leave my email if you promise to send me the poll results from another thousand traders. But if it’s something “Do you think it’s going to rain tonight?” – that may be too light and fluffy. Sure, people can click on it if there’s a soccer game going on that everyone in my city wants to go to. But I’m not going to be interested in getting an email with these results, because I can just wait for it tonight, and I’ll see if it rains or not.

Mike 14:15
The one benefit of polls, though, is that they’re so easy to create. If you use polls in a lot of your longer form content, even if the polls don’t convert as well, they’re so easy to make that, even if you only get five or 10%, you can pop polls in your articles. That percentage is actually pretty low for us, even though it’s very good for the online sector. You know, that’s still not bad.

So polls do have a place in lead generation, as you mentioned.

Next… when people are creating quizzes, after writing six to eight questions, when they get to the end, they need to assign personality or overall quiz results. “Hey, you’re this” or “Wow, you got x out of y questions right”… how many different quiz results do you recommend?

Boris 15:05
I think four is again a really good number, as with the answer options. If you just do two, such as “You did really well” or “You did really bad”. That’s often too easy, especially with 10 questions, people will too easily fall into a low category. Three is kind of weird to set it up in thirds and four, you know, you get the top 25%, the bottom 25% and then the medium, high, medium, low people and quiz.

So for quizzes for personality tests, I like four to five. Don’t go over that because remember, your personality tests assign points to a personality based on the answer option chosen. You will need to have enough questions and answer options so every personality has a chance to get enough points to win.

If you do more than four or five, you are going to then have to write 20 questions with four or five answer options and the quiz will be horrible for most light-hearted or entertaining test topics. And you can work off the OCEAN personality types which is really five results. But as a rule, you can go with a kind of introverted result, we have the extroverted result, and now you have two extremes, you kind of do two in the middle – you’ll do fine.

Mike 16:50
Okay, now, that’s perfect. And the other thing about four, you know, four to five quiz results. There’s enough variety that when people share it on social media, their friends aren’t all going to get the same results. So there’s enough variety to say, “Oh, I’m this” or “You’re that”.

If everyone gets very similar results, that’s going to kill your virality. And people are just not going to be as impressed with your quiz.

We actually had two more questions, but because we like to keep our podcasts quite short and punchy and to the point, we’re going to hold off on those, we might bring this back in another Q&A session.

If you have any questions of your own, please let us know on Twitter. And because we’re online so much at Riddle.com you can also just go to Riddle and ask away on our support chat, we’re always happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much, Boris, for your time, as always. Looking forward to pick this up with our next episode.

Mike and Boris - co-founders of the quiz maker Riddle.com answer customer questions on how to build successful quizzes and personality tests.

Quizzes are powerful marketing tools for collecting personal information from potential customers. However, data privacy is growing more strict globally, with regulations like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA. Data Privacy Officer Alexander Claasen shares how to collect customer data safely with quizzes.

Quizzes are powerful marketing tools for collecting personal information from potential customers. However, data privacy is growing more strict globally, with regulations like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. Data Privacy Officer Alexander Claasen shares how to collect customer data safely with quizzes.

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If you want to reach out to Alex to inquire about his services, send him an email.

Boris 0:03
Hello, and welcome to “The Quiz Makers” podcast. Our guest today is Alexander Claasen. Alex is an external data protection officer, who’s also working for Riddle. And we’re going to chat today about privacy, the European privacy laws, and the most recent cancellation of the Privacy Shield agreement and what that means for doing business globally.

Hi, Alex – welcome to the show!

Alex 0:30
Hello Boris.

Boris 0:34
So let’s start – actually a little background. What got you into the business of being an external data protection officer? Do you just love privacy so much, or what got you to this job?

Alex 0:49
Well, I was studying law and I was about to write my exams when, in 2016, a mentor of mine brought me up to the idea.

“Hey Alex, you’re IT friendly and you know this stuff. Why don’t you try privacy protection or data protection? It’s a crossover from law and protecting personal data – it could be some interesting field for you.”

And so we started to educate ourselves about the whole subject and then I got certified with TÜV Süd. So since 2016, I’ve been in the data protection business.

Boris 1:45
So that was really good timing with GDPR coming!

Alex 1:50
That first passed two years before, but the cut-off date was on the horizon. So we were informed about the mechanics which would come into use – so I could get some experience before GDPR.

Boris 2:11
So as a business owner, when the GDPR came out and the first lawsuits happened, people got scared. We started to hate GDPR more and more to an extent. So from from an end user point of view, have you seen any benefits of GDPR? Or is it making life harder for everyone?

Alex 2:33
Ah, in part.

On one hand, I think it’s a regaining of privacy.

Personal data has become more and more a commodity. So you went from a human being to a trading good. Something, the GDPR wants to turn back. So under the concern of privacy, the GDPR is something pretty good. For every customer, even for us ourselves because we are customers to any other company.

But from the companies’ point of view, it’s hard because all those mostly cheap services can’t be used anymore or can’t be used in the way you would want to use them – because they always cause some problems.

So you have to make the decision as a company owner – “Do I want you to pay money for GDPR compliance service? Do I want to risk maybe getting fined?”

So both positions are hard to bring into level because they’re contradict each other.

But I think in the end, the need to obey the European privacy protection laws will bring a wider range of internet or software based services in favor of the customers. Also European countries which get the chance to provide the services to the customers and can bring in some new ideas.

Boris 4:37
Right. So you mentioned European companies. At Riddle, you know, we have a lot of customers outside the EU. And we altered lots of tools in Riddle to comply with GDPR.

Do you think it’s important for a US company to comply with GDPR or can they just ignore it?

Alex 4:58
It’s, of course, very important for US companies, because we have two ways in which the GDPR applies to you as an US company.

On the one hand, we have the geographical scope of the GDPR. So, that means we have two principles: the establishment and the marketplace principles.

The establishment principle means that the GDPR applies whenever the data processing body has at least one establishment in the EU. So, if you process your European data in at least one branch office, you’re under under the control of the GDPR. In conclusion, you shouldn’t care about being a non-EU business because you’re this or that way. You are affected by the GDPR – and you have to be compliant if you want to take part and participate in this very strong financial market, you have to play by the rules.

Boris 6:30
So the only option really, if you’re a US company, and you don’t want to comply, is you have to essentially block all European traffic. We’d expect you to lose a lot of business.

Alex 6:44
That’s the point exactly.

Boris 6:47
And the good thing for everyone is that more and more countries are establishing similar rules. Canada has a very similar rule to California, very similar laws. So if you comply with the European privacy regulations? You pretty much automatically comply with the Canadian and the California privacy regulations.

Alex 7:08
Yes. Because the European Data Protection Law GDPR is a model for for many other countries, like you mentioned. And the regulations are, in some cases pretty harsh, I think. But on the other hand, you have to see why they are that harsh.

In Europe we consider the right of privacy as a European human right. So that’s why it’s being regulated so hard these days. So if you comply to the GDPR, in most cases, I think you can be compliant with the other laws because they just took the best from the European law.

Boris 7:58
Right. That makes sense. But now that we mentioned the US – a recent development (we’re recording this in August of 2020), the Internet world got shocked because the Privacy Shield agreement, which regulated data exchanges between the US and Europe, got cancelled.

Essentially, if you are a European company or if you want to comply with GDPR, now you cannot transfer any data to a US company. Is that a correct statement?

Alex 8:35
More or less. Maybe under very difficult conditions, you maybe could still transfer data to the US, but that’s not practical.

Boris 8:45
All right. So is that the end of me using Amazon hosting Google hosting, Google services, Google Analytics, Facebook ads, Facebook for business and so forth?

Alex 9:00
You could say that with a short “yes”.

By now, it depends on what all those companies will do in the future to the services, how they will recreate them (if they are able to create them) to be GDPR compliant. So then you could use them again.

But not for now, because we have no way to transfer data safely to the US and back. Because the US are now marked as an unsafe state under the view of the GDPR concerning the US security laws.

Boris 9:49
And they’re unsafe, because the US government reserves the right to access any data stored on servers in the US.

Alex 9:56
Yeah, that’s the point. Because you have no functional protection against these possessions of the US government. So the European High Court of Justice said “Okay, under these circumstances, you can’t transfer European personal data to the US.” It’s not possible.

Boris 10:18
And I just want to pick up on something we said earlier about these laws making way for new and potentially better services, just out of our personal experience at Riddle.

Until Privacy Shield was cancelled, we used Intercom to power our support chat. But a support software naturally needs to capture lots of personal identifiable information, like someone’s name and email so we can communicate. And we just had to quickly swap out Intercom because they were not compliant anymore.

So we found a software from France called Crisp.chat, which is actually lightyears better than Intercom. So we’ve already benefited, and our customers will benefit from a much better experience thanks to the cancellation of Privacy Shield.

I’m pretty sure there are going to be more examples of this. Now, European companies with less funding than some of the Silicon Valley players stand a much better chance.

Alex 11:20
That’s what I what I mentioned with the wider range of new new solutions and services. Because like you said, those companies may get the funds they need to make the business be very appealing to every user.

Let’s step back to the ‘EU <> US Privacy Shield’ to say one last thing.

Even so if you if you don’t worry about getting fined directly by some some European authority, you can at least get fined indirectly. At least your European Customers are being forced to switch to GDPR compliant services. So even if you don’t get fined in a direct way, you will lose a lot of money because you lose your customers. You will have to get ready in a pretty short amount of time, otherwise the EU market will be closed for you.

Boris 12:19

I wanted to wrap this up with one more question. We introduced you as our data protection officer. Would you recommend every company having an external or internal data protection officer?

Alex 12:37
It depends on the size of the company. At least, you must have a person inside your company who is able to deal with all the technical subjects coming up about data protection, you have to always to to understand the technical informations of the services and hardware you’re using.

On the other hand, you have to the law component side as a data protection officer. So if you don’t have a person inside your company who can deal with both of these sides, you better should get an external person. An external consultant like me is very into the subject and interested in all the questions coming up – in that case, hire someone and you’re good.

Boris 13:42
And I can agree to that. We were having a lot of fun discussions whenever we launched a new feature.

We run it by Alex, and he usually annoys us a lot by telling us “no”.

Alex 13:54
Sorry for that but I have to give good advice.

Boris 13:56
But in the end, we always come up with a solution that was probably better than what we initially envisioned.

So thank you for being on the show, Alex. If any of our listeners needs an external data protection officer, you will find Alex’s email down there in the show notes.

Send him a note and he will connect with you. Okay, thank you so much for being on the show Alex.

Alex 14:22
Bye!

Learn the secrets behind creating the most viral quizzes on the internet - the personality test. Easy to create, but tricky to master, Boris and Mike share their tips and secrets, while discussing the most famous one of all - "What kind of dog are you?"

Please visit https://www.riddle.com/blog/growth-hack-marketing-quiz-maker/ to download your free copy of the Quizmaster eBook we mention in the video. No registration needed to get your copy.

Quality, not quantity, matters most in online lead generation. 
Overmore.com founder Robin Caller shares what works (and what doesn't) - and why quizzes perform so well, including some really good benchmarks to help you judge and measure your own lead generation marketing.

Quality, not quantity, matters most in online lead generation.

Overmore.com founder Robin Caller shares what works (and what doesn’t) – and why quizzes perform so well, including some really good benchmarks to help you judge and measure your own lead generation marketing.

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Boris 0:02
Welcome to the next episode of “The Quiz Makers”!

Today, our guest is Robin Caller. Robin is the CEO and founder of the Overmore Group, a group of companies focused on lead generation and lead processing. And we’re going to talk a little bit today about how to generate leads and the importance of good quality leads.

Hi, Robin, welcome to the show.

Robin 0:29
Thanks. Thanks for having me, Boris. Nice to see you again.

Boris 0:32
Yes, you mentioned seeing you again. I probably should do a little intro beyond just your title. So Robin and I – we worked together more than 10 years ago, let’s just call it a decade ago when I was running Tickle.

Tickle was one of the biggest websites in the world, number 27 in terms of traffic, where we did our own quizzes (unlike Riddle.com which I’m running now where we provide the quiz builder for our customers) and Robin worked with us on lead generation. And even back then quizzes were amazing for leads. Right, Robin, we made some good business.

Robin 1:13
Yes, it’s been my career since.

Boris 1:17
So you did. You took that idea of generating leads from quizzes a lot further, right?

Why don’t you give us the quick backstory of the Overmore group, what you do today,, and how you work with leads for your large selection of clients ranging from BMW to Bentley, Intel, and many other blue chip names.

Robin 1:38
Yeah, well, it did all start with Tickle, Boris. So Tickle was a fantastic website. And there was an opportunity to put a lead generation capability into the user journey, I guess.

So we built originally a piece of software to capture and deliver data coming off the back of quizzes and we still own and operate that software today. We then spent 12 years building that up and making it a real a real platform – a real system for for trading data.

But quizzes themselves, they lend themselves very well to lead generation.

They relaxed people, and they were subject relevant. And the lead generation part seemed like a natural step within it.

So over the last 12 years, we’ve branched out. We now have a business that helps advertisers purchase leads from various different publishers on the worldwide web, and you’ve mentioned a couple of them like BMW and there’s Vodafone and Bentley, etc. We’re very strong in automotive, technology, and telecoms.

But we’ve also built and operate some of our own websites to generate leads. So I suppose that we’ve built the business on the back of learning about how lead gen and quizzes is quite broad reaching their clients. You mentioned clients – we’re very proud to be working for clients like BMW, Bentley Vodafone, we are strong with DocuSign and Adobe.

Not that they all use quiz or competition sources, there are quite a lot of different lead generation tactics and techniques. We now work across different types of publishers, as well, but it’s interesting just to catch up with you. It all started with quizzes and now there’s about a $20 million business – so you can generate extreme value from from lead generation.

Boris 3:52
If you were to pit lead generation and lead forms against banner ads in today’s space…

Robin 4:03
It’s no competition, don’t even ask the rest of the question. I think it’s probably worth just that just to help anybody that’s listening, take that direction when I met you and we were selling banners. And we also sold leads on the back of quizzes.

My average order value in my business, the average booking was about 3000 pounds, maybe $5,000. The moment we started doing lead generation business, I would say the average order value was five times bigger than that.

And then the other key metric that I think is critical for anybody is rebooking and repeat business. The average rebooking, the average deal that we did probably just repeated 90% of the time. It went from a quarterly campaign to a six month or a 12 month program, whereas banner campaigns were purely tactical – they were on, then off.

Lead generation campaigns just repeated and repeated. So I don’t know if that’s where you would go with your question either. So I hope it was worth having interrupted.

Boris 5:10
Yes, I was going to lead down the road where, obviously, many large and bluechip customers that can afford agencies will already know that.

But there’s a whole bunch of listeners that run small to midsize businesses and this still spend a lot of their marketing budget on Facebook ads and on Google ads, simply driving traffic to a homepage.

Robin 5:37
Right.

Boris 5:38
What would you do if you were them?

Robin 5:42
Oh well look, we have a list itself.

Boris 5:44
Yeah. Always.

Robin 5:46
Right. When in terms of in terms of traffic, from Google and Facebook, we have a business activity where we very much do drive traffic. So we spend quite a lot of money on Pay Per Click and quite a lot of money on social but the objective all of the money we spend on it – with seven figures a year on our own sites – is to generate a registration.

So perhaps it’s pre lead, but it’s a registered user explicitly consenting on our domain, though we can have their personal data, their name, their email address, telephone number, and are then permitted to send them relevant promotions around the topics or subjects that they’ve they’ve engaged on.

We subsequently turn those individuals and registered users into leads and customers so I’d say it’s fundamental – actually I don’t think search or social or pay per click in itself is is necessarily a channel or tactic anymore.

I think of it really where lead generation is an objective, obtaining consent is an objective. And how you drive people to that consent is probably suppose less relevant. Everybody will use a mix of tactics, but they need to know how much it cost them to generate a consented individual – a real person who gives them permission to market to them.

Boris 7:26
Now, that’s a good thing to mention consent and personal information. How much did the introduction of GDPR change your business? Did it drive out competition or did it make it harder for everybody in the industry?

Robin 7:44
Unfortunately, the short term answer is the latter. I think it’s made it harder for everybody. I think it’s driven out some competition. But I don’t think that at a commercial level we’ve really seen the benefits of that as a from a competitive trading world.

I think the costs probably out outweigh the benefits. The cons outweigh the pros, but I think that’s still a short term point of view. And it’s been two years and we haven’t really seen any penalties for abuse or misuse of consent. We’ve seen penalties for a few like the theft or the loss of data and lack of respect and protection of data, but we haven’t really seen too much in the in the field of consents, permissions, and purposes. When that comes, I think that’ll separate the wheat from the chaff.

Boris 8:44
Okay, because everybody’s personal goal was probably less spam. But that certainly has not happened, right?

Robin 8:51
Mm hmm. And I think as as people who work as we do, and have done for more than a decade. There’s there’s different hats we wear, we could wear a hat as a personal user who wishes our inbox wasn’t so bombarded. We can also speak as professionals and look at the benefits that regulations and good practices actually best practice brings to anything we do. And there are different perspectives, for sure.

And then I think we could look just generically or holistically at the web and say that, you know, these are good changes. These are good changes that have come. But perhaps the real bad boys out there, the baddies and the bots, they need a proper spanking from a regulator before they really do run off and go somewhere else.

Boris 9:49
They probably do, they probably do.

Robin 9:51
Yeah.

Boris 9:52
Another topic I wanted to touch base on – and both of us we’ve been working on this for more than a decade. As we mentioned, for some clients, it’s just a focus on quantity. A lot of clients asked us just for sheer numbers – “deliver 100,000 leads this week”. And that’s what you would get paid for.

We always tell people when they create a quiz and have a form – always make the form optional, never force someone to enter data. Because that will always lead to bad data, I think is completely valueless, right?

You’ve taken this a lot further with your companies have you?

Robin 10:37
Yeah, but the premise is the same Boris. I mean, you know, going back to consenting, I think we should get value, but consent has to be freely given. As soon as you put a barrier up to somebody and tell them that they have to do something, you’re going to introduce some mischief and some attempts to overcome those barriers without freely given alternatives.

So we certainly haven’t seen any situation where a forced gateway produces better value, it does produce more value. Absolutely.

But what we’ll see is just more noise, there will be a bad signal to noise ratio – people will increase the amount of nonsense they submit, just to get past the formula.

In fact, you may not be aware of this but the chief executive of Ryanair recently said that if people are forced to give their address for two weeks of self-quarantine when they returned to the UK, they’ll probably say that it’s #1 Mickey Mouse Street, Disneyland – and that’s talking about border controls, these are people coming coming back through passport control.

But his point is a very good one – if you’re forced to give some information, you will very quickly assess the likelihood of getting into trouble and provide nonsense.

It’s far better to invite users to freely and respectfully give their information over to you if what you’re putting in front of them is relevant. And in the end, it’s value over volume.

I think most of the lead volume sellers that I’ve met in the last 10 years or more, they never think they’ll ever really think about the cost involved in separating the wheat from the chaff.

They don’t think about it from the buy side point of view, which is that a buyer of leads and a salesman would much rather make 10 phone calls and 10 sales than 1000 phone calls and 10 sales.

That’s obvious. So why not just respect the customer, respect the individual and get rid of the nonsense? And if you introduce barriers, you’ll get more nonsense.

Boris 13:06
Right? And always be honest what you’re going to do, right? If you put a form on your website or at the end of a quiz, tell people what you’re going to send them.

Robin 13:17
Oh, absolutely. I think our experience in lead generation has been that if you are clear and you’re fair with people, then the right people will signal clearly their interest and intentions towards an offer or an advert or an advertiser.

And that will transfer to value.

Again, going back to that point about separating the wheat from the chaff. If a salesman has to make 1000 phone calls to make 10 sales, that’s a significant cost. So they’d much rather make making 10 phone calls for 10 sales, they’re saving 990 calls or 990 employee minutes or hours or however long it takes to go through that information.

So you also have to factor in the cost of noise.

Perhaps a good analogy for everybody listening to a podcast in 2020 is that there’s probably very little background noise and hiss now – compared to when there was on a gramophone record or a tape cassette when we were kids growing up. So signal to noise ratio is something that all lead generators should think long and hard about – they really should be thinking about trying to achieve 99%+ signal.

Boris 14:35
Awesome. And as we mention in all our podcasts, quizzes have to be short and sweet and to the point.

So do our podcasts.

To finish off, I’d love to get a number out of you. People always ask us how they compare to other quizzes and lead generation. And we tell them, people like Shopify (who we had on this podcast a few episodes back), they tell us If they have a lead forum that’s optional, with a skip button, they get over 30% opt in rate. We also hear from others like the Chicago Bulls, they get a 35 to 40%. opt in rate.

What do you say someone that doesn’t want to do a quiz – who just puts a form on their website… what will be a really, really amazing number they can get for opt in rates for a lead form.

Robin 15:29
Oh, that’s extremely difficult one to answer.

But the percentages that you talked about are extremely high. I would think that some of the better user journeys that we’ve seen, would still not be at 25%. So if people want to do quizzes, engage users and put them in a positive frame of mind to become leads and opt-in, then I think the answer to that resounding yes.

Maybe I’m not answering the question, but it makes sense. One of the things we found all those years ago at Tickle, one of the things we talked about when we were explaining the journey and the opportunity to advertisers – when you get somebody to do a quiz, they’re leaning forward, and they’re actively engaged in the content. And they are thinking and reacting. You’ve got to a thinking, leaning forward, doing person on your page that’s already got their hands on a mouse or a keyboard.

That’s compared to how we are right now – for anybody who could see us, which is sitting back, reclining, hands back, having a chat.

So they’re in a good, psychological frame of mind so that they would engage at a higher rates I think over a normal, surfing, consuming visitor. That perhaps is the strongest argument I could give you for putting questions in front of people as you’ll get that ‘lean forward engagement’.

If you’ve got relevant lead generation on the back of it, it should do very well. So anybody who’s listening in, if you’re getting 25%+, that’s fantastic.

But I will give you a caveat, if I may, because I think it’s really important to track those users right away downstream to look at the value – not just the conversion rate value from one purchase or one change or one transaction but the lifetime value of a record.

I mean, one of the beautiful things about Tickle then and quizzes now with good lead generation is that you know where and when you got the consent – you know what triggered that opt in. And you can then follow a real person instead of a click or a cookie or some other kind of metadata.

You’re following a real person through a journey to an end point at which they spend money with you, purchase, or sign up to an advertiser or a partner offer. And you can track that all the way through. So that’s really valuable because now you know what works. Now you know what to do next. So it’s not just about the 20% or the 30% today.

Boris 18:37
Awesome. Thank you. That was super helpful.

Thank you so much, Robin. Okay, I’ll put the links to your website in the show notes. Anyone interested in more professional lead generation and processing than we could ever provide at Riddle. please reach out to Robin.

Robin 18:53
We’ll try. We could do it together. Thank you very much for having me. And thanks.

Public relations - growth driver or a waste of money? Join PR guru Laura Field from Publicize.co - learn the tips and tricks about using PR to effectively scale your start up. (Hint: It takes more than just a press release - and quizzes can help.)

Former AppLift CEO Maor Sadra talks with us about the state of the advertising industry, how mobile advertising really works and why ad fraud is such a big issue. Quizzes can be a valuable tool in your mix of ads, especially as they will continue to allow you to collect user information in a safe and ethical way. 
Maor’s a big fan of quizzes for marketing – he says that quizzes are “very creative, good, positive and non-disruptive for users to show, ‘Hey, I’m actually interested in X as a qualified user, rather than some anonymous user.’ So quizzes can be a valuable tool in your mix of ads, especially as they will continue to allow you to collect user information in a safe and ethical way.”