The use of a free quiz as a marketing tool

[Cornish Steve]

My company offers a suite of interactive online courses in business communication. As we try to establish our business, we are pursuing several different marketing approaches. One path we have taken is to offer a free quiz at our website. While the subject matter of the quiz (English grammar) represents just a small fraction of what we teach, it's a topic on which an objective quiz can be based.

Our thought was that many people might be tempted by the opportunity to take a free quiz. A less-than-perfect score might point out areas for improvement in their business communication skills. In order to take the quiz, site visitors must provide an email address - valuable information for us. The process also exposes quiz-takers to our website. As an added incentive, we offer a prize to the three people who obtain the highest score each month - a free pass to our introductory course.

We ran into an unexpected problem: Most quiz-takers obtain a low score and become discouraged! Far from seeing the value that our courses might bring to their writing skills, some people question the accuracy of the results. We are having to spend quite a lot of time sending follow-up email messages to explain some of the answers. Yes, this provides us with the opportunity to build a relationship with site visitors, but it's not yet leading to business.

I'd like to tap into your collective experience and views on this topic. Do you think that a free quiz at our website is a good or a bad idea? If we make the questions simpler, would this devalue the quiz or increase quiz-taker's satisfaction - and does it matter? Are quiz results likely to lead to people taking our courses or not? Is our focus on grammar taking away from the other topics we teach (good writing, electronic communication, letter writing, resumes and interviewing, report writing, presentations, and so)?

Thank you for your advice.

Steve
www.goldctr.com

 

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Steve,

One comment I would say is that requiring me to register to complete a free quiz is out of the question for me right now. Not enough temptation to get me to spend the extra few minutes filing in a form and confirming email address etc.

I understand the principle of why you do it but I would do it at the end of the quiz so they have to register to receive their answers if you feel you really have to do it at all. Rightly or wrongly my perception was of being tricked into giving my personal details - and for what? I don't remember seeing a prize mentioned?

Hope this helps a little,

Rob

 

[Cornish Steve]

Hi Steve,

One comment I would say is that requiring me to register to complete a free quiz is out of the question for me right now. Not enough temptation to get me to spend the extra few minutes filing in a form and confirming email address etc.

I understand the principle of why you do it but I would do it at the end of the quiz so they have to register to receive their answers if you feel you really have to do it at all. Rightly or wrongly my perception was of being tricked into giving my personal details - and for what? I don't remember seeing a prize mentioned?

Hope this helps a little,

Rob

Rob,

Thank you. Your comments are well taken.

Steve
www.goldctr.com

 

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for taking it in the manner it was meant!

I would say that I found the flow of copy on your website very easy to read and follow, it seemed to take me through quite easily and I felt compelled to read each word.

Is this the sort of this the sort of technique that is covered in your courses?

Rob

 

[Cornish Steve]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for taking it in the manner it was meant!

I would say that I found the flow of copy on your website very easy to read and follow, it seemed to take me through quite easily and I felt compelled to read each word.

Is this the sort of this the sort of technique that is covered in your courses?

Rob

Rob,

I'm pleased to learn that you found the flow easy to follow at our website. While we tried hard to keep things simple, you never really know until you receive honest feedback.

We do cover many aspects of good writing in our courses - brevity, the perspective of the reader, use of white space, and so on. The design of our courses, however, is quite different from what you see at our homepage. If you'd like to learn more, select the 'course login' option at our home page and register as a guest. You'll be able to browse two sample courses that we recently made available. While you won't have access to course materials or assignments, you can read discussion posts from previous course participants.

Having been through an online MBA program, my business partner and I learned how to - and how not to - design online courses. For us, the keys are planned class interaction, predictability, and quality. Our beta trial served to reinforce that opinion.

I should add, by the way, that planning a 4-month beta trial is the best thing we ever did as a small business. We received great feedback (and our courses are much better as a result), we proved the international dimension of our product (the trial included people from several countries), and we were forced to address unexpected administrative issues. Most of all, participants in our trial have become our strongest allies. They have become true evangelists for our company; some of them want to sell our courses; others have invited us to regional trade shows; most volunteered wonderful testimonials and are willing to act as references. What more could you ask for?

If it's appropriate for the business, I advise any entrepreneur to run a comprehensive beta trial before going live.

Steve
www.goldctr.com

 

[c2webdesign]

Steve,

I've visited the site and agree with Rob that ideally the results should be made available once the quiz has been completed. Asking the visitor to part with their personal informatin without seeing one question doesn't really encourage sign ups.

This being said your problem is the number of 'discrepancies' afterwards - do you find the questions that are being asked are the same, or that the reason people are scoring low is because of the same reasons. If so you could add a FAQ section to the results screen so they can see the main reasons for lower than expected results.

Capturing the email addresses is going to be very useful now and I would certainly carry on with the replying because you may not be finding the benefits now, but over time as email addresses begin to grow - hopefully so will the course takers.

Hope this helps,
Dean
C2 Web Design
http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk

Family Day Out UK
http://www.familydayoutuk.co.uk

The only place you need for a great family day out!

 

[Cornish Steve]

Steve,

I've visited the site and agree with Rob that ideally the results should be made available once the quiz has been completed. Asking the visitor to part with their personal informatin without seeing one question doesn't really encourage sign ups.

This being said your problem is the number of 'discrepancies' afterwards - do you find the questions that are being asked are the same, or that the reason people are scoring low is because of the same reasons. If so you could add a FAQ section to the results screen so they can see the main reasons for lower than expected results.

Capturing the email addresses is going to be very useful now and I would certainly carry on with the replying because you may not be finding the benefits now, but over time as email addresses begin to grow - hopefully so will the course takers.

Hope this helps,
Dean
C2 Web Design
http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk

Family Day out UK
http://www.familydayoutuk.co.uk

The only place you need for a great family day out!

Dean,

Thanks for taking the time to look into this aspect of our website. I must say that I am impressed with how kind people have been in the last several days. It is certainly encouraging me to spend time reading the posts of others and to consider how I can help them in return (which, I'm sure, is the whole point of this forum).

I'd like to continue the discussion on a couple of points. Should we reveal the correct answers to questions at our site? Certainly, the course management system allows us to do that. The reason we don't is that we offer prizes (a free pass to one of our courses) to those quiz-takers who obtain the highest score each month. If we publish answers to one person, they could pass along those answers to a friend or colleague and undermine the process. This is an interesting dilemma. Which is more important: the incentive of a prize, or more immediate gratification (i.e., answers)?

I think your idea of a FAQ section is a good one and it might resolve the dilemma. We can provide some explanations without giving away specific answers - and hence we would maintain the integrity of our quiz. This prompted me to think of another idea. As an experiment, I have made sample course material available to quiz-takers (they have to register at our site to see it though). Let's see how this changes the dynamic of the quiz. If it goes well, we could make this material more generally available at the website.

Steve
www.goldctr.com

 

[Cornish Steve]

Based on your feedback, we decided to revamp the free quiz. I'd really appreciate your comments on the new version. We made the following changes:

- Access to the quiz is less convoluted.
- There is no registration process up-front.
- The format of the quiz is more straightforward.

We do still ask for an email address, but the request is at the end of the quiz and no longer at the beginning. We are already seeing better results and obtaining those all-important email addresses, so thanks for contributing to our success.