How to Sell Courses With Quizzes
Quizzes and courses are a match made in heaven.
Not just because their syllables roll nicely together off the tongue. (Though they really do sing in perfect harmony—try saying “quizzes and courses” ten times fast. You’ll run out of breath sooner than you’ll get tongue-tied.)
Courses and quizzes are a perfect match because quizzes:
Convert cold leads into toasty-warm prospects
Take your leads on a fun and engaging self-explorative adventure
Make your lead feel “matched” to your offer in a way that feels much deeper than just clicking an ad
Prime your leads to see how your course could totally change their lives
Capture email addresses so you can keep pitching your offer, even if your leads aren’t ready to fully commit yet
Though our team at Persuasion Maven eats, sleeps, and breathes quizzes, we still get a little pitter-patter of excitement in our chests every time we see a Transformation Quiz convert at 50%.
Think those results are an anomaly? Not even!
We’ve helped our clients use quizzes to mani-pedi the course-selling game with 30-60% conversion rates.
Ready to grab a hold of those same wish-upon-a-star amazing conversion rates to help sell your next course?
Let’s break down the step-by-step process for skyrocketing your course sales with a quiz.
Step One: Develop Your Offer
It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to change the world with one stellar course offer or have a website loaded with course landing pages: quizzes are a powerful tool in your marketing toolkit.
If you’ve got a million course offerings ready and waiting for some hot prospects to snatch them up (okay, maybe not a million, but more than one or two), then you’re going to want to narrow your scope.
Writing a hard-to-forget, high-converting quiz is all about successfully playing matchmaker.
Your ultimate goal is to connect each lead to a results page that just “gets” who they are, what they need, and what they’ve been looking for.
Choosing 3-5 offers that appeal to different segments of your audience will help you hit the high-converting sweet spot.
Each of these course offers will ultimately become the leading lady of a different results page. By sticking to 3-5, you’re making sure that you can match your different leads to the course that fits their needs—without spreading things so thin that it becomes almost impossible to accurately connect each lead to the right results page.
If you’re ready to build your quiz around one stellar course offer that you’ll pitch to all of your leads, it’s time to get creative.
You’re still going to need to hit that high-converting sweet spot with 3-5 different results pages. That means brainstorming ways to segment your audience into different “buckets.”
In the quiz-building game, “buckets” are groups that we segment our audience into based on shared characteristics, traits, interests, needs, demographics, etc.
Each “bucket” will be directed to a different, made-just-for-them results page.
For instance, the go-to-gal for teaching tech professionals how to use a new and complicated software might build a quiz pitching her “How to Use This Software, A to Z” course to three different demographics: those brand-new to the tech industry, those who have been in the tech game for 10 years or more, and those who are seasoned tech pros.
With one simple, well-phrased question on her quiz (“How long have you been in the tech industry?”), she’ll be able to easily match them to a results page that makes them feel “seen”—and pitch her course while she’s at it.
Step Two: Build a Transformation Coach Quiz
You’re a course creator, so you know how powerfully transformative courses can be.
Transformation Quizzes give your leads a taste of the transformation that your course can offer by reflecting back the struggles, blindspots, and frustrations of where they are now—and offering them a look into the totally-achievable new reality they can enter with the help of your course.
Our tech software guru could guide her leads through a series of quiz questions that explore the biggest frustrations and pain points they face as industry pros who aren’t loaded with the software knowledge they need to really shine.
Once they’ve told her all about their biggest pain points—feeling lost and confused when talking to colleagues, not being able to participate fully on big projects, feeling “not qualified enough” for a new promotion—she can offer them a results page that shows exactly how life can be different.
She can offer a glimpse into a totally-possible reality where they…
Become solution-driven instead of software-lost.
No longer sit on the sidelines in development meetings, listening to their colleagues offer game-changing solutions while they stay silent.
Know all the inside lingo that will impress their bosses over business lunches and make speaking up—and driving new development solutions—a breeze.
Snag the promotions they know they deserve, because they’re loaded with the expertise they need to take their company to the next level.
When your leads aren’t just being told about the transformation that your course is offering but are seeing its outcomes in action…that’s what really primes them to buy.
When you’re ready to start building your Transformation Coach quiz, check out our post “Quiz Tutorial: Start Building Your Lead-Converting Quiz in Six Steps” and “Everything You Need to Build a High-Converting Quiz Funnel.”
Step Three: Create Your Email Funnel
Your quiz is the magnet that draws leads in, but your email funnel is what takes your leads from “Point A” to “Point Buyer.”
You could have the most well-written, engaging, hard-to-forget quiz on the internet, but if you don’t follow up with your leads through an email sequence, you could miss out on thousands of dollars in sales.
That’s because there’s one very important thing that email funnels offer that quizzes can’t: time.
With an email series of 5-10 emails, you have plenty of time to turn up the heat and take your leads from “cold” to “customer.”
When writing your email funnel, it’s important to balance your hard pitches with education-driven, super-valuable content.
You want to give your leads a taste of the expertise you bring to the table—which means previewing some of the content that they’ll discover once they buy your course—and continue to help them overcome any of their buying objections by foreshadowing the totally-achievable new reality your course helps them enter.
As they took your quiz, your leads gave you a look into the conversation inside their head. With your email funnel, you get to join in that conversation.
Being in full conversation with your prospects…now that’s a powerful position.