How to Use Quizzes to Generate More Leads with Josh Haynman from Try Interact

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Welcome to Inbound Agency Journey. This is the show where inbound agency leaders share the strategies, shortcomings and successes they've experienced in their journey toward building their dream agency. Now here are your hosts, Andrew and Gray.

Alright, guys, welcome back to Inbound Agency Journey. This week we are super excited to talk to Josh Heyman from tryinteract.com Josh, why don't you just kind of give us a little bit of a background on your story, how you got to be where you are today and just introduce yourself to the listeners.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. In terms of how I got to where I am, I've been doing entrepreneurial stuff for a long time, actually since like 14, 15 years old in high school. Started off mowing lawns, you know, just going down the street, spreading out flyers and starting my own business rather than going to get a job for somebody else. That morphed into a variety of, you know, odd, odd jobs, but in the entrepreneurial sense. So, you know, buying and selling things, you know, whatever I could do to make cash. And that kind of progressed all the way through my college years. There was a point in college where I kind of hit a dry spell in terms of ideas for products and services that were my own business but had a bit of a network by that point. I actually got into doing web design stuff, building client websites. We worked with all sorts of people, like sales gurus, coaches, naturopathic doctors, all kinds of stuff like that. All over the board, really. We were building entire websites for people. These were not huge budgets, but decent size web design budgets. And it was really interesting building these websites because we would put in all this work and all this effort to make these sites look super nice and have all these great pages. At the end of the day, all any of the clients cared about was building their email list. It was always a bit frustrating because we'd make all these great designs, we'd come up with these cool animations, like all this awesome stuff and they're like, okay, so how do I get more emails? So one of the things that we tried, because we would try all these different things to help our clients get more emails from their sites. One of the things we tried was interactive quizzes. So on a doctor's website, well, not a doctor's website, but like a naturopathic doctor, like how healthy is your lifestyle Quiz? On the site, you answer the questions. At the end of the questions, you got to put in your email to see how healthy your lifestyle is and then that goes to that doctor's. Email list that started working really well. Realistically, we weren't super great at managing clients. We were much better at building products. My little team that I was working with, we decided to take that one little element that was working super well across the board, which was these interactive quizzes, and then turn that into a productized platform over time. And that's exactly what we did. And that's how it was born out of just trial and error and realizing that this thing worked really well for building email lists and that's what people really care about. So that's kind of how Interact was born. And now we have over 30,000 brands using it to build their own quizzes on the platform. And we've generated, we just hit 4 million leads that we've generated for our clients last week actually. So things have been going well.

Congratulations. That's a cool milestone, man.

Yeah, it was really exciting. It was really exciting.

What is before we jump into some application here, because if you're listening, we're going to go into how you can leverage some of these tactics, these quizzes for yourself, for your clients. But I'm just curious, Josh, on your entrepreneur story, what was the transition like for you guys going from agency life to more of a SaaS product based business? How did that transition go? Was it a smooth one for you? Were there bumps along the way?

Yeah, I mean it definitely was not super smooth. I mean, it's hard to go from agency where clients are paying you consistently, you've got retainers going, you meet with people every week and they're going to pay you as long as you show up and you keep doing good jobs. Going from that to a product where you're trying to get people to subscribe and pay you on a monthly basis and you have to have all these features before they pay you. Whereas with an agency it's like a lot of times a lot of the payment comes before you end up building this stuff because you're in the planning phase and stuff like that. It's totally different with a product because nobody's going to pay you unless your product works. And it works really well and it has all these features that they want. It is really tough. It took really about a year to fully go through that transition. Along the way, what we actually did was built quizzes sort of as an agency, but like as a one off thing kind of using our platform, but mostly doing them one at a time. So we would get somebody to pay us to do a quiz. We'd build it kind of using Our platform backbone, but mostly having to do it all from scratch. And we would take what we learned from that and then build it into the platform slowly. So the platform kind of evolved as we were going until it got to a point where it was literally able to do the same thing that we were doing when we were building those quizzes as an agency for a particular client. But you could do it all by yourself in the platform. That was actually really helpful because you're able to do all these things that people are requesting and that are important to clients and stuff like that with the platform because we built it to emulate what we were doing, you know, on a one off basis.

That is really cool. So the whole not only is the idea born out of pain and then also the solution to that pain, but then you grow and nurture and I guess groom the platform as you go by actually applying it out. That's really cool. So agency folks who are listening if they want to start, if they've never done a quiz before in their life, but they've seen them all over Buzzfeed, if I'm in a B2B space or if I'm in some space where I don't think of quizzes right away, can you walk us through like a little bit of a coaching call here? How would you begin to leverage quizzes into more of a boring industry or something like that?

Yeah, and this is actually a giant question that everybody struggles with across the board. I mean, from your salesforce to your Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, like to all these brands have the same struggle. Regardless of how fun or how boring the industry is. The number one thing that people are really, really getting caught on is what do I do? Like what kind of quiz do I make? Because the mental connection is tough, right? Like you see these cool, fun things on buzzfeed, you've probably taken them, if you're being honest and now you're trying to think about how do I formulate that for this particular brand. And so coming from where we came from and understanding these struggles and how it's so hard to think about these things as a brand. What we did with our product was we actually built a bunch of pre made quizzes for virtually every industry. We have like 50 industry categories. And so our process for an agency coming on and building a quiz for a client is you sign up, then you can search through all of these different pre made quizzes by industry so you can check the industries you want to look at. Then once you select an industry, you can sort them by conversion rate. So what's the highest converting quiz in the automotive industry? For example? Grab that pre made quiz, modify whatever parts of it you want, change the style to match your brand because obviously that's massively important and then launch it so you don't have to go through that whole process of thinking about what in the world is going to work for an automotive brand, what is going to work for a cloud technology company, what's going to work for a T brand. All these things are very difficult to think about because it's a very tough mental connection between I've seen these and I know how to build one. We just took that whole part out and even if we don't have something that matches exactly, you know, what seems to make sense for the brand, it's at least a good starting place to kind of spur those ideas. So if we don't have something that matches exactly what you want, at least it gives you like, oh, this is the type of thing that works for this industry. I can do something similar. So we basically have like, you know, an internal think tank almost that creates these quizzes based on like what is actually working really well. And then we sort them out by industry so you can just see exactly what you should do.

That's cool. So it's got almost like a leadpages example there where you get like all the, all the template landing pages and conversion rate to sort them all. I think that's, that's gonna be awesome to help someone who's like, if they've never tried it out before they can at least see once you have a model like you can always emulate off of that model and I think that helps like people wrap their mind around what they're trying to do as like an exercise. So that's cool. So from your, from marketing strategy standpoint I could see a quiz is a good way to get someone to convert from an anonymous visitor into a lead. Now what are some ways that agencies could think about the follow up off of that? I'm thinking like segmentation. Are you using the answers to the quizzes at all to customize information that you're sharing with them? Can you walk us through kind of the next level once they have opted in? What does that continuation of the customer journey look like?

Yeah, absolutely. Really good question and there's a lot you can do with it. The most common use case is to connect it up to your email marketing program and we have direct integrations with all of them and basically map a quiz outcome to an automation sequence. So for example, if you're saying what type of coffee is right for you and you have light, medium, dark roast, you can have a different automation sequence. Go out to light, medium and dark roast. Now we also have integrations with email marketing programs where you can send individual quiz question answers over to the program and use those to trigger a sequence. So the use case for that would be, let's say one of your questions is, how big is your email list currently? Like you're an agency, you want to know like how big the email list is. And maybe this is part of like a quiz, like what's the best marketing strategy for your brand? Right. And one of the questions is, how big is your email list? You could actually use the answer to that question to fire off a different sequence depending on how big that person's email list is. So if it's zero, like I'm just getting started, you can have one sequence. If it's less than 100, you can have another one, less than 1,000, another one, less than 10,000, another one. So you can actually segment out based on an individual question, which is really powerful because people are going to answer these questions because they want to know what their outcome is. And you can use that very pertinent information to then segment that audience, send appropriate responses. And even if it's just like a one off email, that's like, here's how to get started, something like that, it's still super powerful. And all the email marketing metrics, as I'm sure you're up with, show that personalized emails based on customer data that they've given you, get at least 2x the engagement in terms of opens and clicks and follow throughs as generic stuff. So being able to reference all that information is really important.

Yeah, that's huge. So you can segment out, like take a big bucket of who your audience would be, who's converting, draw it down into smaller segments, and then share with them the personalized experience that they're looking for. Yeah, I mean, like with inbound agencies, we're always trying to think about how do we create kind of that Netflix feel or that Amazon feel for our, for our clients and their customers. And this seems like a great way to kind of gather that initial demographic information and something that's like, way less intimidating than like a, an eight field form on a piece of like PDF content. So that's pretty cool. Do you, I see you guys, you guys also offer like, I see quizzes, assessments, giveaways. Can you kind of give us a breakdown, like what are the key differences between those three and how people could use different applications to accomplish different goals?

Yeah, absolutely. So quizzes are typically what you think of on BuzzFeed and what you see on Facebook all the time. The what color are you, what's your style? Stuff like that. Right. Those work super well for a lot of B2C brands, retail, automotive, all that kind of stuff. Assessments are more like a multiple choice quiz where each question actually has a correct answer. So use case for that would be something like how much do you know about Manchester United? Or how much do you know the cloud? Or how much do you know about the Internet of things? If you're in more of a B2B space and each question has a correct answer, you can give feedback to people as they're progressing through that assessment and show them which ones are getting right, which ones are getting wrong, give them an explanation, all that kind of stuff, and then the outcomes are based on how many questions they get right. So that's more of a test, but you can still keep it fun. And then a giveaway is what you'd think of when you're talking about sweepstakes. If you're giving away a gift card or a free consultation, something like that, people can enter with their email. They can gain additional entries by sharing that giveaway and spreading it. Then you can send specific follow ups to people that entered through the giveaway so they're all going to be tagged by which giveaway they entered. So you can send follow up sequence to them. And then it also integrates with all your email marketing stuff. So it's an additional tool for capturing new emails through social and other channels like that.

That's an awesome overview. I guess like the last focus here is, you know, talking to agencies. Do you have any tips, tricks or insight into how agencies can start to leverage this kind of a tactic as part of their service offering? You know, how do I, if this is just an idea, how do I take it to market, get paid for it like you guys did at your agency and use this to help, you know, start closing more leads?

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And just to clarify, you talking about, you know, agencies using this to market themselves or using it for clients?

Well, I guess it's a two part question that my initial, my initial thought or question here is how do I take this concept and bundle it into a service that I'm selling?

Yeah, definitely, definitely. So I think it really depends on what your client's goals are. Right. So with a lot of agencies that we work with, client Goals have to do with growing email lists and social metrics, things like that. So gaining following quizzes are excellent at doing both of those things. So helping you grow a list and also helping you expand your social reach. So in terms of packaging it in, quizzes are also really hot. And most people know about them at this point. They've at least seen them. And so the concept is, here's a new thing that you can do to build up your email list and grow your social following using these quizzes that are just like the ones you see all the time on Facebook, but except for it being some random brand or buzzfeed that's making this quiz, it's going to be your brand and it's going to be branded with your branding. It's going to look like your site, it's going to have all of your stuff in it, but it's still going to harness the power of those just for fun quizzes. So you're going to be able to take advantage of what's super hot right now in the market on social media and use it for your brand to grow your following. And that's really the angle that perks people up is when they get to use the same concept, the same tool that people are loving in general to grow their own company. So that's really the angle that you want to go at it with. Yeah. So that's what really resonates with people.

Awesome. And now if people are fired up about this, they want to get started. You guys have an agency program that I'm pretty sure is relatively new. Would you mind giving us an overview on how you guys are equipping agencies to help service clients using this strategy?

Yeah. Yeah. So we have the ability to let agencies kind of go about this the way that they want to go about it. So if you want to fully manage everything and just send packaged up quizzes to clients from your account, you can do that and then you can charge them whatever you want for each of those, but you still get to control everything. You can also set up individual accounts for each client, all within one agency account. And then the advantage of doing it that way is you can let them log in and kind of see the backbone of it and how it all works. So it really depends on what kind of clients you have, whether they're the type that want to be involved with everything or they really don't care. They just want to see the end product. Whatever you prefer as an agency, we have a setup for you. The other thing that's really great about our platform is that it's usually month to month. Let's say you're doing a quiz for one client for three months and then you have nothing for the next six, and then you want to come back for two months. We understand that that's a very common thing with agenc. So it's developed to be like that. And then all of the stuff that was in your account still saved. So it's not like you're going to lose everything if you turn it off for a few months. So it's really designed to be flexible in every way possible so that you can service your clients and then each quiz or giveaway or assessment that you build can be branded completely uniquely. So you could have 50 clients that you're servicing within one account and each of their quizzes or giveaways looks completely different. And it's branded and it's got the logo and everything for each client and you're just managing all of that for them. So it really allows you to fully manage everything, but also give everybody the unique experience that they are going to want to see as a brand.

And if just as a closing note here, if anyone wants to learn more information or wants to kind of follow up off of this, what's the best way for them to reach out to you guys?

Yeah, so you can reach out to me directly. Always happy to chat with agencies. I'm joshryinteract.com so that's t r y interact.com we also do have a free tier. You can play around with it on our software. So you can just kind of see how everything works. And that's just try interact.com and we have customer success people that you can engage with there as well if you want to just, you know, start up a conversation with them.

Perfect. Well, Josh, thanks so much for coming on. You shared some great insight. I know I got notes scribbled down here, so I really appreciate the thoughts, the time. And guys, if you want to learn anything more about how you can start leveraging quizzes, assessments, giveaways for your clients, head over to try interact.com or just shoot Josh an email. Josh, thanks for your time, man.

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to Inbound Agency Journey. You can find the show's notes for Today's episode@doinbound.com podcast. Again, that's doinboundalloneword.com podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, head over to itunes to subscribe or leave us a review of the show. Until next time, Remember, life is a journey keep moving forward, Sam.