Lead magnets are a great way to build your prospect list. But is it the best way to get a lead? I decided to investigate LeadQuizzes, a cool SaaS company, and interview its founder, Jeremy Ellens.

He’s discovered what I’ve already witnessed over the past five years. General eBooks and reports aren’t generating the same amount of leads as they did before. You have to nail a specific pain point or deep desire of your target market.

Lead magnets (an eBook, tip sheet, or special report) take time to create. And they also represent yet another addition to “information overload.”

But quizzes are fun. They’re usually short and can give you insights quickly. People love to learn something new about themselves, especially if it has to do with achieving a specific goal like losing weight, finding love, or becoming wealthy.

Jeremy was kind enough to answer my questions and of course, now I want to create my own quiz (so make sure to visit again). Without further ado, here’s the interview:

When you were a small boy, what did you want to be when you grew up? Were you an entrepreneur with a lemonade stand or another money-making idea?

When I was young, I wanted to sell candy to kids on the bus but my mom didn’t like the idea. I spent 6th – 12th grade really focused on playing the saxophone. I got pretty good and eventually went on to play in ensembles like the University of Michigan’s Youth Band, Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Civic Youth Ensemble, and ultimately went to college to study music.

I studied music for one year before deciding I didn’t want to make that my career. I didn’t want to be another broke musician and most of the music we played I didn’t think had mass appeal to a large market. It didn’t make sense to me. If most people can’t enjoy my music, then why am I playing it

If you weren’t always an entrepreneur, how did it develop?

I had a general interest in business so I started attending entrepreneur meetups at Arizona State. I read books like The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss and I listened to podcasts like Mixergy.

After hearing some amazing stories, I really liked the idea of starting my own business and felt inspired that I could do it myself.

I tried starting a few different businesses in college like a website that helped college kids learn chemistry, a blog that earned money from Adsense, and a veterinary app that helped vets diagnose animals.

The latter idea I was able to win a $10,000 award through the Edson program at ASU and that gave me the confidence to quit my job and go full time into entrepreneurship!

You were very entrepreneurial in college when you started Yazamo and I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes within web design best practices. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen over the last ten years?

I graduated from college in 2012, so since then, there have been a few things that have become a lot more popular.

Responsive design was cutting edge back then and now it’s widely adopted. Back then, most companies just needed a website and didn’t really focus on marketing. Since then, lead capture, funnels, and marketing automating have really taken off as strategies tied to web development.

What caused you to think that quizzes would be the key to unlock marketing growth for business websites? Did you have a “Eureka!” moment and if so, describe it.

Yes, our agency had a client that was a hormone doctor. She wanted to become a best-selling author but needed to build an audience. We built a hormone quiz, advertised it on Facebook and helped her build an email list of over 35,000 people in six months at less than $0.20 a lead, which was very cheap.

This was one area we felt in our agency experience that felt easy and focused on something very important, which was building an audience on an ‘owned’ platform like email.

What are some of the things you know now that you wished you knew when you first started?

I wish I would have focused more on creating the right business model from the beginning. I think we got to where we are because we constantly iterated on what worked and what didn’t but if I were to start over, I would try to incorporate some of the following business models from the beginning:

1. Take control of your destiny and focus on generating your own leads outside of referrals and networking.
2. Have a large number of clients pay you less instead of relying on a few that pay you a lot.
3. Grow traffic through SEO. It compounds every month and is one of the cheapest acquisition sources when you get it working.
4. Create recurring revenue in your business.
5. Make sure you have a scalable business where you aren’t forever exchanging hours for dollars.

How did you find clients? (Always a fave topic for freelancers!) Have you used primarily online tactics or do you use offline tactics as well, such as direct mail?

Originally we were trapped in the mode of relying on referrals and networking. We were stuck taking on whatever clients we could get and our revenue yo-yo’ed.

We did however finally figure it out. We grew our marketing agency to over $720,000 in annual revenue using the following lead generation tactics described in detail in this article.

1. Created an email list and made offers to it
2. Referrals
3. Cold outreach
4. Using a quiz to capture leads from Facebook advertising and our own website traffic

Quizzes are always fun to take because they often give clarity and focus to the person taking the quiz. But for businesses, how do they begin to think of creating a good quiz? Where would they start?

You need to begin with the end in mind. What do you want someone to do? Buy a product? Schedule a call? Come in for a consultation?

Once you figure that out, you can brainstorm a catchy topic that helps your audience answer a question or solves a problem. For instance, the hormone doctor we worked with called out symptoms people were experiencing like fatigue, said it might be a symptom of hormone imbalance and then gave a quiz to help them figure out if that was really a possibility.

After they took the quiz and opted in for the result, you can then educate them personally on what to do and lead them to your solution and next step – whether that is a consultation call, product sale, etc.

Here’s a great guide if you want to write a quiz to capture leads for your own business!

What makes an effective quiz for generating leads?

There are a lot of reasons quizzes are effective but the number one is that it gets users engaged.

Think about when you talk with someone in person… no one wants to listen to you talk the whole time, they want to participate in the conversation.

Generally, most websites just shout out you and don’t get you engaged in a conversation. With a quiz, they give you answers because they think you will be able to help them with a personalized response.

For that reason, we’ve seen lead capture rates increase on websites by as much as 500%. Additionally, when you have higher engagement with paid advertisements, you get rewarded with cheaper lead costs. For example,  Goth Rider, an  e-commerce company generated over 75,000 leads profitably using a quiz with Facebook for $0.04 per lead.

These are both extreme results but they paint the picture of what’s possible when you play into this psychology.

Is there a standard length for quizzes?

I’ve seen all types of quizzes do well so I don’t think one size fits all but generally, I advise quizzes that are 8-10 questions do well so this is a great place to start. It’s not so long that you lose their attention but it’s not so short that they think the results will be meaningless.

What question do you wish I asked that you’d like to really answer? :-)

What is your favorite podcast? :)

Very early on in our business, our goal was to get to seven figures in revenue. The way we ultimately got there was by finding mentors and learning from others that had done that.

For that reason, we created our podcast, Journey to 7 Figures to give back, where we interview 7+ figure entrepreneurs on how they got there and the tactics and mindset that accelerated their growth.

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Thanks for sharing your insights, Jeremy! If you want to check out LeadQuizzes, please visit the links above.  Especially that great article, “How We Grew Our Marketing Agency To $720,000 Selling Quizzes.”