Podcast Episodes – The Quizmakers

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.

Transcript

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...

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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Transcript

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 le...

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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Transcript

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 a...

Discover how fast-growing Hair Fuel uses quizzes to find, segment, and convert new customers for their critically-acclaimed hair care products.

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between.

We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets. Plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling a successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Okay, welcome, everyone – I’m really excited to have as our guest in this episode, Laura Sagen. Laura is just a bonafide, bonafide quiz geek – she is doing something really incredible with her business, which I will let her talk about, but she is the founder and CEO of The Hair Fuel.

So I’m going to toss it over to you, Laura.

Laura 1:00
Thanks, Mike. Super excited to be on your podcast. I mean, you and I’ve been in touch multiple times over the almost two years since I started using the software.

So a little bit about The Hair Fuel. It is an all-natural subscription-based hair growth mask that gets delivered every month at our customers’ doors. And like I said, it’s completely all natural safe for pregnant and and young mothers – it doesn’t have any sort of nasty, weird chemicals in it.

I often joke, it’s so safe that you can eat it. Don’t do it though – it tastes absolutely appalling. Because I know the ingredients, it’s definitely safe. And so, that’s basically the gist of it.

Mike 1:44
Perfect. Well, I have to ask, just for people who are just listening to us (vs. watching on YouTube), you’re not going to see my shiny dome, but I am somewhat follicly-challenged. So I’m guessing The Hair Fuel will have no value to me whatsoever.

Laura 1:58
Ah, but I think you’re wrong. It’s not that I think – it’s that I know. I think it can be a whole different podcast episode on that, but the logic is that our target audiences both male and female. As the first step, we decided to target females because this kind of notional self care and applying a mask on scalp is something that is a little bit more female-friendly. Females tend to be a little bit more friendly towards that entire notion. Males tend to expect just to pop a pill. But yes, it works both for for men and women is just for men because of androgens involved.

Mike 2:52
That’s fair enough. So actually, Laura, as you mentioned, you’ve been using Riddle (which is our quiz maker software) for about two years.

What was your marketing problem? What were you looking for and why did you find us? And hopefully, hopefully, fingers crossed... how are we helping?

Laura 3:11
So how did we even come across the whole idea for quizzes? First, a little sidestep is that I came across quizzes with some sort of business coaching website. And it asked “What kind of enterpreneur or something are you?”

It was a such a good quiz. I don’t know what software they used. But it was a really, really good quiz.

Because the questions, they were interesting to answer, and then offered the value that I was getting afterward. So, the drip marketing was very valuable to me.

And also on the back of it, I was working on on la...

Serial Marketer and former CMO of Publicis MRY David Berkwitz shares how he built up a thriving invite-only 1500+ member Slack community for his marketing consultancy serialmarketer.com

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Links

Find out more about Serial Marketers and join the Slack community here.

Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story... the highs (and the lows!) of scaling his successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Boris 0:34
Hello, and welcome to The Quiz Makers podcast. Our guest today is David Berkovitz. David was the former CMO of MRY, a huge marketing agency and has now moved to running his own company – Serial Marketers. Hello, David, thanks for joining us in the podcast!

David 0:52
Thanks for having me Boris. It’s great to be here.

Boris 0:55
David, the first question that I’ve actually always wanted to ask you and never gotten around to somehow.

Just how did you decide to move from being a big corporate CMO? You know, that’s a very well respected job at a huge company to being self employed. That’s a huge step.

David 1:14
Yeah, it’s a it’s a big step. And and some of it wasn’t entirely the plan.

Look life within Pubicis was a wonderful experience. So with the team and MRY, they’re kept shifting, like the organization, kept drifting considerably within Publicis. And so ultimately, they needed to step back from what they were marketing and kind of retrench. And then as I was taking some time off, there were just a lot of the companies I was initially talking to on the tech and product side.

Then I thought – let’s start doing some consulting... then in that four year span I’ve gone in and out of some of these in-house roles, but all of them have been a lot scrappier; it’s been fun being in the this building mode. And really, across the board, I’ve just been just been attracted to these entrepreneurial roles.

So that part has stayed fairly consistent. And a lot of it is even at MRY. We didn’t have a CMO before I joined, right so there was still room to just create things and build. It’s really appealing to track it, you know, going over to that startup front and having those as most of my clients day to day.

Boris 2:46
So but instead of going the usual route where you got to know a lot of people in your previous roles and you then set up consulting gigs.

You went a slightly different route as well. You started with a small Slack channel, I guess to keep in touch with people – which has now grown into a huge and thriving community of well over 1000 members.

Tell me about how that how that ideas started to build that community and how you manage to grow with that fast.

David 3:18
Well, the idea started pretty much the day I left MRY. It’s all very connected because I was I was going to be speaking at an event and after that transition, I wanted a company name associated with. (There’s a bigger sort of back story on the company name itself serial marketer.)

Once I decided on...