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 a US company to comply with GDPR or can they just ignore it?

Alex 4:58
It’s, of course, very important for US companies, because we have two ways in which the GDPR applies to you as an US company.

On the one hand, we have the geographical scope of the GDPR. So, that means we have two principles: the establishment and the marketplace principles.

The establishment principle means that the GDPR applies whenever the data processing body has at least one establishment in the EU. So, if you process your European data in at least one branch office, you’re under under the control of the GDPR. In conclusion, you shouldn’t care about being a non-EU business because you’re this or that way. ...

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 leads into the next question. We’ve covered questions. Now how many answers? Should you have per question?

Boris 3:18
I would say four answer options is what people expect to have. There’s an additional benefit in having four if you use images, for example, it makes a nice 2×2 grid for the answer options. But four is what you see in most common multiple choice tests and quizzes – one correct and three wrong answers. So I would always try to stick to four if possible.

Mike 3:42
Yes, I absolutely agree. And there’s another benefit as well. Generally, 50 to 60% of your quiz takers will be on a smartphone. The fewer answer options you have, the more condensed your quiz will be. It’ll stay nicely on one screen.

Contr...

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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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 that, I thought, “Well wait, a lot of people identify as serial marketers. No one uses that term. Then I Googled it – and saw, right, barely any search results associated with it so there’s something thing to it.

And then I got to this point where I wrapped up this engagement with StoryHunter, this video production marketplace and in July of 2018, I started the community with a LinkedIn post. Yeah, I thought slack was the right place to try this then, like “Slack for business professionals”.

It was still very unusual for those outside of the startup community to have a Slack account. But it seemed like it was in that right place and something that you can customize a lot more than the Google, Facebook and then Li...

Marketing maestro Merilyn Beretta shares how her quiz marketing funnel has generated a jaw-dropping 86% opt-in rate for her ‘Lead Your Day’ online learning academy. It demonstrates how a great product matched up with an insightful quiz helped grow her revenue by 500% – boom!

Check out her website at https://merilyn.com.

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Transcript

Mike 0:02
Welcome, everybody to this episode of “The Quiz Makers” podcast. And I am really flattered and honored to have as our guest today, Merilyn (I’m going mispronounce your name, but it’s just a cool name that I have to try it) Beretta.

You’re a happy customer of riddle and obviously really big into quizzes and marketing. And, frankly, you do so much in the entrepreneurial space, I think it’s better just to let you introduce yourself.

Merilyn 0:33
Sure. And as you can tell by my Australian accent, I’m not Italian... I married into an Italian family years ago. And yes, those guys are listening and it’s spelt like the gun. Guys think that’s really cool, but girls have no idea. They think it’s a ham, which is actually a ham brand.

Anyway, so back to the question. Yes, I have a personal brand – I’m a coach and a trainer. As an educator at heart, I have an education and coaching business for women entrepreneurs.

Mike 1:09
Fantastic and when did you start the business? And then it kind of a segue, how did that get you into quiz marketing?

Merilyn 1:16
Well, interesting enough, I did years and years decades and decades in corporate and various roles.

Then I moved home after living in England for many years – and I moved home to Australia. I was still self employed with number of clients but more of a consulting role doing different things from brand architecture to strategic director, marketing... I was a bit of a sort of a Jill of all trades.

So when I had in my heart to start my own brand, I always wanted to teach online and reach a wider audience. In the past, I was that sort of person that was thrown into businesses to sort of fix things? So when we started online with zero, literally zero audience, what do you do?

I actually started late – I was a little bit older and I only started just about just over three years ago. So not long at all. And I started with creating some online courses. And it’s interesting that I started right from the start with quizzes.

So I learned how to do quizzes, with customer segments, buckets and different categories, which was right up my alley, because for decades I have taught personality profiling.

I think it was the training and learning development person in me, but I’d always naturally categorize people – not to stereotype them, but to understand them.

Mike 2:57
Imagining which broad buckets they fell into...

Merilyn 3:00
Yes. And so I knew I wanted to start some sort of quiz because I thought that they were really cool and fun to do. I actually stumbled across the careers quiz that I’ve got now – I actually started with sort of a course on life direction.

I spent a lot of time doing surveys online and so I have hundreds of thousands of data points. And I actually discovered that the core motivation of what entrepreneurial direction to take fell into four buckets or categories.

So I looked at them and I thought, “Oh my gosh, they relate completely to the person to the broad personality types I’ve been teaching for decades!”.

So it morphed into what I’ve got now – which is my “Wow archetype”. I’m a bit tongue in cheek – I love being a little bit corny, but it’s memorable and everyone loves it. So my “Wow archetype” really focuses on the four core motives of different personalities.

I use it as an icebreaker but I also use it to actually target the different results. It really does work to categorize my people like that and we have a lot of fun with it.

Mike 4:19
With four archetypes or segments, that actually lends itself to personality tests because there are four broad areas that you can say “Here’s a broad area, I think you fall into...”

Merilyn 4:32
And what people love about mine is it’s easy...

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 launching The Hair Fuel at the time. I thought, “I’m willingly giving so much information to that business. And then I’m getting value back.”

So that was a very interesting proposition. Because I’m a strong believer of providing value for people first – if it is the right value, then people will come back, they will ask more questions, they might buy your product – or they might not. That’s not necessarily the point at the quiz stage.

And how I found Riddle specifically? You might have to thank your SEO person – because I googled for software, and found one of the review websites and it sounded pretty simple to implement – pretty straightforward. So I just decided to give it a go and you ...