5 Things You Need to Know If You Collect Data Using Quizzes

Online quizzes are not only a way to engage your audience or generate leads – they are also a valuable source of information about your customers. If you collect data using quizzes, results can be even more effective than info coming from classic surveys. Quizzes can be more helpful in gathering data about people’s behavior, personal preferences, and more intimate impulses.

However, if you want to acquire this often highly-sensitive information and draw conclusions from it, there are specific rules you need to follow. The first group of those rules refers to the scientific methodology of this form of research and the second group refers to legal regulation.

Before we move on to the important details about the ways to collect data using quizzes, it is essential that we differentiate between several types of these questionnaires and the information you can gather using them.

1. The Differences

• Personality quiz

This type of quiz has been used for decades by psychologists and human resources managers – if administered properly, it can give you a great insight into the way your customers are reasoning and making decisions.

The results can come in various forms – they are usually segmented into groups with similar characteristics. You can use it to find out what your customers like, what their habits are, how they decide to purchase a product, etc.

• Scored survey

This type of questionnaire lingers somewhere between a quiz and survey – but in this case, you can quantify the result based on your own metrics and needs.  For example, you can use it to determine the quality of a lead.

• Survey

You can use surveys to collect opinions and feedback from your customers or audience. For example, you can use it to find out how old your customers are, what their education level is, what they think about your product, and how all these elements interact with each other when it comes to the customer’s opinion about your business.

• Test quiz

This type of quiz can help you test the user’s knowledge about the certain topic, and it differentiates from the personality quiz by having answers that are correct or false.

You can use it to test your products or services. For example, if you are selling a language learning software, a test quiz is a valuable insight into its effectiveness. 

2. The Advantages

Now that you understand these differences, let’s see why online questionnaires are slowly replacing traditional surveys on paper and via telephone.

• Fast, simple and cheap

There are no printing or distribution expenses when you conduct your survey online.  With software such as LeadQuizzes, which has a variety of pre-designed templates and an intuitive drag&drop menu, creating an interesting and appealing questionnaire has never been easier.

You can make dozens of surveys and quizzes in one day, adjusting them to your needs, goals and potential respondents.

Quiz in content builder menu

• Dynamic interaction

There are so many ways to design your survey or quiz. First of all, the link to your questionnaire no longer has to be a mushy assemblage of letters and numbers – you can embed it and attract clicks with a great looking landing page.

The questions don’t have to be crammed into one blank paper – you can segment even 100-question quizzes and surveys into smaller, “digestible” chunks and make them additionally appealing with videos or pictures.

• Relaxed environment

People are solving online quizzes and surveys in the privacy of their own home. They are not brought to a room or called on the phone by a complete stranger. That means they are more likely to answer honestly and more openly.

3. Possible Disadvantages

However, the things that make online quizzes and surveys so great can also turn into their shortcomings. You have to take several problems into account if you want to get reliable results you can use in developing your product or business strategy. Some of these issues are:

• Sampling

Sampling is the first problem you may encounter if you are seeking to research a demographic that extends beyond the people on your email list or website. A sample, in this case, is a group of people taken from a larger population for measurement.

To be able to draw correct conclusions, you have to say with scientific certainty that this sample reflects the larger group it represents. 

Your sample size depends on the type of data analysis you will perform and the desired precision of the estimates.

Source: SurveyGizmo

Remember that until recently, users of the internet and e-mail were not truly representative of the general population. This gap has closed significantly in recent years, but the way you distribute your quiz or survey can also limit the scope of your research.

For example, a Buzzfeed type of quiz is more likely to attract a young, affluent demographic that doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions and habits of middle-aged individuals.

You can use this software to calculate the size of the needed sample. You can also read more about sampling and post-survey adjustments that will guarantee that your results are reliable and applicable.

• Non-response

Online survey response rates can vary and sometimes can as low as 1%.  You want to make sure that you offer potential respondents some form of incentive (for example, a discount for your product or an entertainment value for people who solve personality quizzes).

Response rate is influenced by interests of participants, survey structure, communication methods, and assurance of privacy and confidentiality. We will deal with the confidentiality in the next chapter, and here you can learn more about optimizing your quizzes for high response rates. 

• Flashy design

One of the perks of online questionnaires can also be the death of them. You have to be very careful not to nudge users’ responses in a certain direction by suggestive multimedia content. Make sure that each element of your survey improves user experience and makes things as simple as possible.

4. The Instructions

Now that you know what are the advantages and disadvantages of the online quizzes and surveys, these are the key takeaways for making a high-quality questionnaire.

• Communicate clearly

Keep your language simple and avoid questions that may lead to confusion or ambiguous answers. Unless your survey or quiz target a specific group, the language shouldn’t be too technical or complicated.

Also, avoid cramming multiple questions into one. For example, you can ask whether the product is “interesting and useful,” and offer “yes” and “no” as an answer – but the problem is that it could be interesting without being useful and vice versa.

• Keep it short

Keep your quizzes and surveys as short as possible and don’t risk people opting out of the questionnaire halfway.  If the quiz or survey have to be longer, divide them into several segments of related questions. For example, you can group questions in a personality quiz into interests, goals, daily habits etc.

• Keep it logical

Follow a logical flow with your questions, don’t jump from one topic to another.

• Avoid bias

Don’t try to nudge respondents’ answers towards a certain result. We know it feels easier to ask how amazing your product is, but try to stay neutral and simply ask people what they think about it.

Also, make sure that multimedia content in the survey or quiz does not affect responses.

• Consider respondents’ bias

If you conduct personality quizzes, you may notice that you cannot always expect total accuracy when you ask people to talk about themselves. Sometimes, people don’t have an accurate perception of their own daily activities, so try to be helpful in the way you word the questions.

For example, it’s much easier for them to recall how much time they spend on their smartphone on a daily basis, then to as them to calculate in on a weekly or monthly basis.

Even then you may not get accurate answers, which is why you should cross-examine the results with other sources of information.

5. Privacy and Confidentiality

As we previously mentioned, respecting users’ privacy and maintaining confidentiality is one of the most important factors that contribute to response rates.

Until recently, privacy and data protection laws were lagging almost decades behind our technological development. It took several major data-breach and data-mining scandals to put this issue on the agenda of the governments and legal authorities.

For a good reason – 92% of online customers cite data security and privacy as a concern, TRUSTe/NCSA Consumer Privacy study found. Furthermore, more than half of consumers don’t trust brands to use their personal information responsibly, according to a report published by the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Many of these concerns were addressed for the first time in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which was introduced on the 25th May 2018. It establishes different privacy legislation from European countries under one umbrella of legally binding EU regulation.

Although the law is European, each website that receives European visitors has to comply – and this means everyone. So what are your obligations under GDPR? 

• you have to seek permission to use the customers’ data, explicitly and unambiguously
• you have to explain why you need this data
• you have to prove you need this data
• you have to document the ways you use personal data
• you have to report any data breaches promptly
• accessible privacy settings built into your digital products and websites
• switched on privacy settings
• regular privacy impact assessments

Non-compliance could cost you up to €20 million ($23,4 million) or 4% of your global turnover. It could also cost you a lot of customers – who are increasingly cautious about the way they disclose personal information.

While the new rulebook may seem intimidating at first, in reality, it comes down to a matter of business ethics. Think about it in the simplest terms. Sleazy sliding into people’s email inbox may have its short-term benefits, but in the long run, it amounts to building an email list full of people who are uninterested in your product and irritated by your spam.

Actively seeking permission to send emails to your potential and existing customers is an excellent way to make sure that your list is full of high-quality leads that want to hear or buy from you.

Protecting your customers’ data or going to great lengths to explain how you’re going to use it establishes a long-term relationship based on trust. It’s natural to ask for someone’s bra size if you sell underwear – but it’s quite needless if you are selling shoes and you just may want to sell this data to another retailer.

Under GDPR, you have two options – either stop asking for data you don’t need to run your business or tell your customers explicitly you may sell it to the third-party.

Conclusion

You can collect data using quizzes, but you can also use online quizzes to capture people’s attention, convert leads to sales and engage customers and learn more about them.

With LeadQuizzes, you can simplify this process – design quizzes and adjust them to your needs, test different quizzes’ response and conversion rates and tweak the content accordingly. To learn more about other business opportunities that stem from the use of online quizzes, click here.