Gaining your customers undivided attention in today’s busy digital space can be difficult. There is an abundance of companies out there vying for your prospective customers’ attention. People are bombarded online with downloadable e-books and podcasts every day – how many can they use? Luckily, online assessments can be just as successful to companies but take less time to complete.
What are online assessments?
An online assessment is an interactive questionnaire personalized to match peoples’ specific personality or identity, based on their responses. These assessments are usually longer and more skill-related than quizzes and provide a score, as well as personalized feedback. It can be in the form of a personality test or a skill assessment. See an example of an interactive assessment here.
7 Benefits of Online Interactive Assessments for Marketers
Companies use Online Interactive Assessments to help customers and employees find the value they need, but they also benefit from this tool at the same time. Below are 7 ways in which marketers can benefit from using interactive assessments within their own companies and within a B2C or B2B setting.
1. Grow Your Email List
First, by gating your Online Assessment with an opt-in form, you can grow your e-mail list. Today’s audience is selective; thus, it is increasingly difficult to get people to fill out lead-gen forms. Also, the expectations for content value in exchange for contact details keeps on growing.
In contrast to the run-of-the-mill passive content formats, an interactive assessment offers personalized feedback and advice – making it worth the opt-in/permission. With Interactive Assessments, people see value in the real-time feedback of a score and personalized outcome and are willing to trade their basic information for the results.
2. Generate More Leads
Online Assessments are very helpful in generating more leads. Everyone loves a good challenge. You can create an assessment to engage with your audience, test your audience’s knowledge, skills or buyer-readiness and score their results.
At the end of the day, marketing is all about relationships. In B2B situations, you are selling to a business, but the decision-makers are still regular folks like you and me, who have KPIs, targets and challenges. These people need to figure out whether they are on the right track. They need to determine if they are making the right decisions and investments. Your job is to make it easy for them to do all of this.
With engaging content, you have the ability to connect more with your users to develop relationships that will move customers along your sales funnel. Also, with the more interactive elements that you include in the experience, you are able to gain more data on your user. As a result, you capture data that helps to qualify leads with greater precision.
3. Showcase Knowledge in Your Field
By offering users valuable feedback at the end of the experience, companies can showcase their knowledge of specific topics in their fields. This will establish a stronger brand awareness of your company in the eyes of your customers. In turn, this brand awareness will lead to more trust for your brand and more visits to your website. With an assessment, you also offer your potential clients a fun experience that creates a foundation and possibility for a strong, long-term relationship.
4. Gain Valuable Data about Your Clients as Well as Their Need Gaps
The best part of using an interactive assessment is the extra bit of information you gain about areas in which your clients or employees need help. That kind of insight is gold for your sales team, who can take over with confidence, and deliver more precise pitches. It is also very helpful within HR departments in which decisions need to be made about matching the right employee to the right position.
With B2B marketing, gated assessments provide more than just basic information for email lists. They also reveal information about what areas the prospect needs help. Use an interactive assessment to let your clients evaluate themselves. Like a great salesman, an assessment asks questions, listens carefully to every response, and suggests solutions that cater to the client’s individual needs. By asking the right questions, you also get to know the personalities of your potential customers, their likes and dislikes, and their concerns or goals. That’s where you can introduce your product as a solution to their problems. Encourage your audience to reflect on their needs and pains.
When using an interactive assessment for internal matters, HR departments can assist employees assess their strengths and weaknesses to help them perform better in the company. If a lack of understanding is discovered, the assessment can offer feedback to help employees improve in their roles.
5. Use Data Collection to Create More Targeted Communication
You can use an assessment to empower management or the sales team. The insight captured in the assessment can be used to pitch the right products to every user. In addition, it can also help managers understand how to help their employees.
More understanding of the client or employee will help members of your company send out more targeted emails with more precise communication. Sales associates deliver sharper pitches, and managers delegate tasks with more clarity and focus. Depending on the outcome of the assessment, you can follow up with a personalized approach. In doing so, you can change a potential customer into a customer who trusts your product and a confused employee into a more effective worker.
6. Save Time and Costs by Using Online Interactive Assessments
Engagement, education and conversion aside, there’s another really neat thing about assessments. They take a fraction of the time and money required to produce compared to e-books, white papers or webinars. All you need is a questionnaire and feedback variations based on score brackets.
Online Interactive Assessments also have great potential for repurposing. When you’re done with one successful run of an assessment, you just duplicate it, swap out the questions and feedback for new ones and publish it.
Interactive Assessments prove to be a great investment because they also produce a higher conversion rate.
7. Gain an Extra Place to Promote Your Products and Services
Though your website and social media platforms are still great places to promote your brand to customers, an interactive assessment adds one more place to educate customers about your products and services. Be sure to include information in your feedback that highlights your products and services as being the next step in solving customer concerns. Also, you can add call-to-action buttons to the end of the experience to get customers to travel where you want them to go on your website.
Industries that can benefit by using Online Interactive Assessments
Interactive Assessments can be used in a variety of ways in both internal and external situations. Also, there are a number of different industries in which Interactive Online Assessments can be useful. Below are just a few examples of online assessments used internally or within different industries.
1. Internal Company Purposes
HR Departments
HR Departments can use interactive assessments with potential new employees and current workers to help match the work expectations with worker competences. This can be done with a personality test or a skill-based assessment. HR representative can offer feedback to employees that will explain which position is best for them and why. Participants are more likely to find value in this experience since it focuses on a non-bias evaluation of them.
2. External Marketing by Industry
Educational Institutions
Educational institutions may be the industry in which assessments as most associated. Teachers have used assessments to test their students’ knowledge of different topics, but for educational institutions, interactive assessments can be used a bit differently.
In the customer example below, VIA University College in Denmark used an Online Interactive Assessment. Specifically, VIA wanted to help students choose the career type that best fit their personality. It targeted potential students who were unsure of their educational futures. VIA helped these students focus on a possible career path. In addition, it also showed how its course programs would help guide students on their journey.
IT Companies
Interactive Online Assessments can also be used in the IT industry. C2IT, an IT support company from Denmark, set up an interactive assessment to help its clients evaluate if they needed to outsource their IT. Specifically, customers spent 5 minutes taking the test and then received personalized feedback on each question. This offered the client an insight into the future and suggested changes that were needed to improve work efficiency, based on the problem the client revealed taking the test.
Food and Beverage Companies
Interactive Assessments are great to use in the Food and Beverage industry. Use a Level Assessment Personality Test that asks your customers different questions to assess their cooking level. At the end of the experience, offer the right recipe that best fits the customer’s skill set. Add a newsletter sign-up form that offers recipes that fit the customer’s competency level. These newsletters can also be a great place to promote your products while offering your customers value at the same time.
Sustainability-Conscience Companies
Use a knowledge-based assessment to test your customers’ understanding of sustainability and what it means to live an environmentally-friendly life. Ask your visitors questions about their daily life and give customized feedback based from their responses. Let customers know which level of sustainability they fit into and add a lead form for visitors to sign up if they would like to receive newsletters from your company about sustainable topics.
Companies can also use a 10-question educational quiz to educate B2B customers on their own compliance of the sustainability goals. In addition to that, clients can learn more about the goals while discovering which would be best for them to focus on within their own company
In Conclusion
Interactive Online Assessments are quick and easy-to-make experiences that will enhance the customer journey. They also set companies apart from the rest with the value they offer. Start generating more leads for your company today! Add an Interactive Assessment to your website and see not only an improvement in your conversion rates but also in your connections with customers.
Visit Dot.vu to find out more about Online Interactive Assessments and how simple they are to embed onto your website. Click here to get started!
Also, get inspired for this or any other interactive experience on the Dot.vu marketplace place. See our many exciting templates for interactive experiences that are sure to bring value to your company. Let us show what Dot.vu can do for you!
*This post has been updated from the original, which was written by Svanlaug Arnadottir on August 8, 2017.