(And Why it is Important for Cannabis and Hemp CBD Companies to Grow Their Email List.)
After hearing all the stories of how Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube randomly shut down accounts, how much do you trust social media companies with your business social media accounts?
What was that? Not at all?
Good.
We’ve all heard horror stories of accounts shut down with no warning. And all of those 50,000 or so followers were lost. Poof. Gone.
In our industry, we have to assume that our social media accounts could be shut down at any time.
As a result, it is incredibly important that we build a direct relationship with our customers and clients.
But how do we do that?
There are a lot of ways to consider but the most effective still remains email.
That’s right, email.
Email remains one of the top marketing tactics used by companies today. Not convinced? Take a look at these recent stats by Optinmonster.com:
- People check their email up to 20 times a day
- Email remains one of the top marketing tactics used by companies today
- Email has an average open rate of 22.86% and a click-through rate of 3.71%
- Email marketing has a 4400% ROI. That means that every dollar you spend on email marketing has the potential to bring you a $44 return.
Lucky for us, email isn’t dead. Instead, the ROI on email continues to be very strong!
That’s all great news for us! However, in order to send emails, you have to have a list of people who have opted-in. So let’s focus on one interact and fun way to grow your email list.
One Way to Build Your Email List is With a Quiz
There are many ways to grow your email list, and I considered several types of lead magnets, but every time, I came back to the idea of a quiz.
Understanding that people are naturally curious and want to learn more, I decided to use a quiz to build my list.
A quiz is more interesting than surveys or providing other options to get people to opt-in and give you their email address. Quizzes are interactive and can be created to provide relevant information, insights, or entertainment to the person taking it.
As a business, you’re always going to get the best results when you provide something of value in exchange for an email address. It was true in marketing 20 years ago, and it’s true today.
In addition, I’m creating a course for CBD entrepreneurs and I wanted to understand where people are with their marketing. In this, we all win. The person taking the quiz can gain insights that might help them, and I can understand where people are in their marketing, and find ways to provide them with relevant information that could help them grow their business.
Oh, and another reason why I picked a quiz is that I wanted to learn the process of how to create them in order to help CBD clients. Quizzes are an excellent way for CBD companies to fully understand and help their customers make informed decisions on what CBD products are best for them. You can easily learn how to make a product recommendation quiz.
How to Create a Quiz for Your Cannabis or Hemp CBD Company
Step One: Know Where You Want to Go
It’s really important to start with the end in mind.
What are your goals for creating a quiz? If you don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish with the quiz, it could get messy really quick. (Side note, that’s true for life though as well).
For this quiz, my goal is to understand where people are in marketing their CBD business. I am creating a course for CBD businesses to learn how to connect with customers and transform the growth of their business.
Knowing my short and long-term goals made the quiz a lot easier to design.
What goals are you trying to accomplish? Could creating a quiz help?
Step Two: What type of quiz fits your goals?
After researching quiz builders, I decided on Interact Quiz Builder. One of the things that I really liked about it is the different types of quizzes that are available.
You can choose from pre-made templates that you can customize, or you can build one from scratch. No matter what route you go, all quizzes are built using one of these three types. This makes it very easy to match the type of quiz with your goals.
1.Assessment Quizzes
With the assessment quiz, each question only has one right answer. I wish I could create my course quizzes on the Interact Quiz Builder when I’m teaching university classes.
Quizzes used to be my least favorite thing to build, and now I keep thinking of new ones to create since it’s so easy and fun to do. It is easy to see how assessment quizzes could be applied to CBD.
For example, you could create quizzes like:
- How well do you know the FDA regulations?
- Do you know your cannabinoids?
- Is your cannabis product packaging compliant with your state regulations?
Doesn’t that sound like fun? Imagine being tested on whether or not know you know what you can and can’t say about your CBD offerings, or your product packaging? Actually….
2. Personality Quizzes
Who doesn’t love a good personality quiz? I mean seriously, what breed of dog are you? What does your favorite color say about you?
Whether the results are fun, interesting, or insightful, designed to help us improve our lives, we love finding out information about ourselves. Personality quizzes can also match us with products or consumption methods based on our personality.
Example quizzes could be:
- What CBD product fits your personality?
- Which consumption method is best for you?
- What cannabis strain is right for you?
3. Scored Quizzes
With Scored quizzes, every answer has a score value (or points) associated with it. At the end of the quiz, the points are totaled up and the results are based on that score range.
Example quizzes could be:
- How familiar are you with CBD?
- Do you know your cannabinoids?
- Are you packaging savvy?
Step Three: Designing Your Quiz
Don’t want to create a quiz from scratch? Awesome! Use a template. That’s what I did. Being able to select a template as I built out my first quiz made it really easy to have a framework that helped guide the layout.
Even though I mapped out all the questions ahead of time when I was in the brainstorming process, being able to see how things tied in was really helpful. There are many different templates to use to start with on a variety of topics.
To create my quiz, I searched the marketing quizzes and found one that I liked. It fit the style and outcomes that I was looking for.
Step Four: Customizing the Quiz for Your Brand
The quiz is a part of my overall marketing strategy, so I wanted to make sure it visually aligned with the rest of my brand. Being able to customize it to align with my branding was key.
There are tons of free images available in the builder, and we all know that free (legal) images are the best images. However, if you want the option to upload your favorites, you can.
Since our industry is still new (from a legal perspective), I imported most of the images I have on hand, adding some CBD and cannabis images into the mix. This helped me to be more relevant and on-brand.
Speaking of being on-brand, customization is key! It was easy to customize the colors and images in order to make it relevant and aligned with everything else that I do.
Step Five: Create The Questions For Your Quiz
For me, I had my questions already created before I found Interact Quiz Builder.
Since I love to figure things out, I’ve been researching marketing quizzes lately. I would take quizzes I like multiple times to understand their structure, how they were weighting different questions, and putting the pieces together.
My goal is to provide insights and tools for people, depending on how they approach their marketing, so my questions had to be carefully crafted to easily gather that information.
There is a lot of flexibility when you create your questions.
You can edit them, drag and drop the order of them, and play around until you get it how you want it. Even with my questions being written before I found Interact Quiz Builder, I still had to edit and rearrange them once they were in the builder in order to make sense.
Step Six: Driving to the Results
You can’t have a great quiz and then offer up lame results. It’s a rule if you don’t want people to hate you. No one likes feeling like they wasted their time.
But you’re not going to do that! The next step after creating the questions is to map the answers to the results. It’s so easy, it’s like magic.
Does it make me weird if one of the things I loved most about building my quiz was being able to map the results? It might.
Having tried to figure out the logic of other people’s quizzes without having access to their back end, it was fun to see the puzzle pieces fit together.
Below is a social media sample quiz to show you how easy this is!
And seriously? It was so much easier than I thought it would be to map out the results. Understanding which questions lead align with specific results made it a breeze. When I was building it out, it took me longer to drink my iced coffee than it did to map my results.
Step Seven: Integration mapping
After creating the quiz and mapping the results, the next step is to connect integrations. Did I mention magic earlier? I might have spoken too soon because THIS is where it really happens.
This is where you can capture email addresses and grow your email list.
For my marketing emails, I use ActiveCampaign, but there are tons of other options available if you don’t use ActiveCampaign (remember to check with the email provider though to ensure that they allow cannabis or hemp CBD companies to use their service, you’d be surprised!)
It was incredibly easy to connect the quiz results with ActiveCampaign to grow your email list.
Specifically, I created three tags, one for each of the three quiz results. Anyone who provided their email address to see their results were added into my list in ActiveCampaign and tagged appropriately.
Then I created an automation flow in ActiveCampaign for each outcome. When new people fill out the quiz and opt-in, they start to receive the email sequence based on their results. This gave me the opportunity to customize emails and provide relevant information and resources for people after they take the quiz.
The tags help me stay organized and understand who took the quiz and what their results were.
Step Eight: Promoting Your Quiz
Let’s tell the world you have a new quiz! We can use skywriting, right? Smoke signals? Go back in time and add the URL on the coffee cup left in the scene on Game of Thrones?
There are a lot of different ways to promote your quiz after it is created.
Mine is on the top bar on my website. There are also options to create pop-ups on your website as well and more.
IF we were allowed to run Cannabis or Hemp CBD ads on Facebook, you could promote it on Facebook and Instagram.
You can share the link in emails, or you can embed it throughout your website. On blog posts, for example.
Since our businesses are focused on cannabis and hemp CBD, our promotional options are more limited. However, there are lots of options still available to us. I’ve started using social media organic posts and stories to promote it.
I’ve also started to integrate it into my scripts for my Facebook Live show to drive people to the quiz.
There are many more ways to promote the quiz, the more creative we get, the better. You can provide a fun and interactive experience while you grow your email list.
Is Building a Quiz For You?
An unexpected side benefit is that the process has been fun! Building a quiz focused on providing insights and value to people is a great feeling.
There are so many uses for quizzes used in CBD to sell products and build relationships with potential customers (e.g. grow your email list). But quizzes can be used throughout the sales funnel to help educate about products, help people feel more comfortable with cannabis and hemp CBD, and more.
So if you’re looking to better understand your consumers, help educate them, and want to grow your email list at the same time, a quiz is an easy and intuitive way to do so!
And if you want to learn if you are maximizing your CBD brand for profit, growth, and impact, take my quiz!
The results are designed to help you understand where you’re at when it comes to growing your business, creating awareness and connections with your customers.
