Lead generation is one of the most effective ways to find new customers.

It lets you collect information such as emails and phone numbers—allowing you to contact people individually. That information turns into traffic that you can control through newsletters or lead nurturing sequences.

In this short study, we’ll look at the key differences between launching quizzes and giveaways with the goal of generating more leads for your business. 

We’ll also outline key metrics such as completion rates, shareability, and marketing segmentation. Then we’ll analyze lead generation forms by referring to form data and examples from Typeform.

So put down that cup of coffee and finish eating your cookie. It’s time to start learning about how to grow your business.

What gets the cheapest CPL?

When we talk about generating the most leads, what we actually want to say is: which option will get me the most inexpensive cost per lead?

First, we need to understand which people are most likely to hand over their email address. We do this by looking at completion rates.

Here’s an analysis we did by data mining the completion rates of typeforms that can be defined as either a quiz or a giveaway. We averaged the completion rate of forms that had received at least 5 unique responses, which you can see in the following table.

Type	Forms analyzed	Average completion rate	Expected range
viral quiz	2,429	51%	35% – 72%
giveaway	2,721	55%	38% – 78%

As we can see, on average, a giveaway gets a higher conversion rate. This is important if you start spending money on Facebook ads, for example.

However, the completion rates distribution for both types of lead generation is extremely sparse. We see this in the upper and lower quartiles of the expected range column.

What does this mean?

The completion of your quiz or giveaway could vary considerably. So you’ll need to test and see what works best for your target audience.

Now let’s imagine the following situation:

Alex has $500 to spend on Facebook ads because he’s eager to generate leads for his online course. He finds that to reach his audience; he’s paying $0.25 per click.

Expensive, right?

What would get him the cheapest cost per lead?

As we can see in the two funnels above, a giveaway would get a cheaper CPL because it has a higher average completion rate ($0.46 vs. $0.49).

But we need to remember that a giveaway usually has a bigger incentive for the user to give their email address. And we need to factor in the cost of this prize when calculating the cost per lead.

The prize could be anything related to your business or your customers. Wishpond outlines many different ideas for giveaway prizes that are valued at under $500.

Now back to Alex.

Next, he purchases a swanky $500 prize that’s attractive to his target audience. With this extra cost, the CPL rises for the giveaway:

It now costs $0.92 for a single lead.

But by increasing the ad spend, we decrease the CPL. Because the giveaway prize is a fixed cost, and the ad spend is variable to how many eyes we’re after. See below.

The CPL flattens at around $4,000 ad spend, thus compensating for the cost of the prize. Therefore, when launching a giveaway, you need a large budget to counteract the cost of the prize.

Here’s an example of a giveaway created on Typeform:

On the other hand, a quiz usually has no prize. The incentive for a user to give away their email is to see their results—because results are usually gated.

Remember that in order to receive an email address, we need to give something of significant value in return.

For example, take a look at this quiz:

Beer Cartel created an engaging quiz for beer lovers. To be able to see the result they scored, respondents need to enter their email after answering all 13 questions.

Organic Uplift

One of the prominent features of social media is the shareability of the content it distributes. Remember that with a paid push, there’s always an organic uplift in shares, clicks, and reactions.

Let’s have a look at giveaways and quizzes to determine which are more shareable. This will further decrease CPL—providing an even better return on investment.

Using Ahrefs, we analyzed the same typeforms to see how many average shares they received.

Type	Average shares	Max Shares	Average shares per 1,000 responses
Viral Quiz	123	10.5k	13.5
Giveaway	91	5k	2.8

There is no correlation between the amount of responses and the shares. Therefore it depends on other factors such as audience, incentive, and channel, for example.

Now, let’s build this into our funnel and see how the CPL is impacted by the amount of shares, considering that we have a $5,000 ad spend budget:

Segmentation opportunities

One of the most powerful features of a quiz is the ability to ask questions to potential clients. That lets us segment leads to send people a more personalized email lead nurturing program.

For example, Alex now has a health and fitness business. He wants to understand more about his potential customers’ problems and motivations. So he builds a simple diet quiz for social media.

Take a look:

When he sends out personalized emails, he can push leads into different audience buckets depending on their outcome on the quiz. By doing this, he can increase his conversion rates to paying, because his emails are more personal—and therefore—relatable.

Conclusion

Create a viral quiz because of its numerous benefits to segmentation. There’s no need to buy a prize, and it’s highly shareable on social media.

How do I make a viral quiz?

1. Choose a topic related to your product/service that is appealing to your target audience and allows you to segment people by asking relevant questions concerning their pain points.  
2. Pick software to build your quiz (Typeform is super easy).
3. Use AdEspresso to launch your Facebook ads.
4. Use Google Analytics to measure your leads.
5. Celebrate success and repeat!  😆

 

Jake Stainer works at Typeform as SEO Growth Manager, and runs his startup Papora. Typeform combines the human-centric approach of email and chat with the data-structuring capabilities of web forms”.