If you haven’t been living in a proverbial hole in the dirt, you know that marketers know that you love easy quizzes. Short questions that you know the answers to. Hence the “who is this celebrity? tell us and win $500!” quiz that beats you in the face every time you try to log into hotmail.
Although I might take this blog post on a tangent to say that if you are still using hotmail (and not gmail) you actually deserve this treatment, I have other aims.
I’m going to tell you about a quiz I took today that made me smile.
Here was my experience:
A conference I am attending has been sending me a lot of emails. Most conferences do. Most of these emails are very long, full of at least some information that is not relevant to me, and ultimately at least partially unreadable due to a busy life that means I can’t read all emails that enter my orbit. So I skim.
In the midst of my skimming, however, sometimes things stand out.
Like this one. Today, a short email, from a conference I’m speaking at, with a big large graphic. I opened it, and the promise of clicking the big green “YES!” was — well, inescapable.
Here’s why:
Two reasons:
- It was an easy question I knew the answer to. (Is this my name and job?)
- It was an easy question I knew the answer to that was also about me. Hence, I was the best person to answer the question.
Pretty soon, I had not only clicked “yes” but had gone and spent some time taking a screenshot, writing a blog post about it, and generally thinking about this conference for far more time than I would have normally on my Sunday night.
Even if you aren’t a blogger who sees the value in opining on weird marketing gimmicks, I would venture to guess that such an easy quiz would a) convince you to engage and b) encourage you to think about the quiz (or sponsor of it) a tiny bit more after the fact.
If engaging with a product or company, and then thinking about them afterward leads to the coveted marketing goal of a relationship (and, yes, a sale), then I’d say we’ve found a glimmer of positivity here.
Marketing success, no?
Pretty soon, I had not only clicked “yes” but had gone and spent some time taking a screenshot, writing a blog post about it, and generally thinking about this conference for far more time than I would have normally on my Sunday night.