5 key elements that distinguish the great online quiz from the ignored

In July 2014, quizzes built using Interact were viewed 1 million times. Of those million views, 90% came from the top 10% of quizzes built. To discover what sets excellent quizzes apart from the rest, we ran some statistics, put together graphs, and delved deep into the psychology of what causes some quizzes to outperform the rest. What we found is that all the best quizzes have a good degree of similarity, meaning that there IS a formula for the perfect quiz. I'm here today to share that formula with you.

Every great quiz has 5 essential elements that come together to make up the content.

1. A title that stands out above social media noise 2. A cover image hook 3. Conversational questions 4. Uplifting and challenging results 5. A sharing plan Let's take a look at each element and the data behind what works.

Step 1: Differentiating yourself with an…

Why developing an emotional connection through personal branding is essential for ecommerce

On a daily basis, the average consumer will see as many as 5,000 ads. The sheer volume of ads is a large reason why many consumers view companies with distrust, believing that they will only take action and speak with only sales in mind. The reality is, consumers prefer to do business with people, not companies. Personal branding allows your audience to see the human behind the operation.

Why Personal brands?

The most important factor in determining the success of a company is trust. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, your customers do not immediately receive a physical good after they have shopped at an e-commerce store. In order for them to make a purchase from your site, they must be assured that they will receive the product and…

Connecting content on a deeper psychological level

The many different types of content marketing give great opportunities for brands to develop storytelling in new ways. Previously, Dan Bosomworth explained brand storytelling techniques in-depth. In this infographic we gain insights on how people will respond to the content we share, showing how are brains are wired to connect with compelling stories. Did you know that...

'The brain processes images 60 times faster than text, and 92% of consumers want brands to create stories around ads. Because of this, marketers should be delivering linear content with clear narratives and using images to tell their stories".

This storytelling infographic from Onepost shares this insight, explaining that  'finding the right story will activate part of the brain to listen, absorb and transpose it into their own ideas and experiences, making it memorable'. …

Copywriting best practice: Opening Lines - How They Make Or Break

A good opening line draws you in. A bad one tells you to put the book down. Opening lines are the most important sentences a writer will put down in pen and paper. They are crucial for commercial success. If readers cannot go beyond an insipid opening line, they cannot reach the thousands of beautiful sentences that lie just beyond the first page. If a reader does not read, then the subsequent lines will virtually not exist. In a sentence, a good opening line leads to a strong literary start.

A must for commercial success

The start of any literary work begins with the first two lines and continues to the first two chapters. Agents and publishers read a work before readers do, and they are not afraid to cancel the novel if they find it uninspiring. Their most said excuses are: If readers…

How price, type size, position on page and the colour of prices can all impact on whether people click the buy now button

The ultimate goal of marketing, of course, is to get people to buy. That means, that in an online context, actions that marketers can take to influence the pressing of a “buy now” button are desirable. 

But how often do we focus on what seem like trivial things, such as the size of the type used to show the price? Psychological research shows some interesting factors about the way prices are displayed. Get the display of prices right on a web page and you can affect the chances of that “buy now” button being pressed.

There are several factors which I shall cover in this article:

Should prices end in an odd numbered digit?It is not the last…

New research: The SimpleUsability Online Experience Index for UK Fashion E-commerce sites

This article summarises our review of the clothing retail websites for Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014. The aim is to highlight best practices and areas for improvement that can be applied by retailers. You will see from the Radar charts for the retailers that there are substantial differences in experience of each of the customer journey and overall.

Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.

Whether we’re working on competitor or comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around…

Learn to love The Logic Sandwich

To successfully take people through a whole buying decision, you need to find the right balance between satisfying their emotional and logical needs. The human brain has two halves: the left side of the brain is rational, considered and thoughtful, the right is creative, intuitive and spontaneous. To really get someone on board with your brand, you need to appeal to both sides of their nature. In short, you need messages that tick their emotional and logical boxes. [caption id="attachment_35506" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Are you serving up a Logic Sandwich?[/caption] Whatever you’re selling and whomever you’re selling it to (in the vast majority of cases), you are selling to a person: a human being. And, real people are primarily driven by their emotions. Even when what they articulate is a logical motivation for a purchase, there will be…

4 quick tips for shorter, successful social updates

My dream is to open a clothing store for online marketers. So content marketers can wear t-shirts with the slogan "I repurposed this from a blog post". And copywriters will proudly declare "I kept it short".

Short is beautiful in the online world.

Though that's not quite correct. The right length for text depends on many factors. But if you can make your text shorter while communicating the same message, then that's a good thing.

Why?

Because you don't have a lot of time to capture attention and draw people into and through your text...whether it's a blog post or a product description, email copy or a sales page.

Cutting text down is a particular issue when you have a character limit or space is at a premium, such as with a Tweet or subject line. It's one of the many topics I cover in a new Smart Insights video…

Persuasion techniques and examples to improve conversion

'You say tomato we say tomayto', 'c0mmunication breakdown', 'do you speaka my language', 'my baby’s gonna write me a letter'........? It’s funny how song lyrics, when paired with a catchy melody are easy to remember, bulging with emotive meaning.

How easy would it be, fellow webmasters, if there was an easier way to mainline understanding between a website and its target customers? Without the need to carefully group masthead, hero banner, top navigation, product description and call to action button?

The truth is web design and written text are like an arranged marriage. They barely know each other, they’ve never met and then suddenly there they are sharing a bed (or a webpage) for the next however many years.

Top tips for persuasive design

Page composition is often decided way before the body copy has been written - or vice versa. This rarely makes for a persuasive experience.…

How stimulating the full range of senses can affect consumer behaviour

Over the Summer, when we had a hot day and I was stuck on a commuter train I kept getting a whiff of somebody’s sun cream that has that coconut smell that instantly flooded my brain with thoughts of a summer holiday, sat on a beach, looking out to the horizon which takes my mind off being stuck on a commuter train. This smell got me thinking about neuromarketing, which considers all the senses and their response to marketing stimuli. We focus so hard on what we can see, we forget about our other senses, touch, sounds, smell. As marketing is now integrated with multi touch points I wondered how many people are putting these in action? In this post I would like to introduce and show learnings from the relatively new science- neuromarketing taken from the fantastic books by …