My Secret Weapon For Attracting Clients: The Archetype Quiz

For a long time I’ve taught that the best way to collect emails is to develop a 1-2 page cheat sheet that will appeal to your potential clients and offer it in exchange for their email address.

And I still believe that to be true.

But a very close second, when it comes to building your email list, is to develop what I call an “archetype quiz.”

What Is An Archetype Quiz?

Here’s an example that I use on this website. In 2020, it grew my email list by 4,988 subscribers. The quiz helps coaches figure out what the most effective marketing strategies are for them.

And here’s one that I created for my fitness coaching business:

These quizzes are sort of like the personality tests that you used to find in teen magazines (e.g. “What type of fruit are you?”). They can be kind of silly but they work anyway because they play on our innate human desire to re-affirm our identity.

An archetype quiz brings this concept to the next level by providing genuinely useful insights about how your potential clients might want to approach the problem they’re facing. Yes, an archetype quiz will help you generate leads. But it will also make you a better coach by forcing you to think through the 3-4 types of clients who come to you and what each of them generally needs.

How To Create An Effective Archetype Quiz

So let’s talk about how to create one of these bad boys for your niche, shall we?

Step 1: Get clear on your niche

Like most marketing tactics, you can’t really take advantage of this if you don’t know who you’re speaking to or what that person wants. If you’re just a general life coach, all your ideas are going to end up being like, “What type of goal setter are you?” And that’s better than nothing…but it’s not super compelling.

So you don’t have to have your niche 100% dialed in, but you need to have some sort of focus point for the quiz. If you have no idea what that might be then just pause on this step, work with a few more clients, and start to uncover your niche.

Step 2: Choose The Name Of Your Quiz

You can either focus on who you work with for the title, or you can use the thing that you coach people around.

So, for example, my first quiz was called “What Type Of Coach Are You?” (who I serve = coaches) and my second quiz was called “What Is Your Fitness Archetype?” (what I help people around = fitness). A leadership coach might say “What Type Of Leader Are You?”

You get the idea. Don’t overthink this, just brainstorm a few names, get a second opinion from a friend, and then go with one.

Step 3: Decide how to categorize your clients

The easiest way to do this is to think of a few clients you’ve worked with, and figure out what parts of their personality dictated the approach you took with them.

My coaching archetype quiz focuses on which marketing activities each archetype will enjoy doing and will be able to stay consistent with. There are connectors, mavens, and salespeople. You may notice I’ve adapted these from Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point - you can do something similar as long as you give credit to the original source and make it your own.

My fitness archetype quiz focuses primarily on someone’s history with health and fitness. Are they someone who typically puts in low effort and gets low results (The Rebel) or do they put put in high effort and get high results (The Perfectionist)? This determines the approach I take with each client.

After you’ve categorized the 3-4 types of clients you work with in terms of personality, what I want you to do is write out descriptions for each of the types. Include a summary, primary obstacles, and key strategies for each to focus on.

Here’s an example of what a result look like in Interact (the quiz software I recommend). Notice the call to action at the bottom of the result that prompts someone to book a strategy session.

Step 4: Write Out YOur Questions

So once you’ve outlined what defines each of your 3-4 types, you can reverse engineer those descriptions and think about the questions you need to ask in order to assess someone.

Really important note here: I want you to stick to no more than 5 questions. Why? Because if you develop a 20 question quiz, no one’s going to finish it. And then the quiz is functionally useless.

Here’s an example from my fitness archetype quiz. The first question asks:

“How good are you when it comes to sticking with a fitness or nutrition program?”

And the potential answers are:

A) When I have a plan I'm pretty good at following through

— If they choose this, they are more likely to get The Trooper as a result

B) I find it really challenging to commit to a program

— The Rebel

C) Good fitness and nutrition habits are a natural part of my life

— The Natural

D) I tend to go "all in" for a few months and then fall off the wagon

— The Perfectionist

As you can see, because I have 4 archetypes, each question has four potential answers. That’s how I recommend you do it.

Step 5: Publish Your Quiz Using Interact

You could theoretically just write out the quiz, have your clients print it out, and then just provide it as a PDF…but ain’t nobody got time for that.

You could hire a coder to create this, but it’s going to end up way more expensive than it has to be. And you could try to use Typeform, but that’s not really what it was designed for in my opinion.

Fortunately, there are apps that focus solely on helping you create lead quizzes like this. My favorite, and the one I recommend, is called Interact.

You simply plug in a title for your quiz, create the questions, and then easily map each answer to one of the possible results. They even have a gallery of stock images you can insert throughout the quiz.

It’s super easy to create a quiz using Interact. You just connect each answer to the associated result.

Then, once your quiz is done, they give you a bunch of different ways to publish it. My favorite is as a popup on my site. But they’ll also give you a direct link, or a code to embed it, or you can include it as an announcement bar on the top of your site.

Whatever you decide, make sure you ask participants for their email before showing them the result, and connect that form to your email marketing system. It only takes about 10 seconds to do but without that step you’re not actually going to generate any leads.

Now It’s Your Turn

There’s a bunch of fancy stuff you can do once you have everything set up. For example, you can put each subscriber into a unique email sequence based on their result. And you can invite people to a strategy session once they’ve taken the quiz. But don’t worry about any of that now.

All I want you to focus on right now is brainstorming a name for your quiz.

Once you’ve done that, you can sign up for Interact, block off an hour or two, and bang it out. You’ll be glad you did.