Hi everyone, welcome to today’s episode of 10Minute Marketing. I’m your host, sonia Crystal Williams. Well, joining me today is Alephia Karaki, and Alephia is a funnel strategist and conversion and launch copywriter joining us. She’s from, or currently living in, mumbai, india. We’ll get into that a little later about her travels. Thank you so much for being here, alephia.

Alefiya Khoraki: 0:28

I am super thrilled to be here and thank you so much for having me.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:32

Absolutely. So, Alefiya and I met on one of my favorite places that I think if you are a business owner and you want to meet other business owners, you need to be on LinkedIn, and that’s how Alefiya and I met, so she slid into my DMs. So anyway, Alefiya, I want to get into talking about quizzes and what funnels are, because for a lot of business owners, I feel like this is a missed opportunity that could really lead to them creating leads. So, first, kind of break down for just someone who’s completely unfamiliar with this terminology, what do we mean when we say quizzes? How does that apply to a business? And then, how does that lead into a funnel? Go ahead and break that down for me, perfect.

Alefiya Khoraki: 1:23

Okay, I love that question because, as we can think like, oh, quizzes are like, so 2024. How can you not know about quizzes? Every day, someone slides into my DM saying enlighten me on this word, what does this mean? I’m like okay.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 1:37

Okay.

Alefiya Khoraki: 1:37

This means that there’s a lot of brand awareness to do here, anyways. So a quiz is basically it can be different in different forms, but it’s basically a challenge- based or fun- based questionnaire where you fill in, you get asked some questions and then you give answer to those questions. Usually those are MCQs. You don’t have to type in manually any questions, so it’s not a survey. They are pre-built questionnaires and on the basis of those questions you get answers at the end. So there are three type of quizzes that I usually talk about. One is a score-based quiz, which can be a challenge.

Alefiya Khoraki: 2:21

I’ll give an example for a client of mine. She had an e-commerce course, e-commerce email strategy course, and for her the quiz we created was we gave out nine questionnaires of real e-commerce email examples and then we had like okay, a mattress brand has xyz things and we need to solve x problem in their email marketing. Which strategy would you choose? And based on what their choices they are given the scores. So it basically assesses their scoring system. But when I say that this is fun and challenging, the same thing could have been just like a survey.

Alefiya Khoraki: 3:05

You start an email project and what is the first thing you do? Do you audit the email sequence? Yes/N o — even that’s a quiz. That’s a quiz that does not get buzz, that does not get hype, that does not get the right engagement that we are trying to create. So even that’s a quiz, but those are not the good ones.

Alefiya Khoraki: 3:24

They feel more educational or maybe too academic yeah, and you know, when you have those yes/ no quizzes, you can sense a pitch ahead that, okay, here she’s going to tell me like oh, I don’t have auditing skills here, buy my audit, or xyz so in that you can smell a pitch in from those yes/ no survey- like questions. And that’s when people come to me with the quiz and they say like “hey, I did launch a quiz but it’s not working, or I tried a quiz but it didn’t work, and like “do you ask yes/ no questions, and they say yes; I’m like there it is, that’s the biggest breaker for me.

Alefiya Khoraki: 4:05

Then there is a personality type quiz, which works phenomenally well for e-commerce businesses and, for example, an eyewear brand. You have eight trends that are going on around eyewear and then you’re like okay, which frame matches your personality? So, A) you get to know about your personality. B) you’re also knowing, like, what my fashion style is. So, you take the quiz to find out your fashion style, what fits you and also about your personality. So people love, love, love, love learning about themselves and their personalities.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 4:40

I love those.

Alefiya Khoraki: 4:41

We can never get enough of ourselves. If you tell me what’s my astrology sign, what does that mean? What does my palm say? Even those petty ones, we love them.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 4:51

Yeah.

Alefiya Khoraki: 4:52

And that’s why quizzes, and these for science quizzes, work so well. Then the third is diagnostic quizzes which are usually used for hospitals, firms or where, like actual serious brands, and where we are auditing something that we want. We want the consumer to be aware of something there that they are not aware of okay, so this for, like, if you’re talking about stages of awareness.

Alefiya Khoraki: 5:20

Which stages of awareness is you? Only three percent of buyers are in that most aware stage where they will buy your product, but the other 97, either they are not even aware of the problem or they’re not aware of you as a solution. Okay, so you want to make them aware so that awareness is built through quizzes. That’s why the diagnostic quizzes are the ones that we use for people where some sort of educational element is involved. With e-commerce, we use personality stuff. With SaaS also, we use diagnostic stuff, diagnostic quizzes, and the last one was score challenges.

Alefiya Khoraki: 6:01

So that’s where the fun element has to be there.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 6:04

Yeah. So the industry, that a business owner or the person that’s responsible, maybe, for the digital marketing aspect, may depend or determine which quiz type is going to make the most sense. Even if they already have quizzes, maybe the conversions could be better. So that leads to a couple of questions or thoughts I had, as you were saying, that one thought was when I think of this

Sonja Crystal Williams: 6:28

I definitely have been one of those people to take the style quizzes, so I’m definitely I enjoy those. It also makes me think about back in the day, pen and paper, when we used to read magazines, how there would be those diagnostic type of quizzes and magazines and they would have a scoring system and say well, if you scored between one and five, you fall into this category. If you scored between six and ten, you fall into this category. What’s beautiful, though, now is in a digital world, we now can get a lead from that. So one question to you is where does the lead capture happen in the quiz process? So if I am the visitor to go and take your quiz, do I enter my email address first. Is it the last thing I do? Like, where does that fit into this process?

Alefiya Khoraki: 7:18

It depends from industry to industry, okay, but with e-commerce quizzes, sometimes what we do is we ask for the email in the second question. Okay, we ask for the name in the first one and the email in the second one and we make it in a way that we want to personalize. Then after that it will change. Like before that I’m not addressing you by your name, yeah, but after that question I’m like hi, Sonja, you mentioned the xyz and now it tells me about this, like, um, you have this type of mattress. So in all the questions moving forward, I’m I’m addressing you by your name. So it becomes extremely personalized. So that’s one way to go for it. And the second way is we ask for the email just before, like they finish the questions, and then they’re just like oh, what am I, what am I? And then before that there is like OK, just that one last step. So we captured their email there, ok so it could be.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 8:15

Yeah, as you say that. That kind of reminds me of when I took, where they said OK, we’re going to provide your results, provide us your email and we’ll send you an email with the results, and then you provide the email. They give you the results instantly on screen, but they also email you, yeah and I prefer that so I always say that never.

Alefiya Khoraki: 8:32

Don’t like, do not like, never say that okay, when they enter their email address. Never have another page where they say okay, now go to your email service provider and then check like, then get your results. There and there give them the results, because then, from a UX perspective, you might frustrate the customer, because sometimes we are signing up for emails from a different email address and we’re using a different email address. So, like, suppose if I’m surfing my phone, I’m surfing this list on my phone. That’s my personal personal email address.

Alefiya Khoraki: 9:06

I prefer getting these promotional emails on my work email address. I still open them. But now, if you’re saying, like check your work email, that work email might be just on my laptop, but you’re asking me to go there and then you’re not even giving me the results.

Alefiya Khoraki: 9:22

So, you frustrate the customer. So don’t do that. Give them the results immediately and and have something else on the results page that leads them to the email. Okay, so the e-commerce course example I gave you. We had a 50 pager PDF where we broke down what is the right strategy, where is the right strategy, and where the wrong ones could be the right ones in which scenario? And then we also had a webinar where that person taught her students on how to get more clients through that webinar. So people were like anyway, it would be top of their mind, and they did rush to check the PDFs, like why did I get the wrong answer, or whatever it is. And then they did open the email. We do not frustrate them. We give them the results.

Alefiya Khoraki: 10:08

And it was a choice to go to that email. Right now it becomes a choice. Now it doesn’t become like a frustration. With e-commerce, you can say like, okay, I send this and now, um, this is your style and now I’ve curated a personal Pinterest board that matches your style and you’ll get that via email. So now I am prompt, like now I have the habit of opening your email.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 10:33

Yeah, how do business owners approach that results part? And you gave a few great examples. So one would be they get a PDF file back and it seems like there might be groupings, I guess, of results where they might have, like, if I have a PDF file, it’s not going to be everyone gets the same file, but maybe there’s a few different groupings. Like, could you explain, like, what does that look like for results?

Sonja Crystal Williams: 11:01

This is like three days ago I delivered a 90 minute master class just for this okay, so we’re going to deliver this and and everyone needs to get in touch with you to make it by size.

Alefiya Khoraki: 11:14

So t he cliche answer is it depends. Yeah. And then the long, longer answer is that usually we have different groupings so we have different like either–

Alefiya Khoraki: 11:27

If you’re doing a personality type, we can, we can take in human design into the perspective. And people have assertive traits. Some people have more softer, calmer, peaceful side. So we usually take into human design into consideration so that we can win their trust and likability from that first section. The first section is not to sell.

Alefiya Khoraki: 11:49

It’s just like I am describing you so much in detail that you think, like this is something like how I usually take astrology for example here that when that’s super relevant, so relevant that you think that this has to make sense, like this is it. Like you know, that’s how horoscopes are made, they’re relevant to everyone. Like today you’ll see the light and you’ll have that, and that’s it’s so particular and so specific. So specificity is there. Like just before this call I was with I was consulting someone on a travel quiz and where she had like what’s your personality style and what type of river cruise would I recommend based on that personality style? Like, what’s your traveling style.

Alefiya Khoraki: 12:31

And there she said that one of you prefer luxury. And then it was just there. Like you are a person of luxury. I was like no, go specific. Like tell them, not just in travel, but how their day-to-day life reflects luxury. Like whenever you go to the supermarket to choose wine, you don’t even look to the bottom shelf and you’re always like the elite person. You’re the Harvey Specter who would never settle for the random tailor suits. Your suits are from XYZ brand and you’re someone who just walks and talks class. So why shouldn’t your travel experience reflect your personality? And then you take it. Take them so you know when you’re telling them, you’re telling them about themselves. But you, what you want is that trust, that smile, that likability, that nod that they are like okay, this is amazing.

Alefiya Khoraki: 13:24

I like that, like I know that, and you know you’re kind of like fulfilling their personalities. Yeah, so yeah.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 13:33

So quizzes can build trust is one of the things I’ve heard. In some cases, specificity is super helpful because it makes it more relatable. And then and these are really just great sales tactics in general, even though the idea is not to make the person feel like they’re being sold to um, and so that’s really important too and then some personalization.

Alefiya Khoraki: 13:56

In some cases, um can also in all cases so, like in this case, if it wasn’t a quiz, it would be like, okay, you’re going to a cruise and I would uh show all the ways that you can enjoy a cruise. But why this makes it super personalized is because each of them is getting a tailored cruise experience according to their personal travel personality style. If you’re adventurous, you’re getting an itinerary just for that adventurous. And you know the whole reason why quizzes and the sales part is so effective after the quiz because it’s literally me. It’s not speaking to five different types of people, it’s me, legit me. So, okay, this is me. For me, this is just literally what I want and this speaks to my personality, so let’s just do it.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 14:47

So this question might throw you on the spot and if you don’t have an answer, that’s totally fine. But just curious of when people, let’s say, they end up on a landing page to take a quiz and we know, like, average open rate on an email campaign is, you know, 23 or 20 to 25%. Average open rate on text messaging campaigns could be 90 plus percent for quizzes. Okay, what would you guesstimate? Or if you have like an actual, accurate, based on at least your experience with your clients, like how many people actually see the quiz and then they take the quiz.

Alefiya Khoraki: 15:24

Love that question and this is what I talk about. Like, average lead magnet conversion rate is around 3 percent to 30 percent and 30% being the highest. Yeah, and with quizzes. This is according to ConvertK it with quizzes the average conversion rate starts from the 30% is the lowest. So that’s why even the most like yucky type quizzes on the internet, they still perform. I’m going to get leads. Yeah, they are still like. It starts from 30%.

Alefiya Khoraki: 15:56

So, the quiz average is 30 to 55 ish percent. Okay, that is like those yes/ no surveys. And even that is falling in this range. The quizzes I’ve done for clients we’ve seen above 75. Wow. So if 100 people are coming in, 75 to 90 people are coming in. 75% to 90% people are taking that quiz. Huge, because what we just don’t have, that like only one pager snippet, which usually people only have, that one pager, like take this quiz.

Alefiya Khoraki: 16:27

What we also do is we create, like, we treat it like a sales page. So we start with a problem or a dream state and then we say, like this is the context of your life right now and this is the question that is on top of your mind. Um, like, shall I buy a home in Yorkshire or shall I buy a home in London? Like that’s the question and that’s the answer that you’ll get after taking the quiz. Okay, so, and then what we also do is like below in the uh, what do you call it? After the fold in the next sections, um, we also break them down on what they will get after they take the quiz.

Alefiya Khoraki: 17:08

Okay, so they will get PDF, they will get the Pinterest board. So it also compels them to take the quiz, not just for the answer, but also for the next lead magnet.

Alefiya Khoraki: 17:19

Because here’s the thing that people miss quizzes are great lead gen um, lead gen magnet, but they’re only attraction magnets yeah, they attract interest so top of the funnel somewhere up there very top of the funnel, like if you just leave a quiz and then you just leave a results page and then you ask them to open the like, go to the email. It will not work. You need to have that conversion magnet in between, which can be a webinar, which can be a PDF, which can be a book, which can be like a video campaign, which can be some like if you’re talking about e-commerce businesses, it could be some special discounts or you know, some special boxes, gift boxes, whatever it is. There has to be something more on the results page than just delivering the information.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 18:14

Wow. So I’m going to get down to asking you a few final questions. So one is and you’ve kind of brought this to light but for people who are really new to quizzes, these quizzes should be built on a landing page. Should that landing page live on their website? Should it be hosted by some external software?

Alefiya Khoraki: 18:32

So you’ll need an external software to host a quiz. Unless you have like a super huge marketing budget and you want to build that software yourself, like Omo Health did, then feel free to do everything by yourself, but you’ll need an external software. The softwares I love the best are Interact, Typeform and ScoreApp. I really like these three softwares. They’re very easy to use. Typeform has a video element, Interact is amazing with GIFs and images, and then ScoreApp is the only quiz software which can make personalized diagnosis in each problem sector.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 19:09

Yeah.

Alefiya Khoraki: 19:10

So, yeah, all those three and you can host your own. So if you’re hosting the whole landing page on Interact, the landing page will show Interact. So what you can do is host the landing page on your website, like if you’re using Squarespace or what is that.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 19:29

WordPress yeah, yeah.

Alefiya Khoraki: 19:31

You can use WordPress and whatever you want to use. You can use that and then you just embed the quiz on your site, okay, so that? So you don’t have that watermark or that um URL of that quiz software coming in. So that’s what I recommend you host it all in-house. But if you’re like super starting out doing under 5k a month and you want to just like outsource everything, so host it on the quiz software and then, when your budget grows, host it on your domain got it and and budget wise, what you do is come in what?

Sonja Crystal Williams: 20:07

What are the parts that you handle on the quiz side of things? Do you handle it from top to bottom or come in and do a specific aspect?

Alefiya Khoraki: 20:14

So I have different tiers and the first tier that we work with is we start with research. So it’s like it’s a non-negotiable, it has to be done. It has to be done really well. So we spend like two weeks to three weeks on that and that includes surveying your buyers, the one who didn’t buy, the people who wrote like negative comments, your competitors, conducting interviews, maybe some guerrilla researchers, then also discussions like going on surveys and forums, amazon reviews, youtube reviews. All that process is done and it’s very crucial because you have to use your customers words’ words when you’re talking to them. So research, then research report, offer optimization, because if you don’t have a good enough offer and you’re leading that quiz to that offer, it will not convert. So even that’s important offer optimization. Then you also do story scraping. So we meet with the founder and we scrape their stories because we want to lead, we want to create, like in 2024, just pain point marketing is not working, like, hey, you have this problem that we need to surround that problem in an ecosystem of stories.

Alefiya Khoraki: 21:29

So we do story scraping and then we get to the writing. So with the writing I write the quiz landing page, the quiz results pages, the emails, everything that goes into the quiz ecosystem, and then that’s the first package. Then, if they want, we do the implementation and design as well.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 21:45

OK, the second package yeah this is way more thought out than I ever imagined and I love how you broke it down in such a short period of time, because I’ve been on Interact, I’ve been on Type form and they have those quiz templates and they make it look so easy. But the way you’ve just described it, it seems like you could get way more out of this by taking the approach that you just outlined. So I want to thank you so much for that. Alefiya, um, I always like to end every every episode sharing um a little bit about you in our lightning round, so I’m just going to ask you a few quick final questions as we wrap things up. One of the conversations you and I had previously was just about your extensive travels and just such an interesting background and all the things you’ve done. You shared you’ve lived a few places around the world. What has been one of your favorite places that you’ve lived so few places around the world? What has what has been one of your favorite places that you’ve lived so far and why?

Alefiya Khoraki: 22:41

Nairobi. I love Nairobi, one reason it has the perfect weather all around the year.

Alefiya Khoraki: 22:49

Oh, wow so it’s like not super cold, it never snows, but it’s like that perfect chilly where you just have the comfiest night every single night and you can just see my smile widening and widening on the name of right, yeah, and the atmosphere is amazing, the greenery. Then you get wildlife every now and then. I love animals and jungle so you get to experience like musaima or whatever it is, every now and then, whenever you want it, some crazy jungle experiences which, if you want to know, you can hit me up and I’ll share some lion photos and rhinosaurs, geocene photos and all that.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 23:24

So yeah, Nairobi.

Alefiya Khoraki: 23:25

I love Nairobi.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 23:26

Okay, on my list, on my list to go. And while you were in Nairobi, I think you shared with me in a previous life– I always say in a previous life when you did something completely different to what you do now. But you mentioned you owned a bakery. So did you just jump right into this world of digital marketing and quizzes and funnels like from owning a bakery, or was there some kind of step in between?

Alefiya Khoraki: 23:46

Yeah, it’s different for all of us. So when I started this business, I was still in my final year of graduation, so I’m 24 and this is what I did when I was 19. So COVID hit and I was like, okay, I really need a hobby along with my university classes which was just there in the morning, so let me just do something. And I wanted to save $800 USD for a university event. I was like it held a lot of meaning to me, so I didn’t want to be a spoiled brat and just get it from my dad, so let me just find ways to earn this money.

Alefiya Khoraki: 24:22

So at first I started with baking cheese, homemade cheese, and then my mother was like I don’t think this is gonna pick up. But I was trying different things and I loved baking, but no one at my like. We were only four people at our house and it was covid, so no one ate. So, okay, I need to find people who can eat it. Yeah, and I need to find the budget to make good stuff so that I don’t like um, I don’t wipe out all my mother’s grocery budget. That’s how the bakery was born. My brother is a photographer, so we had that edge where the branding was super luxurious and the photos were super fancy, so that’s what kept the eyes like I was a loot. My mother and father was like you loot people. So I charged like around 200- 300 for a cake and around 100 for a brownie tray and whereas the normal price there was 30.

Alefiya Khoraki: 25:14

But just because of that photography luxury yeah perceived luxury and that’s where I got into marketing. So I used to run. I figured out this whole Instagram thing because I was running my campaigns on there.

Alefiya Khoraki: 25:28

And then a friend helped me with Facebook Ad campaigns and I was really enjoying the marketing side. Like, so much so that I wanted to stop doing the big like, outsource the big, the breaky part, and just keeping doing the marketing campaigns. And someone introduced me, like they had, a virtual online marketing seminar. I went to that and then I got hooked and a lot of events happened which would take another 10 minutes so that doesn’t matter to you all. But then I came to India. I had like 40 60 days to do nothing.

Alefiya Khoraki: 25:57

My husband I just got married and my husband went for a pilgrimage and that’s where I was like, okay, let me just brainstorm ways on what I can do. So I started off by cold emailing people on can I be your bakery startup consultant? And no one responded. And then one thing led to another. I started with LinkedIn marketing, then funnels. So I did funnels for one of the biggest names on LinkedIn.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 26:21

Yeah.

Alefiya Khoraki: 26:23

End-to-end launches and end-to-end funnels. And then in March last this year I had one quiz project and it was like it just landed like out of the blue, and it was a quiz project and it got these 75 to 80% conversions, whereas we were getting 30 to 40% average. And I was like, okay, this is is something different. And then I had another project. I was like, hey, this just happened. I can’t guarantee any results, but I think that this is something interesting and we can try it. And then it crossed like it was above more than 80 percent that’s okay, this is not beginner’s luck.

Alefiya Khoraki: 27:00

Something’s clicking and that’s what we need to niche down into quizzes. So now we, I, my whole team, everyone is just doing quizzes, and then if the clients want help with funnels, we do that as well. And the thing that that’s why I talked about offer optimization and having the right funnel in place is because, because I’ve done funnels, I can look at the larger picture yes where the quiz fits in into the funnel yeah, very huge congratulations on such wonderful success.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 27:30

How can people get in touch with you if they want to get more information about your services or just see the lion photos?

Alefiya Khoraki: 27:38

I live and breathe on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn: a-l-e-f-i-y-a-k-h-o-r-a-k-i, Alefiya Khoraki. And yeah, I’ll mostly like respond within 24 hours, okay perfect.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 27:52

All right, Alefiya. Thank you so much for being our guest today. We may have to talk to you sometimes. Really good information. Everyone find Alefiya on LinkedIn. Until then, bye, everybody.