How We Know Our Franchise Matching Quiz Is Working

If you’ve perused FranchiseHelp in the past 9 months, you’ve noticed a bit of a change in some of the ways that we acquire leads.

Prior to this period, we used predominantly what I like to call a “Directory Strategy.” Essentially, we used to be a hub for franchises to post information about themselves. Subsequently, visitors would come and read about different franchises, hopefully settling on a few franchises to speak to.

Of course, one of the major flaws with this strategy is that humans are notoriously bad at knowing what they want.

As world famous behvioral economist Dan Ariely once put it,

“[Humans] are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing.”

Ultimately, simply encouraging potential franchisees to browse around can invite rather unexpected outcomes.

So toward the end of last year, we started experimenting with the idea of helping people find the franchises that were actually right for them.

Thus, the franchise matching quiz was born. (If you want to take a peek through the flow, start by clicking here.)

As you’ll see, it’s a 5-20 question brief assessment about what the prospective franchisee is looking for and what type of qualifications they have. (The reason I can't give you an exact number of questions is that we're continually changing the questions we include and exclude in the quiz flow. Sometimes it's 5. Sometimes it's 20. Ultimately, it's important for us to continually experiment with our user experience, so we can stay on the cutting edge.)

While the effects of using this acquisition strategy vs. the directory strategy are numerous, today I want to focus on one of the questions that we receive most often,

“How do you know that this is a better strategy?”

A totally fair question, and one that is best answered in a very long-winded treatise on internet theory.

However, I’ll try to boil it down to a single point: it gives us a better chance to find the right person instead of any person.

Let me introduce you to one of the questions that we’ve asked on the quiz since the very beginning:

As you can imagine, we want to find as many people as we can who fall into the two blue buckets on the right.

When you look at what the data looks like for EVERYONE that answers that question, here’s what you see:

So, according to our statistics, 76% of the people who answer this question on the quiz are interested or very interested in opening a franchise. Ultimately, we all wish that that number was higher, but I'd say it's pretty good.

Now here's the thing about the data presented above. That sample is actually made up of three separate groups of individuals:

1. People who start the quiz but don’t finish (Quiz Abandoners)
2. People who finish the quiz but don’t become leads (Quiz Finishers)
3. People who ultimately are turned into franchise leads (Leads)

It’s important to note that in a directory strategy all 3 of these audiences are co-mingled. There’s no mechanism to ensure that people who are not that interested don’t become leads. It’s not too far of a stretch to think that, in a directory strategy, 76% of leads would be interested or very interested in opening a franchise.

Here’s where we start to realize that the matching quiz is working. Here’s what the data looks like for each of the three groups separately:

So, 86% of the leads that we end up passing along to the franchises that work with us are interested or very interested in opening a franchise.(This was compared to the 76% of all quiz takers.)

While the jump from 76 to 86 percent may not excite all of you, it's a huge deal when you think about the number of people who come through our funnel. On the order of hundreds of thousands of people are visiting the quiz every month. So seeing this increase in interest is a huge deal and ultimately one piece of proof that our strategy is working.

And asking our visitors their level of interest is just one way that we're ensuring that we're passing along the best leads. We keep tabs on other factors like net worth, motives for opening a franchise, and whether someone has previously been a business owner just to name a few.

As we have the chance to learn more and more about the world of prospective franchisees, we’ll be able to stay ahead of the curve in terms of delivering the best leads we possibly can.

If you want to learn about FranchiseHelp’s lead generation programs, let us know!