What to send after someone finishes your quiz and doesn't buy

Why don't people buy after finishing a quiz?

Because finishing a quiz and being ready to buy are two different states. Someone who completes a quiz has told you they have a problem. They have not told you they trust your answer to it yet.

Interact analysed over 80 million quiz submissions and found around 65% of people who start a quiz finish it, and around 37.6% of those hand over an email address. Read it the other way round and most people who finish your quiz still do not buy. That is not a broken quiz. That is a normal quiz with nothing useful attached to the back of it.

The hesitation is almost never about the product. It is about whether the product works for them specifically. They have a specific dog, a specific set of symptoms, a specific situation, and they just typed all of it into your quiz. Then they get an email addressed to nobody in particular.

The information to close them is sitting in your own database. Most brands never use it.

What should the first follow-up email say?

It should say back to them what they told you, and then answer the objection that their answers imply.

Someone who picked the worst option on your severity question has a different unspoken worry than someone who picked the mildest. The severe one is worried nothing will work because nothing has yet. The mild one is worried they are overreacting and do not need to spend the money. Same product, two different emails.

That is the whole approach. Repeat their answers back, name the worry those answers point to, and answer it in plain language. No discount, no countdown timer, no urgency. Those signal that you are running a sequence. The point is to not look like a sequence.

Keep it short. Under 120 words. Written the way a person writes an email, not the way a brand writes a campaign.

What does a good quiz follow-up email look like?

Short, specific, and written as if one person sent it to another.

Here is the shape. A dog owner takes a separation anxiety quiz, answers that the barking has been going on for two years and that they have already tried a crate and a calming collar, then leaves without ordering.

Four things are doing the work there. It names her actual answers, so it cannot have been written in advance. It states the worry she has not said out loud, which is that this is money after money. It gives one piece of real information for free. And it ends with an open door rather than a buy button.

No discount. No countdown. No product photo. If she writes back, she tells you exactly what is stopping her, and now you are having a conversation instead of running a sequence.

How long after the quiz should you send it?

Within the hour, while the person still remembers taking the quiz.

The window on a quiz funnel closes fast. Most people decide within a week of taking the quiz, and most of them stop thinking about it after the first day. An email that arrives four days later is competing with everything else that happened in those four days.

There is one constraint on speed, which is time of day. An email that lands at 3am local time sits under forty others by the time they wake up. Send fast, but hold anything outside normal waking hours until the next morning in the recipient's timezone.

Should the follow-up come from a person or a brand?

From a person, with a name, whose replies go to a real inbox.

An email from a brand name gets read as marketing and filed as marketing. An email from a named person at that brand gets read as a message. That changes how people respond to it and how inbox providers treat it.

This only works if the reply goes somewhere. The single biggest failure in quiz follow-up is sending a personal-sounding email from a no-reply address. People do reply to these. When they do, they are telling you the exact objection standing between them and the order, in their own words. If nobody answers, you have just taught them the personal tone was fake.

How many emails should a quiz follow-up sequence have?

One that is written for the person, then at most two more.

The common setup is a five or seven email welcome sequence that every quiz taker drops into regardless of what they answered. Volume is doing the work there, and it does not work very well. Each email that ignores what the person told you makes the next one easier to ignore.

A better shape is one email that references their actual answers and invites a reply, then a second a few days later if nothing comes back, then a third that closes the loop and stops. Three touches, each one aware of the answers, beats seven that are not.

The count matters far less than whether anything in the sequence can respond. A person who replies to email one should get an answer from a human, not email two on schedule.

Why doesn't your email platform already do this?

Because email platforms send sequences, and a sequence cannot hold a conversation.

Klaviyo, Mailchimp and the rest are excellent at what they do, which is sending planned messages to segments on a schedule. You can segment on quiz answers and branch a flow. What you cannot do is write a message that responds to the specific combination of answers one person gave, and you definitely cannot reply to what they write back.

Segmentation gets you five versions of an email. It does not get you a conversation. The gap between those two things is where most of the recoverable revenue sits.

Frequently asked questions