Both online trainers and corporates struggle with two common problems when it comes to training:  driving learner engagement and reducing dropout.

Even if your courses include the best subject matter, if learners leave midway through there’s no point investing time and money in creating courses. To aid retention, businesses incorporate quizzes into the training process as this not only help learners gain insights into how much knowledge they have acquired, but also keeps them motivated to continue and complete the course.

Although businesses have started to incorporate quizzes into their training courses, they are still far from achieving their desired outcomes and one reason is that the quizzes do not meet the audiences’ expectations. If you really want your quizzes to supplement your training efforts, you can’t expect random quizzes to generate results. Instead, follow these five tips to ensure that your quizzes get the traction that your training courses deserve.

1. Determine Your Objectives

Before you create a quiz, there is some preparation required. First, it is important to identify exactly what you want to achieve. Do you want to create a pit-stop for the learner to relax, or wish to extend your learners’ knowledge? Or, do you want to assess the learners’ knowledge of the course content so far? More often than not, most online trainers are vague about their purpose when designing quizzes. Placement of the quiz is also crucial as they can frustrate learners if introduced too early. The golden rule is to introduce the quiz when a considerable amount of learning has already happened, say 30-40%. So, run a beta test among your team and decide the placement accordingly.

2. Do Your Research

Taking an existing quiz from some of your competitors and giving it to your learners is not the greatest idea. Instead, you need to create a quiz that will differ in many ways, and you can achieve that through extensive research.

You should dedicate time to determine which topic will best connect with your users. You can achieve this by finding out which quizzes are regularly shared by users to get a glimpse into your learners’ preferences and interests. Moreover, you can prepare a checklist to follow in the process of framing your questions.

3. Determine Your Target Audience

Creating a business level quiz for a 5th grader won’t serve any purpose. If you include too much jargon in your quiz, it will simply alienate your readers. Instead, step into the audiences’ shoes to assess what type of quizzes will work, and what won’t. The way you connect with them will further determine your quizzes’ success. Another way to determine your target audience, other than through market research, is to choose specific demographics based on certain factors such as age, gender, location, income level, education level, marital status and occupation. This way, it is easier for you to identify your target audience and create quizzes relevant to them.

4. Decide the Tone of Your Quiz

After determining the topic and the objective of a quiz, you should consider its overall tone. When framing the questions, you should pay attention to using language that is user-friendly and precise, and create questions that are fun to read. Furthermore, if the goal of your questions is information gathering, they need to have a proper flow. To make them even more engaging, you can include visual elements such as videos, images, or GIFs.

5. Come Up With a Captivating Title

Even if you have created an engaging and well researched quiz, it won’t be successful without an eye-catching title. Chances are that your learners won’t even bother to read the questions if the title isn’t sufficiently appealing. Try to find quizzes that attract instant attention because of their headline, and learn from them. To get a glimpse of what might be interesting to your learners, visit popular websites which conduct quizzes regularly. Make sure your title is short, precise and, most importantly, that it defines the outcome for users.

6. Pay Attention to the Time Frame

Remember that your learners are super busy, and that attention spans have declined. Therefore, creating lengthy quizzes is equivalent to not creating a quiz at all as your audience won’t pay it much attention. That doesn’t mean that your quiz should necessarily be short, but it should be short enough to motivate users to complete it. Generally quizzes should not take more than 3 minutes to complete. Try limiting the number of questions and include only those that will make sense to the reader.

7. Provide Feedback

Successful quizzes always deliver valuable feedback to the users, and this can relate to anything in the quiz. If your feedback is designed for information purposes, you can provide users with their rating. Delivering valuable feedback will motivate users to explore your website further and learn more about the subject of the quiz.

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Start Your Journey to Viral Quizzes Today

If your first quiz is not a huge success, or if it failed to make a huge impact, don’t give up! The chances of your first quiz going viral are quite small, actually. You should judge the impact of your first quiz, learn from it, and make the necessary improvements next time.

To realize what went wrong, you should check which of your questions had the maximum traction, which ones were misunderstood, and where users dropped off during the quiz. Your quiz might turn out to be either too difficult or too easy for your audience, and that is why you should constantly try new strategies in order to achieve your goals.

To sum up, if you want your quizzes to get maximum attention, following these tips will ensure you get the desired results. Knowing your learners, performing research and staying focused will help you reach your objectives and attract new users as well.

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