Your 10 Step Guide – Go Live with Your Interactive Assessment!

Congratulations on getting started with your interactive assessment on Evalinator!

This guide will help you channel your expertise into an interactive assessment which will serve as an evergreen content marketing asset. If you are setting up a Wheel Of Life, then use this guide as well.

 We are laying out 10 steps for you in this guide. Do these systematically, and you will have your target users engaging with your interactive assessment quickly. 

Once your users respond, you can engage with them through goal setting. That will become a powerful mechanism for meaningful sales follow ups. 

So you will address the entire customer life cycle – from lead generation and email database building to sales follow ups and conversion to revenue. 

Completing each step below in sequence will also motivate you to keep making progress!

Here’s to our partnership. We’ll be here for you every step of the way.

Step 1: Set up your profile

Grade: Easy

When you log in, your profile is at the top of the screen. You are front and center!  There’s nothing better than logging on and seeing yourself smiling back at you! So let’s do that first. This can be your company logo too of course.

1. Choose and upload a nice picture you use on your other channels – your website, Twitter, or LinkedIn. You want your face (or your company logo) to be the same everywhere so that your users feel a sense of continuity. So try choosing a picture you use often. For a personal picture, a smile is proven to build customer engagement, so if you don’t have a smiling picture, it’s time to either ask someone to take it now.  Remember to pick a suitable background.  For most, a plain background is fine, but you can select one based on your area of expertise – at an event, in the gym, in nature etc.
2. You should already have a profile description of you or your company. You don’t need anything too fancy, just 2-3 sentences should do.  Make sure you put your purpose and your most important credentials first. Something like: ‘An established coach with 15 years of experience. My purpose is to help your unleash your creativity. I have worked with organizations such as …, and helped over … professionals.

Remember: Don’t overthink. Nothing is final. You can come back and change this anytime.  Keep moving.

Step 2: Set up the title and rating scales of your interactive assessment

Grade:  Medium

Optional: You can start this step in a spreadsheet to make it easier.

Here’s where you take the first attempt at zooming in to the subject matter of your interactive assessment. In all probability, you have thought about this already so take a first pass at what you want your assessment to look like.

1. Choose a title for your assessment. This may not be the final title but choosing a title grounds you. It’s like a radar. That’s why many purposeful bloggers think of their title first, and you always set an agenda for your meetings. A title keeps us from rambling. It also sets you up for the next step instead of getting lost with the details. So choose a title that defines your purpose. Don’t worry. This is not the final title. You just want to define what your focus will be. So something like “See how green you are?” is good enough. As you go along, you can always make it fancy like “X steps to a greener you!”, and edit the title to suit that if need be.
2. Choose how you want your audience to see their scores. Generally this is done by set up tiers or rating scales. Generally, 3 levels are good and practical, but 5 is also good in some industries like software or manufacturing. The levels are your guide to the questions you will set up. It will keep your questions focused. The tiers you set up will also allow you to write better questions. You can always come back and edit the rating scales. For now, just think about and set up the most logical way you think your interactive assessment is going to work.  

Remember: Don’t overthink. Nothing is final. You can come back and change this anytime.  Keep moving.

Step 3: Setup the segmentation profile fields to enable the right customer analytics

Grade:  Medium

Here’s where you’ll setup the basics of your segmentation. Segmentation is about the individual taking the assessment. Once you have the results you will use these fields to compare and contrast the result in interesting ways. For example, one type of stakeholder may rate themselves high, while others may rate low. That’s a great insight to dig into.

This can be fairly easy, but also can quickly get pretty complex. So don’t over-analyze as you get started.

1. Set up 2 or 3 profile fields. Depending on your business, this is generally something that directly maps to your target audience. For example, how big of a business they are, what industry they are in, different titles or designations, functional area of respondents etc. Coaches might want to set up age and other related fields. 
2. Once you define the profile fields, set up some values for them. Be careful because it is easy to get too granular. For example, if one of your fields is the title of the respondent, you should be careful to restrict the selection of value to between 3 – 5 values. Keep them relevant and only include the most important ones. Making the list longer will make it difficult for you. The most important reason is that you will then have to get responses for every profile field value to analyze the data meaningfully and show it to users. Your graphs will always look a little empty. So select the top 3 to 5 values you think are most likely to respond. You can add more later if needed.

Reminder: Again, don’t overthink. Nothing is final. You can come back and change this anytime.  Keep moving.  

Step 4a: Pass 1: Setup the questions for your interactive assessment

Grade: Difficult

Options: You can continue to use your spreadsheet if you find it easier.

This step can get a little hairy because this is the meat of your interactive assessment. So we will do it in 2 passes. This step might take up to 2-3 days.

Some people are too creative for their own good. For example, when we first set up the assessment “Is Evalinator right for you?” on our home page, we set up 5 different dimensions of analysis and 6-7 questions under each one of those dimensions. We ended up making it too complicated for our own good. The intent was excellent but we were not ready for the complexity. So after several months of struggling, we finally bit the bullet, and made it a linear assessment with 10 questions. 

In many cases, having multiple dimensions may make sense. For example, as a sales coach you might want to measure content, org structure, and best practices as 3 dimensions. The important thing is to make sure they don’t overlap. So measuring “content”, and “target customers” might result in duplication and confusion because they are linked – content questions will ask about target customers. So just take care of that aspect. Keep the topics independent, and you’ll be good.

To get started, we recommend just creating a simple linear assessment, not a multi-dimensional one.

What’s a good question? A question should allow you logical followups so you can help your customers and prospects improve. So any topic that is controllable by your customers can be a question. That’s the purpose of Evalinator. Things that your prospects can’t change should be posed as profile questions.

Each question has a title, and description.  You can use the title field to also denote category of the question. For example “Segmentation” and then use the description field for the question itself.  Play with it, and see what works. 

Under each question, define response options that users will select. The important thing is to have at least as many response options as your rating scales. So that each response option maps to at least one rating scale. It makes scoring the responses much easier for both you and your users. People like simplicity.

Remember: Don’t overthink. Nothing is final. You can come back and change this anytime.  Keep moving. 

Step 5: Pass 2: Refine the questions for your Evalinator

Grade: Difficult

Sometimes, you need to take a break or pick up a complex topic another day. This is Pass 2. You will review the questions you have set up and adjust them as needed.

Sometimes it also helps to google a bit on your target topic. See what other thought leaders are saying about this topic. It might help to get your thoughts organized. Don’t copy from anyone else of course, just get some inspiration.

Wrap it up. Don’t overthink. Consider what your customers think of intuitively. Sometimes our own expertise makes things more complicated than they should be.

Step 6: Add images to the questions in your Evalinator

Grade: Medium

People like relevant visuals. So set up a nice picture for each of your questions.  And also for the background image on the Evalinator and each assessment

1. Make sure to keep your visuals aligned with what you have used in the past. If you are just starting out, then pick a picture theme that works for you. For example, some people may pick out colorful pictures with people in them, and some might pick out simple ones with one or two words on them. Just remember to keep them uniform, and aligned with your target customers.
2. Use any of the free or paid image sources online. Make sure they are either royalty free or grant you a license to use the images. One good source is pixabay.com.
3. We have found that for simple images with words or signs on them, creating them in a simple tool like Canva, or even MS Powerpoint is a fine option. Just make sure you size them properly.
4. Get creative help if you need it. There are many freelance designers who would do this for you very cheaply with high quality. Look up fiverr.com for inspiration, or tap into your network.  

Step 7: Set up the color scheme for your Evalinator

Grade: Medium

Your Evalinator needs to look nice, and also match with the color scheme of your own website.

1. If you are a DIYer, then just go ahead and set up the right colors for your Evalinator.
2. If not, get a freelancer to help you. They might even inspire you to make broader changes so be careful there!

Step 8: Dress rehearsal for your Interactive Assessment

Grade: Easy

It’s time to run though the assessment online. Hit publish, and then go through it as a user would.

1. Check your landing page content – grammar, brevity, clarity
2. See if your questions are simple enough. Simplify them and make them crisp. Don’t try to cover ALL possibilities.
3. Check the descriptions of your rating scales. Keep them punchy. No need to write a big essay here.
4. Check your color scheme
5. Review and update the pictures. 

You might also want to get feedback from a real user or two. Send them the link and tell them to take the assessment, and see what they think. They will come up with insights you didn’t think of. Just remember to take all feedback with a pinch of salt. You are the best judge of what you are after. Remember Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and others. Believe in your vision.

Step 9: Connect your content marketing email provider

Grade: Easy

You will collect email addresses when users take the assessment. So you will want to capture them in your marketing automation provider.

Here are the available integrations and instructions to set them.

1. Create a new list to capture these users
2. Set up this list within your Evalinator settings
3. Set up a welcome email in your email marketing tool

You can make this more advanced, but this should do for now.

Step 10: Go live!

Grade: Easy

Congrats! You are ready. Embed the Evalinator on your website. And start collecting responses. See instructions here.

1. Create a new page on your website and place your assessment there.
2. It’s best to prime the pump. So ask a few trusted users to take it so the Evalinator has some data in it. Make any final changes.
3. Then send it to the next wave of people.
4. And then go all out.

At this stage, you are helping your audience tremendously. And you have a content marketing asset that will keep on giving.

Congratulations!

Remember: Your journey has just started. You have to now compile the insights you gather to engage your customers, do meaningful sales follow ups, and help them set and meet their goals through goal setting.