I never imagined that one of the most worthwhile marketing investments I’d make for BLUEPRINT would be…a quiz.
Rewind to 2021. I was four years deep into building this branding studio for Realtors, refining the business one thoughtful decision at a time. I was investing in better systems, a stronger website, richer client resources, and work I believed served agents well. An “interactive personality quiz” belonged somewhere far outside my carefully curated creative universe. Like between the corner of BuzzFeed and dancing IG reels, for instance, and we all know I take myself MUCH too seriously to enjoy such Internet amusements (she says, as she moodboards European linen and lovingly kerns out the type from a Swedish font foundry that is perfectly EDITORIAL). Surely no quiz could function as part of a meaningful marketing strategy.
That assumption unraveled pretty quickly in February of 2021 when I first signed up for Interact, an online software platform that allows businesses to create customized, interactive quizzes for lead generation.
Five years later I can confidently say that my studio quiz has become one unexpected virtual “front porch” of my business:
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More than 60% of my email list has been built through Interact, and after connecting the quiz to an automated email workflow, my digital real estate template sales increased by more than 40%.
Even more valuable than the numbers, though, has been the quality of the conversations it has created. Instead of attracting people looking for another free download, our studio quiz consistently introduces me to truly brand-curious Realtors who are already thinking deeply about their business, and who often arrive in my Inbox feeling like we’ve already met.
That last part, I think, is the real story.
Because Interact is less about the software itself and more about creating an uncommonly excellent experience that helps people feel understood before you’ve ever asked them to know, like or trust you.
I was looking for a stronger first impression (not another lead magnet)
As Founder + Creative Director of a boutique branding studio, I’ve always struggled with traditional lead magnets. I could have written another checklist or created another downloadable guide in my early days as a company, but every idea felt disconnected from the work I actually do, which is meticulously translating identities into brands that feel like the obvious choice.
If discovery is at the heart of my client process, why shouldn’t it also be the first experience someone has with this studio?
That question became the seed for the quiz.
Building a quiz that felt like BLUEPRINT
Once I committed to creating an Interact quiz, I knew it couldn’t feel like homework.
Most business quizzes ask direct + predictable questions: What’s your biggest challenge? What’s your marketing style? What’s your ideal client? The problem with questions like these is that they breed static, rehearsed answers. People begin answering as the business owner they think they should be, rather than the person they naturally are, with living + breathing assumptions and insecurities and core beliefs about their best offers.
When I’m working with a branding client, some of the most revealing conversations have almost nothing to do with “marketing.” We talk about the places they’re drawn to, their personal service moments that make them feel something, the tools they instinctively reach for, the environments where they feel most at ease. Those seemingly unrelated details often reveal far more about someone’s core emotional identity than asking them to describe themselves ever could.
So I drafted my Interact quiz around that philosophy.
Rather than asking Realtors about marketing tactics, I invite them into a series of visual lifestyle choices. They choose the home interior that feels most like them, the kitchen countertop they can’t stop staring at, the outfit they’d wear to a showing, the cocktail they’d order after a long week, the quote that resonates most deeply, and even how they’d spend a rare Saturday with nothing on the calendar.
To someone taking the quiz, it feels playful. Yet behind the scenes, every answer contributes to a purposeful framework that uncovers how they organically show up in the world and, by extension, how their brand might be authentically expressed.
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By the end of those eleven questions, each Realtor is matched with one of four personalized brand blueprints: California Casual, Modern Lake House, European Farmhouse, or Spanish Charmer. I rooted each archetype in the world Realtors already know + love, each designed to capture not only their visual style, but the emotional experience they’re naturally equipped to create for clients. These aren’t abstract personality labels that could apply to anyone, but aesthetic environments and values-driven containers to find one’s place in.
The quiz was never meant to be the destination
One of the biggest mistakes I see with personality quizzes is that they build all of the anticipation around discovering your result, only to reward you with a paragraph or two of generic copy that reeks of sales-breath.
I wanted the opposite experience.
To me, the results page is where credibility is either earned or lost.
Every one of my four archetypes has its own beautifully designed, in-depth results experience. Rather than simply telling someone, “You’re a California Casual,” I walk them through why they landed there while explaining the emotional qualities that define their brand, the clients they’re naturally wired to attract, the experience people have when working with them, the strengths they should lean into, and the blind spots that can unintentionally hold them back.
From there, I begin translating those personality traits into a few key insights relative to that archetype. While the results offer sound guidance, I never attempt to prescribe a “strategy,” since we know that real brands with stories + soul, built for longevity, are never assembled from templates or personality types. It’s important to hold a tool like this in its proper place: in my view as a seasoned / trusted creative, a well-made quiz can illuminate tendencies, preferences, and recurring themes, but it certainly cannot do the deeply human work of building a truly bespoke brand. That’s a process that unfolds through listening well, asking better questions, and uncovering the nuances that no algorithm or personality type could capture.
If the BLUEPRINT quiz helps someone arrive at that conversation with greater clarity and self-awareness, then it’s done exactly what I hoped it would. Giving participants a more intentional lens through which to see themselves (and maybe a desire for a unique collaborative process from there, if they so choose).
Interact made the vision easy to build
Before ever signing up, I had built the quiz-making project up in my mind as something incredibly technical…assuming I’d spend more time wrestling with software than actually creating the experience itself. I was happily proven wrong.
Interact is an intuitive platform. Inserting questions, organizing outcomes, refining the flow, and connecting the entire mechanism is surprisingly straightforward. Whether someone wants to create a simple quiz over the course of an afternoon or craft something much more robust like I did, the platform accommodates both equally well. In many ways, I found that the only limitation was my own creativity.
As someone who tends to dream up projects that are…let’s say, a little ambitious…I appreciated that the software never made me feel like I had to simplify my vision to fit within its capabilities.
The feature that changed everything wasn’t actually the quiz
For all the time and care that went into creating the quiz itself, I’ve come to realize it isn’t actually the most important part of the experience.
The real magic begins the moment someone enters their email address and clicks “SEE MY RESULTS.”
Interact integrates directly with FloDesk (and a host of other email platforms), which is the email marketing platform I use exclusively for BLUEPRINT. After finishing the quiz, every new subscriber is immediately welcomed into a pre-designed email series without me having to manually export lists, tag contacts, or move data between platforms. It’s one seamless handoff.
Here’s how the process starts in my FloDesk backend:
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That first email is deliberately gentle.
Rather than immediately promoting (God forbid), I thank the Realtor for taking the quiz, expand on the ideas they just explored, and invite them into the larger philosophy behind BLUEPRINT. Over the following days, I continue sharing insights about branding, offer practical resources, introduce them to my template collection, and eventually explain how custom branding works inside the studio.
My favorite kinds of emails
The kind of messages that stick with me tend to come from Realtors like Susie. She had discovered our studio through a Google search, spent the better part of an hour exploring our website and Instagram, and then took the quiz. She landed as the California Casual. In her reply, she told me she felt genuinely understood, explaining that while she had a background in marketing, branding herself had always been the bottleneck. She closed by asking how she could begin that journey with us.
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Listen…I receive emails similar to Susie’s in my Inbox at least 4-5 times a month. That’s no small thing. The quiz gives my niche audience language for something they’ve often sensed but never fully articulated, and by the time my first welcome email with their quiz results hits their inbox, we’re mid-dialogue already.
One of my favorite recurring themes in these replies is some variation of, “Okay…that was a little creepy.” Take this email reply from Megan, Dallas-based Realtor, in response to her quiz results and the first welcome email of my automated sequence. To me it’s all evidence that the right questions invite the right answers: when you spend time helping someone reflect on who they are instead of what they’re trying to sell, they often end up feeling understood. And they’ll gladly open up (Megan quickly booked a consult and converted to a custom branding client, shortly after this email exchange):
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From there, some people ultimately invest in our custom branding. Others purchase one of our digital Realtor templates after moving through the email series, or simply remain part of my community for years. Every one of those relationships begins in exactly the same place, with eleven great questions and a memorable articulation about who they are.
Looking back five years later
When I think about everything Interact has made possible, sure, the statistics are exciting. More than sixty percent of my email list has grown through this single quiz, and my template sales nearly doubled after connecting it to my automated FloDesk workflow. Those are business outcomes that have made a tangible, trustworthy impact.
But perhaps more importantly, Interact has given me the freedom to create a lead-gen experience that reflects my distinctive methodology as a brand-builder, instead of forcing me into someone else’s marketing playbook. It connects beautifully with the rest of my business through native integrations, it has been consistently intuitive to use, and every interaction I’ve had with Interact’s customer support team over the last five years has reinforced why I’m such an enthusiastic advocate for the platform.
I also think Realtors, in particular, are missing a unique opportunity.
Real estate is an industry filled with remarkably talented people who often market themselves in remarkably similar ways. Seller checklists, home valuation landing pages, market reports. All of those things have their place, but very few of them leave someone with the feeling that you hid a camera in their office. That they just encountered someone who understands their world to a degree that few others do.
A thoughtfully designed quiz — with stellar results pages, mind you, as the critical ingredient to the conversion recipe — has the potential to do something different.
Instead of giving information, it makes you feel something. It invites participation instead of passive consumption. It gives people a reason to spend ten intentional minutes with your brand, communicating expertise before you’ve ever been hired. And when it’s connected to an email platform like FloDesk, it continues building that relationship long after someone closes the browser window.
At the end of the day, it’s still just a quiz, and we shouldn’t pretend it can ever punch above its weight to truly diagnose or distill someone’s entire business into a series of questions. What it can do is create a powerful pause of self-reflection that grows trust and inspiration in your people. Used that way, it becomes much more than a clever lead magnet.
Interact has given me a way to scale one of the most personal parts of my business, while creatively reimagining my brand worldview into an experience. And for a branding studio that believes the strongest brands aren’t invented, but uncovered, I can’t imagine a more meaningful place for the conversation to begin.
P.S. – Interested in growing your real estate list through a customized quiz? Use THIS LINK for 25% off your first 12 months with Interact.
Then go link your quiz up with FloDesk to drop new leads into an automated welcome sequence (these templates of mine would help a lot) that can work hard to convert for you while you sleep.
By the way, if you decide to give this a go, then my encouragement is for you to resist building quizzes about real estate. Start building quizzes about the people who happen to need real estate.
“What’s Your Signature Hosting Style?” (on your BUY WITH ME web page)…
“What’s Your Pace of Living?” (on your COMMUNITY LIFESTYLE web page)…
“What Chapter of Home Are You Entering?” (on your real estate Home page)…
…could be actually interesting, anti-transactional, avoiding-the-obvious starting places.
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P.P.S — What’s BLUEPRINT, again?
We’re a gaggle of designers, writers, and creatives on a mission to change the branding narrative in real estate.
We offer a signature branding service and the industry’s most elegant and high-converting digital products to help modern, stylish Realtors do three things:
➝ Communicate their worth;
➝ Become the obvious choice;
➝ Tell the right stories to stand out + SELL more.
We love new friends, so hop on our email list for more value content, take our wildly popular real estate personality quiz, or follow us on The ‘Gram to join the family.
