Marketing With Assessments

Assessments are challenging traditional website registration incentives, such as e-books,special reports, and tip sheets.

Why assessments?

Assessments are questionnaires visitors fill out on your website. Instead of immediately providing scores on your site, however, autoresponders deliver scores by return e-mail. Assessments are easier to create than e-books and reports. More important, you'll learn
more about who's signing up for your incentive than just their e-mail address. This permits you to profile specific prospects, so you can fine-tune your follow-up to their specific needs.

What you can learn?

You can create assessments to learn whatever you want to know, at any point in a prospect's relationship with you:

• Frustrations and goals. What problems are keeping your prospects up at night? What are their most important goals?
• Knowledge and experience. Find out how much prospects already know, and other solutions they may have tried. 
• Teleseminar content. Find out which topics are important to your market. 
• Compatibility. Assessments help you avoid potentially problem clients. 
• Progress and satisfaction. Use assessments to measure progress and satisfaction after teleseminars, coaching sessions, or purchasing an e-book.
• Concerns and objections. What's keeping your market from buying? Objections are often the result of miscommunication or insufficient communication. Assessments help you clarify misunderstandings and create clearer marketing messages in the future.

How are assessments created?

The best way is to use the tools at web sites like www.assessmentgenerator.com, that specialize in them.
Assessment Generator, for example, offers numerous resources to help you choose the right type of assessments and ask the right questions. Plus, you can sign-up for a 30-day free trial. Sign up!

Where do assessments appear?

Assessments appear as links on your website. In addition, remote hosting permits you to offer assessments accessed by links in e-mails and your e-books.

How are assessments scored?

Scoring is automatic, and results are delivered via autoresponder, along with a scorecard PDF, or any other file. You also receive a copy of the e-mail.

Creating your first assessment

Follow these three simple steps:

Step 1: Choose a format
The first two options score themselves:

• 1-5 scale. Use this format to ask website visitors to rate their levels of agreement or disagreement with statements. 
• Checkbox. Checkboxes permit visitors to select from the options provided. 
• Narrative. You can also invite visitors to respond in their own words, providing as much information as desired. 
• True or false. This is an easy to find out how much site visitors already know. 
• Multiple choice. These help identify goals, objections, obstacles, or desired features. 
• Mixed. You can also combine formats.

Step 2: Create the questions

Base your questions your marketing goals. Start by listing the desired end result-the information you want to obtain or points you want to emphasize. Create and fine-tune questions offline, using a word processor. Then, copy and paste your questions into the forms located at www.assessmentgenerator.com.

Step 3: Add to your web site

After creating, simply copy the html code the Assessment Generator provides you and paste it into your web site.

Tips and follow-up

• Never immediately deliver scores on your web site. This destroys your chance to obtain your prospect's e-mail address.
• Always save your assessments as you prepare them, so you can modify and re-post them as you fine-tune them. 
• Send personal assessment comments, or offer brief telephone consultations, to prospects who best fit your client profile. 
• Consider offering an appropriate mini-course to prospects taking assessments.