If you want to build a Survey Funnel OR need a way to qualify your leads this blog post is for you.
Now, I don’t like dumping on other people’s products. Because I know how much time, sweat, and tears go into product creation just to have some random internet person dump on you.
But as entrepreneurs we don’t always hit it out of the park. And sometimes we create something a competitor does twice as good for half as much (It happens). Which is what this blog post is about.
TLDR: SurveyFunnel.io WINS hands down.
While doing research on a new potential tool I end up reading A LOT of comparison blogs, which tell you the winner at the end of the article. I find that really annoying, so I’m going to break the rules and tell you the winner upfront: SurveyFunnel.io beats the other tools I compared by a large margin.
With that said if you’re in a hurry you can leave now, but if you have a minute the rest of this article explains how I came to that conclusion. So, SurveyFunnel.io was the first tool I ever used to create a Quiz Funnel back in 2015. It came as a free bonus for paying $197/month to be a member in the best online mastermind I’ve ever been in: Next Level Mastermind Group.
There was nothing wrong with the tool. It did everything I needed. Allowing me to send out hyper relevant Soap Opera Sequences to my email list. But the reason I ditched it like an old iPhone was because after using it for so many years I thought “there must be something better by now”.
I was 100% wrong and the rest of this article explains why.
I tried Thrive Quiz Builder First
The 1st replacement tool I tried was Thrive Quiz Builder. I chose it because in 2016 I decided to get back into blogging. Up until then I did not have a real website. I depended entirely on ClickFunnels (which freed me from the burden of needing to have a traditional website to make money online).
But after missing out on “free” SEO traffic for years I wanted a regular website that could rank easily in google again. Which meant getting back into WordPress. And that’s what attracted me to Thrive Quiz Builder. Thrive Quiz Builder is a premium WordPress plugin which means like most premium plugins purchasing it cost a one time fee, instead of a monthly fee like most marketing software.
Which would save me $737 a year from the quiz tool I was previously using.
It wasn’t just the price that attracted me however. The sales page for Thrive Quiz Builder looked beautiful too. And after watching a few videos on it I was convinced it could do everything I needed, plus offer some bonus features I could use. So, I purchased the tool feeling great…until I tested it.
The Problem with Thrive Quiz Builder— Thrive Quiz Builder review
Thrive Quiz Builder suffers from 3 damning problems.
1) Getting your Quiz “Facebook ads” or “Google Adwords” ready is nearly impossible.
I should have known when the sales page for it kept stressing “viral sharing”… but at its core Thrive Quiz Builder is a tool built for creating quizzes that will be shared, NOT a tool for marketers that run ads.
And this is shown in the way the tool handles pages. Instead of having a different URL for each page that makes up a unique section of your quiz like SurveyFunnel.io or LeadQuizzes (So you can place unique tracking pixels on different pages that represent the separate stages of your quiz).
Thrive Quiz Builder runs your entire quiz on a single URL. It dynamically updates the same page using a coding language called AJAX. Meaning you can’t place a tracking pixel on your thank you page or results page after someone takes your quiz because there is no static thank you page.
This was THE deal breaker for me, but it wasn’t the only problem.
2) Designing your quiz is a nightmare
For a quiz builder from an established design company you would think that the designing stage of your quiz would be their strongest feature. But it’s actually a major weak point after getting used to tools like Elementor or ClickFunnels.
First off, each quiz is composed of 4 “pages”. A Splash Page, a Quiz Page, an Opt-in gate, and a Results Page. Each page allows you to design how you want that page to look (with a lot of frustration)…except the actual quiz page. I kid you not.
There’s no option to design the quiz page itself. Zero. Nada. Zilch. It’s comically bad. And a major oversight on the developers part.
As for the other 3 pages you can actually design there’s problems there too.
Mobile headlines sometimes bleed into each other making them unreadable. While spacing issues refuse to go away even after altering the padding and margin of your quiz. I tried setting all padding and margin to zero as a last result, but that still didn’t fix the “scrunching up” issues. Making it hard to force your quiz to look readable on mobile.
…and since 100% of my ads target mobile traffic this was a big problem for me. But since I hate refunding purchases I still tried to make it work. Which brings me to the third problem.
3) It doesn’t integrate with Zapier
I used to code websites from scratch way back in 2011. So even though I was greatly disappointed with the design issues of Thrive Quiz Builder, I knew if I sunk enough man hours into custom CSS I could probably fix the mobile design issues eventually.
But that wouldn’t fix the problem of not being able to place tracking codes (problem #1) unless the tool integrated with Zapier.
If you’re a software designer making sure your tool integrates with Zapier is like buying an insurance policy in case one of your native integrations isn’t enough for a potential customer. If Thrive Quiz Builder had a zapier integration I might have been able to workout problem #1, which might have made suffering through the design issues worth it. But alas it didn’t.
While trying to work through these issues reading the help forum for solutions let me discover a dozen different bugs I hadn’t run into yet (which I surely would have if I kept the tool).
…and while support is great at responding quickly, half their answers are “sorry you can’t do that right now but we’ll add that as a feature request”, or code snippets you have to place yourself using ANOTHER plugin.
These three issues make the tool unsuitable for building survey funnels or qualifying your leads with. So, I requested a refund after 4 days of trying to make it work and went on to the next tool on my list… LeadQuizzes.
The problem with LeadQuizzes— LeadQuizzes 3.0 review
LeadQuizzes 3.0 was the second quiz tool I tried and right from the start it was leagues better than Thrive Quiz Builder. It wasn’t a WordPress plugin and charged a monthly fee of $67/month. But I didn’t consider that a downside because after Thrive Quiz Builder I was so over wasting time to save a few bucks in the grand scheme of things.
In fact, I thought I would settle with the tool. Because it seemed to have everything that SurveyFunnel.io had, plus looked a lot more “socially shareable” if that makes any sense. It also boasted a lot of case studies from marketers that used the tool with both paid advertising and to go viral.
However, the two problems I ran into made me cancel my trial.
1) It scores quizzes in a clumsy way
PSA: When using quizzes in a serious way to build your business with paid ads you’re almost always going to be using the quiz to…
A) provide some kind of accurate diagnosis to your prospect.
B) Show your prospect a unique results page based on their diagnosis.
C) Place your prospect in the right “bucket” inside your email list (segmentation)
Which means your scored quiz needs to be as “surgically precise” as possible. Well, what’s wrong with the way LeadQuizzes does scoring is it doesn’t allow you to be surgically precise.
What it does is show your quiz taker the results page they scored closest to. Instead of letting you set a specific range of numerical values that you want each results page to link to.
I know that sounds confusing so to give you an example of why that’s clumsy it means you can’t create a binary (this or that) quiz that separates prospects into high quality leads or low quality leads.
For example, let’s say you figure out that there are 8 qualities you need a prospect to answer a certain way to qualify as a high quality lead and if they miss even one of those answers they are a low quality lead to you.
Well, what LeadQuizzes would do is if your prospect answered 10 questions and 6 of their answers indicated they were high quality leads it would show them your results page for a high quality lead and segment them as high quality… even though they aren’t by your standards.
Meaning you might waste time chasing after a prospect that has 7 of the 8 qualities you need except for oh let’s say “having enough money” for your coaching service, or “being the right sex” for your erectile dysfunction product ????.
Do you see how that’s a problem?
It would be like going to the doctor with all the symptoms of being pregnant, except for the pesky little factor of being a MAN. Yet, being told you’re pregnant anyway because you got 9 out of the 10 symptoms of being pregnant.
This was the deal breaker for me because the quizzes I create are built to be very precise. But it wasn’t the only problem.
2) LeadQuizzes 3.0 was unbelievably slow.
The survey looks great and is really easy to program, but after testing my 9 question quiz I could easily see how prospects taking my quiz could get annoyed and quit midway due to having to wait 1-2 seconds to load the next question. It’s not instant. They are aware it’s an issue people would cancel over, because when I went to cancel my trial one of the options for why I was canceling was “loading too slow”.
In the end I really wanted to like LeadQuizzes 3.0 because its newer, produces the prettiest quizzes and is the same price as SurveyFunnel.io at $67/month. But if you want to build a survey funnel or qualify your leads it just doesn’t do 100% of what you need it to do.
Why SurveyFunnel wins— SurveyFunnel review
SurveyFunnel.io was originally built as a lead qualifying tool to make Survey Funnels extremely accurate, and work perfectly with Ryan Levesque’s Survey Funnel Formula. So, I suppose it’s no surprise that SF.io wins the comparison contest despite being the oldest tool. Jack Born the creator is simply phenomenal at building out what marketers NEED in software.
He knows the bare minimum you need a quiz tool to do is segment quiz takers to your list based on their answers, allow the ability to place tracking codes, and show a specific results page based on a specific score or range of scores. SurveyFunnel.io allows you to do all of this, plus execute a couple other Ryan Levesque style strategies like running a pivot survey, or running a deep dive survey.
Last words:
If you understand the power of quizzes, and segmenting your email list into different buckets so you can talk to your leads differently based on their specific situations I recommend adding SurveyFunnel.io to the list of tools you use to run your business.
Surveyfunnel.io costs $67/month for unlimited everything. There used to be 3 separate plans but I guess Jack Born wanted to simplify his pricing so he removed them. I think it’s a pretty good deal because the alternatives aren’t as good for qualifying your leads or building Survey Funnels.