Assessments vs. Surveys

Assessments vs. Surveys

by | 13 October 2021 | Lead Generation, Solutions

An assessment, similar to a survey, can be an invaluable tool for you and your business. Both provide you with client data to use, while assessments allow you to take things a step further and offer expert feedback and tailored results to your clients. Are you looking to foster greater engagement with your current clients, or bring in new ones with ease? It might be time for you to try using assessments! Below, we’ll take a look at some of the main differences between assessments and surveys, and how to best utilize an assessment.

Surveys: A one-way street

A survey is intended for one main purpose – to gather information that the survey creators can use. Therefore, feedback to the respondent of the survey is typically limited to a “thank you” or “the survey is complete.” That’s not very personal!

Common uses for surveys include:

  • Customer service – How was your experience at our store or with our work?
  • Product feedback – How did your recent purchase work out for you?
  • Scientific – surveys intended to gather data on a particular topic for research or a study

In each of these cases, the respondent answers the questions and the data goes to the survey author, who typically analyzes the aggregated data. This type of information-gathering is typically used if you’re not interested in what any individual responses are, but rather the data as a whole.

Assessment Generator can certainly be used for this type of survey, but it offers so much more in terms of customer engagement and feedback.

If you’re looking for something more than a survey, and to really have a meaningful conversation and relationship with new or potential customers, an assessment may be just the thing for your business.

Assessments: A Conversation

An assessment is unique in that, in addition to answering questions, respondents can receive direct feedback from you. This feedback is the secret sauce that makes an assessment such a powerful engagement and lead generation tool. 

So, how does it work? Once a respondent submits an assessment, Assessment Generator calculates a score based on how the user answered the questions. As the author of the assessment, you get to decide how to define this score. It could be a combination of different responses to each question, or involve different categories to be scored throughout. Let’s take a look at the multitude of options available to you with Assessment Generator:

Simple Assessments
You can create simple assessments that automatically calculate a single overall score. Learn more about simple assessments here.
Type-Based Assessments
You are able to create type-based assessments that include multiple types or categories. These allow you to assign each question to a category and give your respondents a separate score for each category. Learn more about type-based assessments here.

After the score is calculated, the user receives feedback either on-screen or via email telling them how they scored and what their score means. It’s that last part — your expert evaluation of them based on how they answered your questions — that provides enormous value to your respondent.

This exchange also greatly benefits you:

  • This relationship forms a basis for further conversation. When you reach out to them again, it will be in the context of already having communicated with them and provided direct feedback. No more cold calling or emailing!
  • Your analysis of their results demonstrates your expertise and establishes your credibility with the respondent.
  • Delivery of the report establishes a relationship with the prospect. When they receive their report, your prospect has received something of legitimate value from you, for free! This makes them more likely to want to return the favor, and respond to future communications from you.
  • Your report can also invite your prospect to contact you to learn more about their assessment results.

Assessments can also be used to engage your website visitors that want to know more about what services you offer. Having your website visitors “test themselves” via an assessment, without obligation, is a terrific way to prove your value, gain their respect, and keep them coming back.

Automate your Lead Generation

You can completely automate your lead generation process with Assessment Generator. No, we’re not kidding! Instead of spending hours doing one-on-one evaluations and free consultations, try using an assessment to help find the clients that fit best with your offerings. It’s efficient and will save both you and your clients valuable time, effort, and headaches! An automated assessment frees you up to really focus on your passion of helping people to reach their goals. Isn’t that why you went into business in the first place?

Ready to get started? Use the buttons below to set up a free account at Assessment Generator, or schedule a one-on-one meeting with our experts to learn more about us!

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How Assessments Drive Results and Engagement

How Assessments Drive Results and Engagement

by | 12 September 2021 | Solutions

Assessments are a fun and easy way to monitor your success metrics. With an assessment, you can engage potential clients, share your knowledge, and measure progress. They are also an ideal way to show results — whether through the answers given or how those answers or results may change and improve over time. If you’re a coach, assessments are a great way to engage by learning what a new client is hoping to achieve and sharing some helpful tips or recommendations. Not a coach? That’s ok — assessments prove equally valuable for those outside of the coaching field as well. For consultants or anyone looking to gather information in a new way and achieve “expert status” among potential clients, assessments are a proven and invaluable tool.

Below, we’ll take a closer look at some of the ways assessments can be used to provide a benchmark of client progress, show results, and drive engagement.

Assessments as a Benchmark

Assessments can be used strategically as a benchmark when given to clients before, during, and after a program. This kind of benchmarking is crucial to letting you see the effectiveness and success rate of your offerings. Let’s say you’re running a coaching or consulting program, and want to show tangible or measurable results, but you’re not entirely sure how. Having your customers take an assessment before, during, or after a service you provide can be a great way to show just what they’ve learned or how they’ve changed from your teachings and services. Assessments can also be used in this way to deliver feedback and tips along the way based on how someone scores.

Assessments as a Re-Enrollment Tool

Assessments are a great way to show results to continue a business relationship, re-engage past clients, or gather information on the path to re-enrollment. Similar to using an assessment as a benchmark, assessments can provide a huge variety of results that you can point to. What better way to show clients that they should keep investing in working with you than with data from an assessment they filled out? It’s right there, in their own words and answers!

If you’re looking to re-engage with a past client, you could also use an assessment to find out how you did according to them, and use that information to reach out with a new, tailored offer or address any past concerns. Being able to point to specific areas to work on with a client is a great way to re-engage them with data and recommendations for the future.

Assessments to Manage User Experience

Interactive in nature, assessments are also a great way to manage user experience and receive honest feedback. Assessment Generator provides a specific kind of assessment just for this purpose, which uses a variety of question types to determine the quality of customer service received in four different categories. No matter the service you provide, knowing how your customers feel about your work and how it is being received, and gathering that information in an easy way, is a great customer service tactic.

Overall, assessments are a wonderful, interactive tool. They provide a way for clients, both new and old, to engage with you and your business. They let you gather important information with ease, they make your clients feel more engaged, and they can help you to better understand what a client’s needs are and how you can help them.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for more information and to get started with your very own Assessment Generator account today!

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How to Share Assessments for Maximum Brand Impact

How to Share Assessments for Maximum Brand Impact

by | 26 July 2021 | Solutions

It’s no secret that assessments are a great way to engage with your audience and share your expertise.

So – what are the next steps once you’ve created a stellar assessment, and are ready to share it with current or prospective customers?

With Assessment Generator, we’ve made the process easy and seamless:

You’ll receive a unique URL (where ‘0000’ is the unique identifier for your assessment):

https://app.assessmentgenerator.com/assessment/0000

This works well in most situations – you can link to the assessment from your website, post it to social media, or send it via email. This is a great option if you’re trying to engage your current email list in a new way, or reach a wider audience on social media.

What if you want to limit the distribution of your assessment?

You may not want everyone to have access to an assessment. This could be for any number of reasons, including:

  • Your assessment is only to be used internally by existing clients
  • It’s only available if the respondent has paid a fee first
  • It contains some intellectual property you don’t want widely distributed
  • You want your assessment URL to reflect your brand

Whether it’s to emphasize your brand, keep visitors on your website, or protect your intellectual property, we’ve got you covered!

Assessment Generator offers 3 distinct approaches that allow you to hide, encrypt or change your assessment URL:

Embed your assessment in an iframe

An iframe allows you to embed your assessment within your website, so your visitors can take the assessment without leaving your site. Choose where on your site you’d like to showcase your assessment – whether that’s a dedicated page that also includes your site’s menu items, or alongside other brand elements you’d like clients to see and potentially engage with.

This capability is available with all of our subscription plans. Check out Sharing Your Assessment in our User Guide for details.

Encrypt your assessment URL

This approach modifies your URL so that the exact format is hidden from respondents when shared. In addition, once someone opens your assessment, the URL shown in the browser address bar instantly changes to an address that cannot be used or copied. Meanwhile, the respondent can still complete the assessment normally. This is a great option for paid assessments and really gives them an exclusive, made-for-you feel.

This feature is available for Advanced and higher subscriptions. You can also sign up for a 2-week free trial of our software, which allows you to test out our Advanced-level features!

Use a custom subdomain

With Private Label subscriptions, you can set up a custom subdomain on your website for your assessment. Creating a custom subdomain is an effective way to designate a custom URL for your assessment.

This capability offers an additional level of professionalism and integration for your assessments; it truly helps them appear to be a seamless extension of your brand (which they are!) For example, your assessment URL could look like: https://assessment.YourCompany.com

Learn more about how to Personalize your Assessments with your Private Label account in our User Guide for details.

We want your assessments to work for you!

We’ve designed Assessment Generator to work seamlessly with your current business practices so that you can reach new heights. Whether you’re building a new audience, looking to better engage with your current customers, or simply gain helpful data along the way about people who come in contact with your brand, our assessments can help you work smarter and more efficiently.

Create your free account today, and discover what our software can do for you!

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How Entrepreneurs Can Use Assessments To Manage Growth

How Entrepreneurs Can Use Assessments To Manage Growth

by | 8 July 2021 | Solutions

The word “assessment” can mean different things and conjure up different thoughts with every person.

I’m no psychologist, but I’m willing to say it may go back to grade school and the dreaded test day. No matter how much we were sure that we did our best on a test, we could’ve missed something and we might receive a disappointing grade.

It can be the same in business – if you keep doing the same things that you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get the same results. It’s easy to continue coasting along with that cozy illusion that we’re exactly where we think we are and need to be.

However, when it comes to our business, this tack of ‘looking in the mirror’ is counter to what we should be doing.

The reality is that when it comes to our business, tracking business performance is essential at any stage. As a company owner or an entrepreneur, you need to be aware of your business’s strengths and weaknesses.

As an analytical tool that provides a clear picture of your business—where it stands, where it is going—and the factors affecting your growth, a periodic assessment is essential to achieving your goals.

So, while many entrepreneurs think that assessments are simply used to point out the status of their business, client, or customer, a successful entrepreneur will use assessments to see opportunities for growth.

How to Conduct Business Assessments

Every business assessment should consider 4 factors.

  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, or SWOT are the key ingredients that business owners should consider when analyzing the competition and planning effective strategies for the future. A SWOT analysis should be applied to the several departments integral to a company’s success.

We offer a set of pre-written Business and Entrepreneurship assessments that will help you understand where your business is today and identify areas that need improvement. The best part is that these assessments have already been written and are ready to go today!

An assessment is more than just taking the temperature of your business; rather, an effective assessment will help guide you toward the optimal track for growth. An effective assessment will enable you to translate your vision for your business into reality. Taking the same assessment every three to four months will show the gains you’ve made in striving for enhancing your business.

Use Assessment Generator to automate your assessments and get results quickly.

Create your free account today!

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Assessments and the Science of Persuasion

Assessments and the Science of Persuasion

by | 21 June 2021 | Solutions

Assessments are a great way to leverage the proven science of persuasion in order to get your message across and attract new customers.

In his widely acclaimed book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini describes seven principles of persuasion that marketers in the world overuse in their efforts to sell products and influence decisions.

Here’s how you can use an assessment to leverage the science of persuasion to attract new clients:

Reciprocity

When people are given something, they feel the need to reciprocate. This is a deep-seated psychological norm engrained in who we are as humans. When you offer an assessment, not only are you asking questions and collecting the responses, you are also providing feedback to the respondent in the form of a personalized analysis of their results. Assessment Generator offers three ways to provide automatic feedback from an assessment:

  • In a Simple assessment (providing a single score), you can define any number of score bands and provide different feedback depending on how the respondent scored.
  • In a Type-Based assessment (providing a separate score in each of several types or categories that you define) you can define content to provide depending on which type the respondent scored highest (or lowest) in. Here are some examples of how you might use this type of scoring:
    • Identifying a dominant personality type
    • Showing which aspect of life a respondent could use help with
  • Another way to use a Type-Based assessment is to define score bands for each type. Then you can provide specific, score-based feedback for every type you’ve defined in your assessment.

This analysis represents something of value that you’ve given to the respondent for free. When you next reach out to them, start out by reminding them about the analysis they received from their assessment. This leverages the Commitment norm (see below) since they’re no longer a cold contact — you’ve had a previous interaction. It also leverages the Reciprocity norm — you’ve given something for free, and they will want to reciprocate by engaging with you further.

Commitment

People like to be consistent and to be seen as consistent. Once someone has completed your assessment, they’ve made an investment in you and will be more likely to engage with you in the future. This combined with the reciprocity norm is strong motivation to further engage with your brand.

By itself, just completing the assessment leads to a level of commitment. You can also take it a step further and offer a one-on-one introductory session after completing your assessment. Provide a link to your schedule and allow your respondent to sign up for a time slot with you. Once they’ve made the commitment to meet with you, you’ll have the opportunity to talk with them one-on-one.

Authority and Social Proof

When you’re designing your assessment, be sure to leverage the authority you have in your subject area. If you have an advanced degree, mention that. People are more likely to engage with someone they see as a credentialed professional. If your authority stems from experience rather than education, you can use that just as effectively.

Providing a convincing argument that your assessment and the feedback you’re providing was designed based on expertise gained through formal education or life-long experience will give respondents an extra incentive to take the time to complete your assessment, evaluate the feedback it provides, and engage further with you.

Combine authority with social proof by mentioning the number of people you’ve helped and how they’ve achieved their goals as a result of your expertise.

Assessments are a great way to leverage the proven science of persuasion to help generate more leads, more qualified contacts, and ultimately more satisfied customers.

Take the first step today by signing up for a free Assessment Generator account:

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Provide Maximum Value for Your Webinar

Provide Maximum Value for Your Webinar

by | 3 June 2021 | Solutions

Many webinar leaders tend to follow a pre-designed outline they created specifically for that class.

But if you’re not sure what you should cover in your webinar, or if you simply want to WOW your participants with the value they receive, follow this simple strategy:

Ask them what they want to know!

Put together an assessment or a questionnaire and ask each participant to complete it before the class.

Here are a few sample questions you may want to ask them:

  • What attracted you to this class?
  • What do you expect to get out of it as a result?
  • Which questions would you like to get answered?
  • What are your biggest problems or challenges at this time?
  • What have you done so far to solve your problems?

The information you receive from your participants will give you a much better idea of what they expect from your webinar.

And happy participants means more business!

webinar

After the webinar, you may send out another survey to get a better idea of how the class went and how you can improve it next time.

Some sample questions to ask are:

  • What new information did you take away with you?
  • What did you want to know that wasn’t covered?
  • How was the class helpful to you?

…and so on.

Follow-up is extremely important for webinar leaders and…

Assessment Generator is a great tool to use for building surveys like these.

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