How a State-Wide Tourism Website Builds their Email List and Inspires Wanderlust Using Personality Quizzes

The travel bug is real. Folks who enjoy visiting new places and having new experiences often find themselves daydreaming of their next vacation. Personality quizzes are a unique tool tourist destinations and travel businesses can use to help people decide where to go for their next adventure.Travel Nevada is an online travel resource for Nevadans and visitors to the state. The website has everything someone exploring the state needs, from road trip maps to recommendations of unique places to stay and from delicious eateries to exciting events. The website is a one-stop shop for what’s what throughout the state. Recently, Travel Nevada ran a campaign to drive email list sign-ups. Rachel Wright, the Social Media Strategist for Travel Nevada, shared her team’s experience using ShortStack for their lead generation campaign. Read on to learn more about how they used a quiz to reach their goals and what results they saw.

Campaign Objectives and Solution

According to Wright, Travel Nevada’s goal for this campaign was to “create a fun, engaging, and seamless experience for our audiences, while also encouraging them to sign up for our email newsletters.” They decided to use a personality quiz to incentivize people to sign up for a list without running a contest.Personality quizzes are a well-loved marketing tool. They use gamification to get people’s attention and collect leads after drawing folks in. An added bonus – personality quizzes can showcase different products, services, events, and experiences in the quiz questions , not just the outcome.

The Campaign Premise:

Entrants were able to find out what their “Nevada Inner Beast” was by taking a personality quiz. At the same time, the quiz would showcase many unique attractions this state has to offer. This quiz takes entrants through a series of eight unique questions with 10 different outcomes including wild mustangs and bighorn sheep to special animals only known to Nevada like Dirt the Cat and Penelope the Cow. This campaign was embedded onto the Travel Nevada website as well as shared via email newsletters. Embedding campaigns to your website enables quiz-takers to explore your website without having to navigate to an outside source. Everything is accessible and will increase each entrant’s time on your website, leading to greater awareness of what your destination has to offer.TIP: While Travel Nevada wanted to simply have a fun and engaging campaign to collect leads, personality quizzes can also gather vital customer data. ShortStack’s personality quizzes track users' selection and personality results. This information can be vital to understanding more about your customers. For example, are you curious about the number of people interested in short 1-hour road trips versus longer 4+ hour road trips? You can also learn about people’s preferences for certain content. Including the following, “I like to receive my media through…” is a great way to learn the best ways to increase interactions with users! The list can go on and on, but of course, personality quizzes can also be just a fun source of engagement for users.

A look at the campaign:

Travel Nevada used our Personality Quiz template to set up their quiz. This template is highly recommended by the team at Travel Nevada as it is easy to use and ShortStack users can complete it quickly. Wright explains, “Building the quizzes is also a blast for our internal team, as ShortStack makes it a painless process and delivers us such a beautifully branded product.”Let’s take a closer look at their campaign.To start, they have a catchy text box to engage users right away. Also, check out the use of alliteration [seriously sensational] that is pleasing to the eye and when read out loud, pleasing to the ears. [caption id="attachment_49925" align="alignnone" width="600"]

Travel Nevada uses catchy and engaging text.[/caption]As you scroll through the campaign, you’ll find text informing you that you’re about to take a trip through Nevada. This is a great way to prep your visitors for the experience your about to take them on. For tourism brands, this is a fun way to allow users to travel through the destination virtually. Pro tip: This campaign was running throughout the height of the pandemic in 2020, which allowed for even more engagement while everyone was bored at home. Staying current with what’s going on in the world around you will help you create a campaign that will appeal to the audience.The first question seems innocent enough, “What’s for dinner?” As a Nevadan, I can instantly recognize all of the options available as Nevada staples – from all-you-can-eat sushi to the Middlegate Monster Burger! Already, this virtual adventure is beginning.[caption id="attachment_49927" align="alignnone" width="600"]

Use recognizeable options.[/caption]Next, “What does your ideal weekend look like?” This question has some great comedy like “spittin’ maaaad game at them chicks” with a picture of someone feeding the adorable chickadees at Chickadee Ridge! This was very clever and kept the Travel Nevada team on brand by showing off more of what the Silver State has to offer.[caption id="attachment_49928" align="alignnone" width="600"]

Stay on-brand with elements like humor.[/caption]And the virtual adventure continues throughout the personality quiz. Every question shows the breathtaking imagery and wide-variety of experiences the state has to offer! It’s clear the marketing team at Travel Nevada did their research by creating a digital adventure throughout this beautiful state.

The Results:

Travel Nevada was able to generate 794 leads through their personality quiz. They had over 6700 campaign views, of which 2,889 were unique views. “We routinely see thousands of campaign views and hundreds of entries, so we’re always delighted with the outcome!” shares Wright. Furthermore, Wright explains the success of this campaign, as well as her other experiences working with ShortStack’s products:“Quizzes like these bring the Travel Nevada spirit to life, and give us a perfect way to engage and have fun with our audiences. Plus, the quiz results are so awesome to reshare on social media! It was great for us to see how many people shared which Nevada Inner Beast they were on their own social channels, which backed up our belief that people would love a quiz like this. Successes like that are why we continue to use ShortStack!”

Other Travel Nevada marketing campaigns using ShortStack

Travel Nevada has used ShortStack for several online marketing campaigns. Beyond the Nevada Inner Beast personality quiz, they used ShortStack to promote the Reno Balloon Races by hosting a photo contest. Photos are essential for any travel-related business or event for attracting visitors and attendees. Photo contests allow these businesses to collect user-generated content in the form of beautiful photos and drive awareness when people share their entries.Side note: The Reno Balloon Races sees over 130,000 people in the span of three days with almost 100 balloons flying every day. The event brings visitors from all over the country and is a great hit with the locals. Personally, I love driving during the Great Balloon Race weekend and seeing the skyline lit up with colorful balloons. It’s a spectator’s and photographer's dream.

Future plans for Travel Nevada:

The team at Travel Nevada has been hard at work updating their website. Now that it’s finished, they’re ready to get started on their next ShortStack campaign. According to Wright, “Travel Nevada plans to use ShortStack to run a March Madness-inspired bracket around voting for Nevada’s color of the year, much like how Pantone annually names a hue. We’re excited to see which colors resonate with our in-state and out-of-state fans, and use the palette we’re putting together to introduce folks to more of Nevada’s iconic sights!”Looking for more ideas on how you can engage visitors and increase tourism to your destination? Check out our blog post 7 Ways to Increase Tourism Through Digital Marketing or find out more about what ShortStack can do for you.“