I read a lot about all kinds of calculators and quizzes (custom built or with 3rd party tools) that end up going somewhat viral and get a steady stream of leads for the startup.
Is this something you did for your projects? Can you share the calculator/quiz you did and what were the results? (number of leads, conversions %)
I worked with a media company for sometime where we had a chance to experiment with using quizzes/ third party widgets for capturing email.The widgets used to work best when at the end result of completing the quiz / calculator there was somethig genuinely useful for the user.
Here a couple of things that I remember worked
We embedded (https://cleartax.in/paytax/TaxCalculatorEmbed) and the end of the calculator we asked the user for their email to send them tax saving tips.
This was calculator/quiz, rather a generic widget (you could implement this right now for ongoing winter olympics) and asked user to subscribe for daily updates to medal tally.
Also,
If you have a general content site (like a blog), quizzes can be a very good tool to increase engagement
Example : Buzzfeed uses quizzes very heavily https://www.buzzfeed.com/quizzes
Just wanted to add that more than any of these widgets / calculators / quizzes what worked best for us was using ebooks as lead generation source.
For your startup / product, offer an ebook that educates the audience about a relevant topic in return for subscrbing to your mailing list.
Hubspot does this exceptionally well https://www.hubspot.com/resources/ebook
Thank you for such a detailed reply. Buzzfeed is definitely doing a great job with quizzes :) Good idea with the Income Tax Calculator and sending tax savings tips after. Maybe I will implement something like this in the future for my calculators.