In our previous article from last week we wrote about lead magnets and how they can help your business. One of the lead magnets that we mentioned was using surveys for your business. Surveys can be really useful if implemented properly and we wanted to go into why that is and how to do that! When done correctly surveys are really knocking out two birds with one stone.
On one hand, you can entice people to fill out surveys about your business by offering a reward for completing the survey. Attach rules at the end of the survey where a consumer must fill out information on themselves in order to submit the survey and what you have is an awesome lead magnet! It is important to note that the reward you offer must have a value that makes filling out the survey worth it.
On the other hand, if you develop a quality survey that asks customers thoughtful questions, then you are also gaining valuable insight in to your business based on the results. This is an opportunity for a big win if done correctly!
So how can actual survey results help your business? Americanexpress.com lists five different ways that surveys can help your business. They are market analysis, tracking performance, customer follow-up, customer demographics, and crowdsourcing.
1. Market Analysis
Conducting surveys allows you to get an idea of what your consumers want from your products or what they think is important. Information such as this allows you to plan ahead and create or improve products and services that consumers want to see.
2. Tracking Performance
You can use surveys to simply find out if customers had a good experience with your business. This is a good way to keep track of how you and your staff are performing.
3. Customer Follow-Up
Right after completing a sale, a customer follow up survey is a great way to see if the customer’s needs were met to their satisfaction and it shows the customer that you care. Showing you care builds trust and you want everything to go back to trust!
4. Customer demographics
Surveys that ask consumers questions about themselves will do two things for you. It will strengthen that bond of trust and show consumers that you want to gear your products to fit their potential needs and lifestyle. It will also provide you valuable data that shows who your consumers are and what they need. Knowing more about your consumer base allows you do a ton in terms of developing new services, relationships, and strategies.
5. Crowdsourcing
Asking your crowd what their opinion is on certain things really isn’t a bad idea. Trying to decide on a new logo or new product? Asking consumes to vote between choices is a pretty good way to see what people will like. In return people also see a business that cares about what their consumers have to say. It’s a win-win.
What Makes A Survey Good?
When you’re going to create a survey you can’t just jot down questions and then slap it online expecting the best results. The better your survey is written then the more informative the results will be. Not paying attention to detail opens up the possibility of consumer confusion which may create unreliable survey results.
Writing
Surverymonkey.com is one of the many survey service providers on the internet to choose from. They have a great article on their website in which they share some tips for writing effective surveys. We are going to share their tips for writing a good survey below and discuss each of them!
1. Focus On Asking Closed-Ended Questions
Asking too many open-ended questions can lead to consumers abandoning a survey before completing it because of all the effort required to answer the questions. Survey Monkey recommends asking no more than 2 open-ended questions on a survey and to leave them until the end so you can collect all the other info beforehand.
2. Keep Your Survey Questions Neutral
If you’re conducting a survey you want to get the most reliable results possible. This means you do not want to lead consumers to feel one way or another based on how your question is worded. Human psychology is a sneaky powerful thing and you would be surprised how much sentence structure can have an effect on how people respond.
Survey Monkey uses a more obvious example to demonstrate the differences between a leading question and a neutral one. Their example for a leading question is “We think our customer service representatives are really awesome. How awesome do you think they are?” Their example for a neutral question is, “How helpful or unhelpful do you find our customer service representatives to be?”
See the difference?
3. Balance Answer Choices
Similar to keeping your questions neutral you also need to make sure that consumers are provided with answer options that are fair and balanced. If you ask a question about the helpfulness of a product or service and the only options to answer from are “extremely helpful, very helpful, or helpful” then the customer has no opportunity to answer honestly. If they had a bad experience what are they supposed to answer?
4. Don’t Ask Two Things At The Same Time
This is what is known as a double-barreled question. You don’t want to confuse consumers by asking them questions that involve two different topics. An example of a double-barreled question would be, “How would you rate our product quality and our delivery time?”
Product quality and delivery time are two different things and can’t both be answered at the same time accurately. If one was bad and one was good then there is no way for a consumer to express that if they are asked in the same question.
5. Vary The Questions You Ask
This might go without saying, but do not ask the same question over and over again with different phrasing. This will just make people leave the survey, or even worse, just click random answers to get through to the end. This is called “straight lining” and it is a killer to survey reliability.
You don’t want people to go into autopilot mode so it is important to vary the types of questions you ask and where in the survey you ask them. This keeps the survey fresh and less monotonous.
6. Make Your Questions Optional
Forcing people to answer every question in a survey is just going to make some of them stop taking the survey altogether. There might be a possibility that some people will not know the answers to certain questions you pose so it is better to make most questions optional if you can.
Now not every question can be optional as there are some questions that may be very important to the results of the survey. For example a question asking someone their age may be important to know for your particular survey so you can get an accurate idea of what kind of consumers respond to your products. If no one is answering how old they are then your data would be hard to interpret once you get all of the results back.
7. Test It Out
Always survey your close affiliates in a test survey before doling it out the masses. They’ll be able to find mistakes and raise questions that you couldn’t thanks to a fresh pair of eyes.
Survey Length
You also want people to actually fill out your survey. Offering a reward for completing the survey as we mentioned above is a great way to encourage more responses. You also don’t want to make your survey too long as this will dissuade people from filling it all out. Shorter surveys are more conducive to a better response rate.
Survey Monkey has another very informative article that looks at research on survey length and response times that they conducted. What they found is pretty interesting!
One thing to note is that the more questions there are then the less time people spend responding to each question. Part of this depends on the type of question, but ask yourself, do you want people to spend more time answering your questions or less? If you’re looking to get thoughtful answers that may lead to reliable results then you probably want people spending more time thinking about your questions.
Survey Monkey also found that abandon rates increased for surveys that took more than 7-8 minutes to complete. They also found that the tolerance for lengthier surveys was higher for surveys that were work or school related and less so for surveys that were customer related. So if you’re a business surveying your customers we’d advise keeping it short and to the point!
Now You’re Ready
Surveys can be super beneficial to a business and we hope this article helps you with creating surveys of your own! As long as you take the time to create a thoughtful survey then you will likely gain thoughtful feedback in return. That is the ultimate goal and the crazy part is that it all stems from the idea of a simple lead magnet!
If you’d like to know more about how lead magnets can be combined and utilized to help your business grow then give us a call! We’re the experts and we love helping small local businesses grow and reach their potential.
