 Surveys are an important part of any successful company’s marketing mix. Getting feedback from the people who use your site or product is a truly priceless resource to understanding their needs. Whether it be to streamline an existing offering, or to branch out towards new products, or even new ways to communicate, sound decision-making always starts with listening to your clients.
But that process seems daunting with so many possibilities. What should you ask? How much should you ask? When should you survey – over what media, and for how long? And then what do you do with all that data? We put together a few quick tips on how to survey your audience and get results that make a difference to your company.
The medium is the message
It’s been overwhelmingly proven that print surveys are dead. They’re very expensive to print and mail, offer low response rates, and are resource intensive to pull intelligence from. So that leaves us with the two models that do work well for retrieving valuable information from your audience: Web and Email.
Actually, you’ll probably need both to drive your audience to a survey. Sending an email with a link to the survey is the most traditional method. It gives you the chance to promote the fact that your clients are important, and that you want their opinion. So even sending the email is a boost to your brand equity. You’ll also want to share some information back to your clients (more on that later).
The question then becomes whether to lead users to your Website for the survey, or put the survey directly in an email. The answer here isn’t as obvious as it seems. Yes, email is going to be the most direct way to pull responses. It’s the most convenient medium for your audience to share information with you, without feeling like it’s taking so much time away (even though it’s just one click) from their other duties.
However, You can’t code validation into emails. That’s the big downer. If you don’t care about whether questions get answered or not – great! This is why emails are an excellent place to put polls: one simple question with a short answer.
So we come to the natural conclusion: Web-based surveys are the answer. They allow users to feel like they have more time to think about questions than in an email context. Conventional Web pages allow you to perform validation: making sure that the survey is complete before sending. And you can design them to be in the context of your site, which adds to a complete brand experience, ending with the user already in the navigational structure of your site.
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