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Good analysis without complexity
Research firms do an excellent job of taking your survey results and massaging them into a myriad of findings. If you don’t have the time or budget to engage a research firm, here are a few techniques you can use to get great value from your responses.
Start with Excel
You should be getting reports in excel format or some flat file format like tab-delimited or comma-separated values (.txt and .csv, respectively) that can be easily imported into Excel. You already understand how to use Excel to sort and manage data – so go with what you know. ReachMail’s Survey Builder is invaluable here. It plays very nicely with Excel.
Basic Understanding
Your first step is just to see how people responded on average. So create pivot-tables based on each question. This step will give you a basic, visual insight into how people felt according to your survey on the whole, and give you a foundation to take your understanding of your audience a step further.
Clustering
OK, now you have a basic feel for the results, but you need to know something more specific. For example: 30% of respondents use your product more than twice a week, but why is that? Conversely, 70% do not – and why don’t they enjoy it as much? Now is when you separate respondents into groups based on certain answers and look for common trends among their other responses.
Research firms call this “Clustering.” It’s a great way to understand more specific patterns based on common answers. For most do-it-yourselfers this is as much data as you can handle. You just don’t have the time or resources to keep digging in, and now you’ve got yourself actionable information to help you make decisions.
Look at that – marketable groups!
What results from the two-step method is both useful information, and groups of customers with similar needs. This can lead to a few useful, easy-to-implement marketing strategies.
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