Your Customers Are Your Best Research Team
Taking the temperature of your customers or involving your customers in product development has never been easier. Large, expensive research surveys have their place but many research goals can be achieved by quick and easy online surveys.
There are a number of companies that provide this service and most give you an opportunity to test drive the software before making a commitment. Even if you decide to subscribe to their service, the cost is nominal. Survey Monkey, Zoomerang, QuestionPro, and Constant Contact are a few of the better known survey programs.
Of course you need to have customer email addresses to send invitations to the online survey but emails are now an essential component of each customer record and you should be actively collecting those anyway. In K-12 education, classroom teachers often use their school email address as a dumping ground for companies and offers they don’t want to respond to, so “What is your preferred email address?” is an important question.
The other important factor to keep in mind when developing online surveys is that shorter is better than longer. The shorter the survey, the higher the response rate. People are busy and if you promise a short, 5-minute survey and deliver on that promise they are more likely to accept your invitation again.
You can even make one of the survey questions, “How often would you be willing to respond to short 10 question surveys during the school year?” Educators are usually very happy to share their opinions but you have to make it fast, convenient and simple.
It is a minimal investment of time to test an online survey using one of the programs mentioned above. What questions have you been wanting to ask your customers?
Posted in: Marketing |
September 9th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Hi Annie! What a great post. I’d also like to add a little technique to get your survey takers invested in the survey– tell them they will receive the results of the survey in some future email. This will ensure you’ll get a good email address and will hopefully raise participation.
I also noticed your list of online survey tool providers and thought I’d add the company I work for (SurveyGizmo) in the mix as well (shameless plug time). We offer free and paid accounts and an entire email invite system that can send out the invitations, remind people who haven’t taken the survey yet to take the survey and email personalized thank you’s once they have taken the survey. Let me know if you or your readers would like to know more! Thanks-Brittany
September 10th, 2008 at 7:34 am
That’s an excellent suggestion, Brittany. Promising to share the survey results is a terrific way to get the preffered email address. Thanks for stopping by.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:24 am
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