Have you harnessed the power of surveys in your business? If not then I really think you should consider doing so.
Surveys are a marvellous and powerful business tool which when properly executed have the power to take the brakes off your business and allow it to zoom up to the next level. Tragically though most of the surveys I see are poor due to the inane questions they ask and the wishy-washy manner in which they are executed.
Surveys can provide you with amazing insights that will inspire and motivate you
Below is my ‘inside track’ on the main survey success principles that I have learnt and used over the years. If you follow these steps then I guarantee that your next survey will be a stunning success, providing you with amazing insights that will inspire and motivate you because they reveal what you’re doing right and what you’re doing that could be improved. Added together this simple information will provide with a rock solid platform on which both you and your business can catapult yourselves to the next level.
The very first thing you need to understand about surveys is that it is mission critical that you give your customers/prospects the biggest ethical bribe you can afford to properly complete and return your survey.
Your survey questions need to be sculptured! Correction! Artfully sculptured to answer every unansweredquestion you can think of that you would like to know about your customer and how they perceive you. You want to discover how they compare you with your competition and likewise for your products and services. Similarly your questions should be aimed at identifying any gaps in your product range and service (by the way, the word for what emerges is: ‘opportunities’).
Importantly, if you don’t give them a ‘big bribe’ then you will probably get less than a tenth of your surveys filled in than if you do.
Use just the right bribe for your audience
And by the way, the type of bribe is also critical, it has to be just the right thing that will appeal to your target audience and that will thus motivate to them to take action. Warning! Failure to observe this rule will dramatically reduce the amount of surveys you get completed.
Use tick boxes
Don’t prompt people to give you rhetorical answers in your survey, instead provide scenarios with tick boxes(e.g. tick boxes for which range of products or services they most like and tick boxes of what new products or services they’d most like you to introduce etc, etc.
You have to make this process as easy as possible for them
Whatever you do don’t ask people to use their imaginations, instead you have to imagine for them, generally people are lazy and also very poor at activating their imaginations and you have to make this process as easy as possible for them. This is why you (not them) list and describe the new products and services and this is why wherever you can you use tick boxes instead of expecting them to give you written and rhetorical responses which are often interesting and entertaining to read but difficult to analyse collectively afterwards.
You need to manifest short but attractive descriptions in your survey with tick boxes and just let them tick away happily. For example a good question is along the lines of: “If we were to introduce a new version of our best selling ‘Acme Thunderer’ made of glass would you stock it? y/n. In most cases (for all the reasons described above) it’s best to avoid asking questions like: “What new products would you like to see us introduce”?
Important: As a guide, as soon as you have about 20 or 25 of these surveys completed then loosely analyse the results and you will likely discover just how poor some of your questions were (so refine them at this point) and you’ll also suddenly think of many more questions you should have asked so now’s the time to include them.
The more data you gather the better the results
Following the re-working of your survey you should then re-launch your new improved version to the remainder of your database (hopefully the much larger portion). The more data you collect the more compelling and informative your results becomes.
Only when you’ve done everything you possibly can to get as many surveys as you possibly can completed by as many people as possible then and only then, do you officially end your survey and sit down and properly analyse your results.
Tip: See www.surveymonkey.com which is an absolutely fantastic, easy to use on-line tool for running surveys and gathering the results for easy and automatic analysis. You can also produce an off-line hard copy version of your survey for people who don’t like to complete them on-line and then key in their results yourself into Survey Monkey (also, if you’re up to it, then you can phone them and simply ask the survey questions and fill in the survey for them over the phone).
Software now makes it child’s play to evaluate the results
The main benefit of getting all of your data into an on-line software solution like Survey Monkey is that it provides instant and childishly easy analysis of the results and it automatically creates graphs and bar charts based on the answers from each question. All of this makes the information incredibly easy to evaluate and display to others too (it also makes a very effective presentation). Should you find Survey Monkey a little too expensive then you may wish to consider www.limesurvey.org which I have not personally trialed but I am reliably informed that: “it’s good, it does the job and it’s free”.
Don’t get hung up on using software to survey though, you can learn just as much with a hard copy survey, it’s just much more difficult to analyse and collate the results.
In conclusion: The quality of your survey will rely upon the quality of your questions. To be even more specific if you ask good quality question then you will get good quality answers. Do all of this exactly as I’ve described above and I can absolutely guarantee that providing you put the information your survey generates to use then it will transform your marketing and your business and give you so many new ideas you’ll be staggering under the weight.
The real icing on the cake is that it will also give you the most profound sense of direction and belief in your future marketing and help you to develop your overall business strategy.
Most importantly, it will be a strategy built around the most important people in your business….your customers!!
So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you start assembling your list of questions right now, once you start you’ll find it hard to stop.
Happy surveying.
PS. Once you’ve done a survey properly and realised just how incredibly powerful they are then why not schedule it as an annual event allowing you to compare results year on year?