SimplyCast: Interactive Marketing Blog

Has anyone asked how you are doing today? If so, you probably gave them instant feedback that will help them better understand your current state. This is no different with your business.

You need to be keeping close tabs on what your customers are thinking in order to grow your business. What do they think of your product or customer service? Trust me, if you ask them, they will tell you the truth. One of the best ways to do this is to invite customers to take a well designed survey.

Effective customer feedback will help you drive your company forward because at the end of day, they are the ones keeping you in business.

SimplyCast provides an easy-to-use Survey Marketing tool that allows you to create pretty much any kind of survey you want.

But how do you properly create a powerful survey that will gather the information you want?

Here are a list of helpful tips to keep in mind when you sit down to create your next survey marketing campaign.

1. Clearly define what you want to know from your customers. Write it down and make sure anyone else involved understands as well. You can’t seek out feedback properly if you don’t know what you want to learn first.

2. Don’t ask customers potentially annoying questions you already know the answer to. For example, anything that you can find out for yourself using the company database or doing a little digging. This shows that you are not in touch with your customers. Only ask questions that gain new information for your company.

3. Which question format will better generate the information you require. Numerical questions (rating from 1 to 10) are better for repeat surveys where you track change over a period of time. Non-numerical (low / medium / high) or categorical (yes / no ) are best for grouping your market. Open Response Questions (do you have suggestions?) are best for exploring. SimplyCast offers all of these question types as well as many others.

4. Make sure that all question phrasing is clear and easy to understand. Don’t ask two or three part questions, making sure it only covers one thing. If you make things too complicated and hard to understand, people will not take the survey.

5. Keep it simple! Read the question wording carefully to make sure it is not loaded with what you want to hear. Feed customers the answer in the question and they will simply give it back to you. That will only give you a false sense of feedback. Also, use the same language as your customers.

6. Understand and remember who you are sending this survey to. Do you know whether each survey respondent will have the knowledge to answer your questions? Ideally if you are asking about your product or service, they have actually used it at least once. That is where having targeted lists of customers can come in handy. Paid users will have much different answers than trial users for example.

7. Include all possible response categories without overlapping categories or your customers will become confused and disinterested. Remember, survey design is about limiting choices without leaving any out. You only want your customers to select the one most applicable response for them. If in doubt, it is always a good idea to include “other / not applicable” to the list.

8. Review the very first point in this list. Have you covered all the things you want to learn from your customers? Have you added too many questions or could you possibly take a few out without losing potential feedback. Remember, customers have lives as well and they won’t spend all day answering your survey.

9. A well designed survey should flow and entice the reader to complete the entire thing. The survey needs a beginning, a middle and an end. That can mean easier questions to draw them in, more specific questions in the middle and personal questions at the end when they are almost done. Adding some form of reward for completing the survey will help as well. Thank the customer for taking the survey by adding a code for a discount on the last page.

10. Give people a chance to make comments at the end. You can add a box for any thing else that a customer wants to share. Give the survey taker a little freedom to add what they may of not been able to fit in within the structure of the survey. If they have made it to the end of the survey, they are very interested in making their opinion heard. This may not be relevant in all surveys but the potential feedback can be incredibly valuable.

By taking these tips into account you will ready to create a powerful survey or questionnaire, especially if you use SimplyCast’s easy-to-use Survey software.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Got some survey design tips of your own? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter.

SimplyCast’s Interactive Marketing Suite includes:
Email Marketing | Survey Marketing | Event Marketing |
Fax Marketing | SMS Marketing | AutoResponder Marketing
List Management | Online Signup Forms | IP Monitoring Tool