How many times have you heard the concepts of analytics and big data during the last week?
In our case, we counted them and we recorded more than 50 times that clients, partners and colleagues have mentioned these concepts in meetings and job communications in a five-day work period. At a rate of 10 times per day.
(And we are sure that we are not the record).
Now well, it's important to use technological tools to interpret behaviors, analyze trends, improve the business, but what if we listen to the voice and opinion of customers in the first person?
Now, it's important to use technology tools to interpret behavior, analyze trends, improve the business, but what if we heard the voice and opinion of the customers first hand?
Online surveys are beacons that guide us through the fog: when customers’ comments match the data from the analytics, the picture is much clearer.
Search for your customer’s feedback
This is what feedback is all about, that essential tool which helps us understand why people behave the way they do.
Why do people use one feature three times more than another? Why do most of your customers stop the purchase at the last step? Or what causes consumers to use your product less often (and eventually stop using them altogether)?
Online surveys are beacons that guide us through the fog: when customers’ comments match the data from the analytics, the picture is much clearer.
Also, online forms are easy to set up, easy to send, and easy to analyze.
Design, implement, analyze
Let's suppose you are the Marketing manager of a textile company whose target audience is women between 15 and 35 years old and you need to know what your customers think about the launch of the new collection for the spring-summer season.
How does the process begin? We know that the objective is to get specific feedback from the client about our new clothing brand.
After designing some questions, you can send the link of the survey to your list of clients through your CRM, to your followers on social networks and to other people through the additional communication channels, like QRs in the clothing shops.
What is the next step? Give the online form a few days to run its own way, review, and wait for the magic to happen (hopefully).
Unfortunately, you don't always get good results when you submit surveys. Sometimes the customer does not finish the survey because they have found it tedious and useless. Other times, you may find yourself with an important, but not interesting number of answers. That is, customers have answered, but have not provided the information that helps you to make decisions.
However, this does not have to be the case.
Here are some easy tricks to make sure you get helpful responses from your online surveys.
Start with open questions
When you start asking your customers questions for the first time, their responses will completely surprise you. Therefore, if you create a survey full of rating scales and multiple choice questions, you will restrict the responses to their own assumptions.
However, when you use open-ended questions you will know what your customers really think.
Be brief and ask only the questions that will be useful to you
Each question must have a purpose. Don't think that adding an additional question, as is done in the “omnibus” polls, doesn’t bother. The public has changed and doesn't want to respond about things they don’t care about. So, if you are not relevant in the information you are requesting, you are wasting their time.
Not only that, but you are also wasting your own time. You will have to go through a whole bunch of responses and none of them will make a difference. Instead, by asking only what is fair and necessary, you will save time and get better responses.
We have all completed surveys that took more than 20 minutes. Was it a fun time? Do you remember it fondly? Probably not, you will remember it as a tedious experience.
It's probable that the customer will start to look for answers after the first questions. So, if we want to obtain quality responses from our clients, it's fundamental to make only a few key questions. Try to stick to a 5 question survey and do not exceed 10.
Add images
Although the questions will be the center and key aspect of your survey, you must not forget to consider the value of illustrating them with images. Now, this poses a new challenge to solve: which images work best?
Choosing an image related to the audience you want to reach increases the chances of getting more responses.
When deciding how to illustrate an online form, remember that it will always be better to use your own images that represent your business in a more original way. However, if you don't have enough material, you can choose from thousands of images from banks or galleries available on the web.