Using Online Surveys to learn more about your customers
(This article was originally printed in Greater Wilmington Business 10/2006)
(Please click here to learn about online surveys and take one yourself!
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225QB92XYN8 )
Customers are the most critical component of your business. Learning more about them and identifying innovative ways to deliver value to them should be paramount in your never-ending quest to increase profitability.
In previous columns we’ve talked about leveraging the internet as a cost-effective marketing tool to help spread the word about your business. This month, we’ll talk about some of the benefits, costs and specific steps you would take to use an online survey to learn more about your customers and how to better serve them.
Too often we make assumptions about our customer’s preferences and their perceptions without ever asking them. Surveys, Focus Groups, and Interviews are three methods we can utilize to learn more about our customer.
The 3 R’s of marketing are Research, Reach, and Retain. Surveying customers falls into the Research aspect and helps you to answer questions like: Who is your Target Market? Who is your competition and why are you better? Why are you uniquely suited to deliver a given product? This research can also be used to identify the optimal ways to reach and retain them.
Some of the reasons you might want to utilize a survey include making a decision to move an existing product into a new market, finding out more about your existing customers and how they view your company and its products, and identifying the unmet needs of your existing or potential customers to create new services.
Online surveys can be used to inexpensively obtain speedier, more accurate response rates that reduce workflow, thus saving two of your most critical resources; time and money. Zoomerang.com and Surveymonkey.com are two online companies that provide this service.
Some of the benefits of using online surveys are higher response rates, automatically and immediately tallied results, no need to wait for mail to be delivered and returned by respondents, and no need to print the surveys.
In compiling the CFCC Small Business Center Annual report, for example, we use online surveys to ask more in-depth questions about our customer’s experiences with our services.
This process was previously done by mailing out several hundred questionnaires, addressing and stamping them, and then waiting several weeks for replies. Once a goodly portion of responses was returned, the results were tabulated into an Excel spreadsheet and answers were compiled into a “Survey Results” document, an unnecessarily tedious process often resulting in less then 10% response rates.
About 3 years ago we began using Zoomerang.com to take the place of our paper-intensive survey. In one survey, it took 48 hours to achieve an 18% response rate and 1 week to achieve a 24% response rate.
Zoomerang’s Basic version is free but results are only available for 10 days, there is a 100-response limit, and you can’t download results to Excel. Upgrading to the “zPro” version removes these limitations, costs $20-$50/month and allows for better analysis and filtering, sharing of results, and extends the survey expiration date.
SurveyMonkey.Com, who charges $20/month or $200/year, lists about 33 competitors at http://surveymonkey.com/Pricing.asp . SurveyMonkey Basic is free and has a limit of 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. I utilize Zoomerang because their free service allows for 30 questions per survey, though I might go with SurveyMonkey were I to upgrade to the professional version.
The workflow is as follows:
1. Log on to zoomerang.com and create your survey.
2. Once complete, a unique web address will be generated.
a. Example: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225QB92XYN8
3. Send this survey link via email to your existing clients, who would click on the link and take the online survey.
4. You can then periodically view immediately tallied results.
5. With the Basic Version, you can print, copy or save the results as an HTML file. With Pro Version, you can export or email the results to yourself.
Using the client’s name and addressing one email per client will get better response rates. The alternative is to Blind CC your entire email list with one bulk email so that no-one sees the other addresses on your email. A potential downside to utilizing Blind CC in this way is that, depending on the number of emails you are sending, your email may be categorized as spam.
If you are not polling an existing list of clients, Zoomerang provides a “Sampling” service that will poll a targeted list based on demographic information like income levels or consumer habits.
As an example of online surveys, I’ve posted a link here:
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225QB92XYN8
where you can answer questions about this column and we can learn more about how to better serve you, our customers.
(Please click here to learn about online surveys and take one yourself!
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225QB92XYN8 )
Customers are the most critical component of your business. Learning more about them and identifying innovative ways to deliver value to them should be paramount in your never-ending quest to increase profitability.
In previous columns we’ve talked about leveraging the internet as a cost-effective marketing tool to help spread the word about your business. This month, we’ll talk about some of the benefits, costs and specific steps you would take to use an online survey to learn more about your customers and how to better serve them.
Too often we make assumptions about our customer’s preferences and their perceptions without ever asking them. Surveys, Focus Groups, and Interviews are three methods we can utilize to learn more about our customer.
The 3 R’s of marketing are Research, Reach, and Retain. Surveying customers falls into the Research aspect and helps you to answer questions like: Who is your Target Market? Who is your competition and why are you better? Why are you uniquely suited to deliver a given product? This research can also be used to identify the optimal ways to reach and retain them.
Some of the reasons you might want to utilize a survey include making a decision to move an existing product into a new market, finding out more about your existing customers and how they view your company and its products, and identifying the unmet needs of your existing or potential customers to create new services.
Online surveys can be used to inexpensively obtain speedier, more accurate response rates that reduce workflow, thus saving two of your most critical resources; time and money. Zoomerang.com and Surveymonkey.com are two online companies that provide this service.
Some of the benefits of using online surveys are higher response rates, automatically and immediately tallied results, no need to wait for mail to be delivered and returned by respondents, and no need to print the surveys.
In compiling the CFCC Small Business Center Annual report, for example, we use online surveys to ask more in-depth questions about our customer’s experiences with our services.
This process was previously done by mailing out several hundred questionnaires, addressing and stamping them, and then waiting several weeks for replies. Once a goodly portion of responses was returned, the results were tabulated into an Excel spreadsheet and answers were compiled into a “Survey Results” document, an unnecessarily tedious process often resulting in less then 10% response rates.
About 3 years ago we began using Zoomerang.com to take the place of our paper-intensive survey. In one survey, it took 48 hours to achieve an 18% response rate and 1 week to achieve a 24% response rate.
Zoomerang’s Basic version is free but results are only available for 10 days, there is a 100-response limit, and you can’t download results to Excel. Upgrading to the “zPro” version removes these limitations, costs $20-$50/month and allows for better analysis and filtering, sharing of results, and extends the survey expiration date.
SurveyMonkey.Com, who charges $20/month or $200/year, lists about 33 competitors at http://surveymonkey.com/Pricing.asp . SurveyMonkey Basic is free and has a limit of 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. I utilize Zoomerang because their free service allows for 30 questions per survey, though I might go with SurveyMonkey were I to upgrade to the professional version.
The workflow is as follows:
1. Log on to zoomerang.com and create your survey.
2. Once complete, a unique web address will be generated.
a. Example: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225QB92XYN8
3. Send this survey link via email to your existing clients, who would click on the link and take the online survey.
4. You can then periodically view immediately tallied results.
5. With the Basic Version, you can print, copy or save the results as an HTML file. With Pro Version, you can export or email the results to yourself.
Using the client’s name and addressing one email per client will get better response rates. The alternative is to Blind CC your entire email list with one bulk email so that no-one sees the other addresses on your email. A potential downside to utilizing Blind CC in this way is that, depending on the number of emails you are sending, your email may be categorized as spam.
If you are not polling an existing list of clients, Zoomerang provides a “Sampling” service that will poll a targeted list based on demographic information like income levels or consumer habits.
As an example of online surveys, I’ve posted a link here:
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225QB92XYN8
where you can answer questions about this column and we can learn more about how to better serve you, our customers.
posted by slidesage at 7:45 AM
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