Customer touch points are integral to your sale. Here’s how using surveys to move customers through your funnel can help drive business.
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7 Proven Methods You Can Use to Get Customers to Answer Your Survey
Survey Tips
You want to grow your business and provide the best experience to your customers. You know that happy customers mean repeat business and new customer acquisition as well.
To accomplish your business goals, you want to use an important marketing tool – the customer survey. Securing customer feedback is crucial to growing your business.
Smart businesses know that sending surveys helps you gain valuable information to propel your business forward. Plus, surveys are easy and affordable to create. (tweet this)
You’ll find there are a few tricks to sending surveys that get responses. In this article, we look at seven proven methods you can use to get customers to answer your survey.
#1: Make Customers Feel Special
Since you want people to complete your survey, you have to make them feel special. How do you do this?
You want to show you genuinely appreciate your customers’ participation in your survey.
There are various types of messaging to use in your survey that accomplish this, and here are two suggestions:
- Use the subject line: “We want to know what you think.” This immediately sets the tone and lets your customers know that you really want to know their opinion on your products, services, or customer support. You might then elaborate a bit and tell your customers how their feedback will impact them and your business.
- Or, use this subject line: “Please take a short five minutes to complete this important survey.” With this sentence, you tell your customers up front how long your survey is going to take them. Five minutes is a good length because most people have that amount of time to spare. Be sure that you have had sample subjects take your survey, though. You don’t want to promise five minutes when it is really 10. Don’t forget to thank them as well. Always remember that shorter surveys are better.
#2: Provide an Incentive
You can try the above tactics, but if they aren’t working for you, try something different in your next survey.
Offer your customers an incentive to raise your survey completion rate. Here are a few examples:
- Offer a discount at the end of the survey. For example, you might provide a 15% off coupon for their next shopping trip.
- Give your customers a gift certificate at the end of the survey – $10-15 is a nice range.
- You can also offer a drawing as an incentive. For example, “Enter our survey and be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card.”
Whatever incentive you offer, make sure you know your target audience. It should appeal to a broad range of your respondents.
#3: Use Multiple Channels
Sometimes businesses make the mistake of only sending surveys through one channel.
For example, if you post a link to your survey on Facebook, you won’t necessarily reach all of your customers. Some of them might not even use the social media platform.
The easiest, and usually the best way, to send surveys is through your survey provider or in other instances, your email marketing service provider.
If you have your customers’ email addresses, this is the most reliable way to get your surveys in front of your customers.
Next, you might consider posting your survey through your social media channels and putting it on a landing page on your website. You can also send survey links through SMS.
How does all of this help? It ensures that your customers will see your survey. If they ignore the first notice, but they see a link to the survey three more times, they might just click and complete it.
#4: Keep Your Survey Short
How long is too long?
Research shows that survey length is one of the most important thing respondents consider when completing your survey and accounts for many drop-outs.
As a rule of thumb, keep your surveys under 10 questions. For most surveys one-three is the ideal amount.
The last thing you want is your survey drop-out rate to increase because your survey is too long. Show your customers you appreciate their time by keeping your survey short.
It should only include the questions that you are actually going to act on in the near future.
#5: Be Timely
You want to send your customers their survey the same day they made their purchase or used their services.
It’s best if the experience is fresh in their mind because they’ll be more likely to complete your survey. If they can’t remember their experience, they might provide you with inaccurate feedback.
#6: Know the Goal of Your Survey
Before you even begin putting your survey together, you want to make sure you know the goal.
Perhaps your goal is to find out if your customers would recommend you business. Your go-to survey is the Net Promoter Score survey.
Or, your goal might be to find out how your customer liked the product they purchased. This is a short survey with detailed questions.
Next, you want to tell your customers up front what you’re going to do with the information. And, after the survey, when you’ve formulated your plan, email your customers and let them know the actions you’re going to take.
This helps them feel appreciated once again.
#7: Personalize Your Survey Email
Your customers expect you to know who they are.
According to a survey, when you send emails with personalized subject lines, your customers are 26% more likely to open them.
When survey respondents see their name in print on their screen, there is a subtle nod that encourages them to complete your survey. The human touch works when it comes to increasing survey response rates.
Consider using their name in not only the email subject line but the body of the email as well.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know the seven proven methods you can use to get customers to answer your survey, you’re ready to create your first survey.
You are also well on your way to understanding your customers’ needs and wants better so you can refine your products and improve your customer service.
By taking the time needed to create the best survey possible, you have a better shot at more responses which is just what you need to improve your business.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
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Should You Reward Customers For Taking Surveys?
Survey Tips
There’s a fine balance between giving rewards for taking surveys and not giving them at all. The most important thing to consider is your results.
You don’t want to skew your results by offering rewards, and you certainly want to avoid tainted data as much as possible.
So, this begs this question, “Should you reward customers for taking surveys?”
First, let’s look at the distinction between reward and incentive.
Rewards vs. Incentives
An incentive is often given to respondents for completing a survey. A reward may be seen as a thank-you for finishing a survey.
This distinction may be important to consider when offering them to respondents. For example, big survey companies offer monetary incentives to random survey takers, and the results have a higher probability of being skewed.
A reward may be offered by your company to your specific customers for taking your survey, and it may be less skewed than the incentive.
So, one can deduce that it may not be the value of the incentive or reward that increases the responses, but it’s the way it’s offered that makes a difference to your respondents.
How to Decide
As you ponder the question of whether or not you should offer a reward, you want to consider the following questions:
- Who is your target? Is it existing customers or a specific demographic? Will these people have something important to offer? If so, you might consider offering a little boost for taking your survey. Yet, if you’re sending out a blanket survey, an incentive isn’t a great idea.
- What’s your relationship with your respondents? If you’re sending it to customers after they make a purchase, a thank you reward in the form of a coupon may be a good idea. On the other hand, you might not want to offer an incentive for a survey that isn’t specifically targeted.
- Are people interested in my business? If so, a reward is a bonus. If they aren’t, then the reward will attract the wrong respondents.
- How long is your survey? Short surveys don’t need a reward. A longer survey certainly merits one because you want to show respondents you value and appreciate the time it takes to fill out your survey.
When to Offer the Incentive
Should you offer it before the survey or after?
To increase your response rate, you can offer it before the survey. But, beware that this may cost more because you provide the incentive before anyone even takes your survey.
Your audience may take the incentive and leave your survey unfinished.
Conversely, offering the promise of the reward for taking your survey is a much better option because it’s a true reward provided after the work of taking the survey.
Final Thoughts
Offering rewards for taking your surveys may make respondents more likely to complete your survey, but you want to be careful with your offer.
For example, you don’t want to attract the wrong type of respondent. Consider the boat dealership that attracts online shoppers with the wrong type of incentive or reward.
The best way to avoid problems is to know who you’re sending your survey to. The reward should match the audience. (tweet this)
This way you won’t end up with people who misrepresent themselves. These folks may not know or care about your services or products. They simply want a reward.
Offering survey rewards should be well thought out. You want to consider the survey, your audience, and the results you’re after before deciding to offer a reward.
Finally, consider the type of reward you offer. It should fit the survey and the audience. These may be monetary, in the form of a coupon, or something that benefits a third-party like a charity.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
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How To Get Links To Your Survey In Front Of Your Customers
Survey Tips
You want to provide the best customer experience possible, and one of the best ways to do this is to find out how your customers feel about their experience with your company.
A survey is an excellent way to find out if your customer service, products and overall experience are meeting the needs of your customers.
But, what happens when your survey participation rates are low because you aren’t sure how to disseminate your survey?
In this article, we look at how to get links to your survey in front of your customers.
Send an Email
One of the most efficient and commonplace ways to communicate with your customers and get your survey link to them is through your email marketing channel.
Since email is a direct line of communication with your customers, you can easily send them a link to your survey.
Your email lands right in the inner sanctum of their email box, and because you can highly target your email list, you can decide just exactly who to send your surveys to.
For example, you might choose to send a survey to only the people on your list who made a purchase in the last year. Or, perhaps you want to survey customers who haven’t made a purchase in the last year.
You also might segment your lists by demographics. Another option is to survey people who landed on a specific page of your website and not made a purchase.
Finally, perhaps you’d like to survey those on your list who chatted with your customer service staff. The possibilities with email are limitless.
It’s worth noting that your emailed surveys will most likely show the highest response rate because these are people who’ve opted in to your email list and are receptive to communication from you.
As you send your email surveys, here are a few tips to follow for the best results:
- Use a short and specific headline to grab your customers’ attention.
- Make the subject line seem like an exclusive, special invitation.
- Do nothing else in your email other than explain your survey and provide the link to avoid any distractions.
- Be brief in your description.
- Offer your thanks and explain the incentive if you’re offering one.
- Make your call to action button (your link to the survey) big, colorful and visible.
- Send a follow up reminder if you have a low initial response rate.
Host Your Survey on Your Website
Another way to get links to your survey in front of your customers is by hosting the survey on your website.
By placing your survey on your website, you can invite your website visitors to complete your survey.
This can be beneficial to you because while these people may not be your customers yet, you can still gain valuable information from them.
Even though you gain information about your website visitors through your Google Analytics, you can glean even more information by posing specific questions to the people who visit your website.
How might you do this? Here are a few questions for putting surveys to work for you right on your website:
- Create surveys for specific pages of your website. For example, you might include surveys on your product pages or your blog.
- One survey might ask them what brought them to your website or how they learned about you. Another survey might ask them what they think of your brand-new product or what they might think of a proposed product or service.
- In addition, you could ask them if they found your content useful or enjoyable.
- You could also use a survey as a means to gain their contact information. Just be sure to tell them that you are doing it. There are many possibilities.
Where you place your survey is of significant importance. While you might place it right on your pages, you could also put your link in a pop-up box as visitors either land on your site or prepare to depart your site.
You can also use a survey on a follow-up page. For example, you might add a survey on your thank-you page after someone downloads something, makes a purchase or signs up for a beta of your services.
Do be sure to use a strong call to action and a very visible button.
Create a Blog
Another way to get a link out is to write a blog article and add the survey to the article.
This allows you to briefly explain why you want to conduct a survey and what you hope to gain by it. You can also return to update the blog post once you have your results.
Your blog allows you the ability to really connect with participants and encourage them to complete your survey.
Again, you want to use a strong call to action as well as a button link to your survey and text links to your survey within the blog text itself.
Use Social Media
Another premier spot to get your survey links into the hands of your customers is through social media.
While you can link to the blog post that includes your survey link, you can also create posts that share direct links to your survey.
The benefits of social media are many. Namely, social media allows you to start a conversation and encourage feedback in a friendly, low-key manner.
When utilizing social media, include a direct link to your survey. Consider using bitly to shorten the link as a best practice.
You can also use others on social media to share your link as well. Capitalize on your influencers to share your survey link.
You might also add a drawing to your social media link to encourage more survey participation.
Final Thoughts
The value of the survey is quite unsurpassed for finding out what your customers think about your business.
In fact, a survey by the Pew Research Center says that online surveys are one of the most convenient and cost effective ways to collect data from your customers.
Yet, it can be difficult to get responses for your surveys. The best way to combat this is to have an effective plan for distribution, and then to follow up and make sure it’s working.
Use your existing digital channels and brainstorm a few others. Then, promote your survey and distribute it to elicit a higher response rate.
Finally, the most important thing to remember is to make your survey about your customers, not you. You want to learn how they feel, so tailor your questions so your customers know how much you value their opinions.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
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