Survey secrets for your business (or how to get your prospects to reveal what it takes to sell them)
From: Jeff Smith
Cyberwave Staff Writer
Dear Friend and Subscriber,
Can you really expect your market to tell you what products they want, what price they are willing to pay, what messages would convince them to buy and exactly what you can do to improve your business?
The short answer ...
Absolutely Yes!
This is exactly the kind of market research companies spend small fortunes to uncover. Yet, we found less than 5% of online businesses regularly survey their customers.
Incredibly, that 5% tends to achieve a far greater degree of success than the remaining 95% who do not survey their market.
This article explores 10 different ways you can use surveys and questionnaires to improve your bottom line, reveals the right and wrong ways to survey your market, gives you some of the best tools on the market, and teaches you how to automate the entire process so you can make use of the survey data to earn more cash.
10 ways to increase your profits using surveys
We are noticing more and more surveys appearing at different points of the sales and marketing cycle. Considering the profit potential, it's no wonder, and we expect to see many more of them.
Here are 10 ways you can use surveys to your business advantage:
1. Find New Products, Services or Business Ideas
Whether you are scoping out your niche market, discovering hidden desires, refining your product ideas, or seeking advice on the exact design or content of your product, you can significantly increase your profits by making sure you have a product that fulfills a raging desire in a market you can reach.
We've used surveys as primary research into emerging markets, as secondary research to test existing product ideas and to discover gaps for additional follow-up products.
One thing is certain - it's far too risky to guess at the desires within a market.
Again and again we have been astounded to hear first-hand, from our target markets, product ideas we would never have considered otherwise.
2. Test the Profit Potential of Products or Services
It's not good enough for people to want your product; you need to also know you can run a profitable business and achieve your financial goals with your products and services.
Surveys give you the edge in determining your profit potential in at least 3 ways:
- Surveys help you determine size of market and potential responsiveness. You can tap into a flood of responses, which indicate at the very least, you can reach your target market and you have hit a nerve.
- You can test the strength of desire by asking very specific questions such as... "On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the strongest, 1 being the weakest) how important is it to your business to solve problem X?" In general, strong desire will result in larger profit potential - taking competition into account as well.
- Discover the past purchase history of your market. Have they purchased products to fulfill the desire you have identified before? How many products have they purchased in the past? Do they intend to purchase again? A strong correlation to demand is past buying history. We all purchase many CD's, many computer games, many books, etc... You want to tap into a market and demand that ranges beyond just one single product.
3. Discover the Best Price For Your Products
Quite frankly, it amazes me to see how many businesses massively undervalue their products. Why does this happen?
When we price our products we often ignore important aspects such as lifetime benefit, overall value, and level of desire.
Let your market tell you what they are willing to pay!
When you ask questions on pricing to your market always word them in terms of what your product will do for them.
Here's an example ...
What would you be willing to invest in a system, designed by insiders, on how to get the job you always wanted?
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What we had in mind here is a hard-copy course, workbook and 1-hour follow-up teleseminar where we bring in an industry expert from Human Resources world.
Many marketers may be tempted to price such a product at less than $100, however if we take into account the lifetime benefit of such specialized knowledge, our market will tell us what they will be willing to pay.
4. Uncovering hidden benefits and benefit statements
Readers of this newsletter already know the importance of writing convincing, compelling marketing copy.
The success of your marketing effort, whether from ads, emails, newsletters, articles, websites, autoresponders, joint venture letters, search engine optimization, keyword selection, (etc.) depends upon hitting the right message to market match for your business.
How do you discover the hidden gems that will impact your market profoundly, enticing them through your sales process until they make the ultimate decision to become a life-long customer?
Conducting periodic surveys on your market is a terrific way to understand their opportunity triggers.
Questions regarding their frustrations, desires, rationalizations, and reasons offer great insight into hidden benefits that will instantly bring you closer to your market and give you a real edge over your competition.
5. Improve your Sales Process
As your business gets busier and more successful, you run the real risk of losing sales by missing or over-complicating something in your sales process.
99% of customers won't tell you why they didn't buy, or why they will not buy from you again.
However, if they are asked in the right way, they will tell you. Like it or not, you MUST know what those problems are before it costs you business.
You'll want to have exit surveys - where you quickly poll visitors on their reasons for not buying.
Survey those who abandon your shopping cart or sales page.
Ask those who have been through your follow-up sales process why they didn't purchase, what they liked and didn't like about your process and what you could have done better.
We have experienced amazing results by simply changing the last message in our autoresponder series to solicit feedback, a suggestion that came from a respondent.
Here is an example:
http://www.highertrustmarketing.com/minicourse-sample.html
You can see how the follow-up is automated as part of our popular e-course.
In response to the #3, one respondent sent us additional questions she had. They were so good, we decided to answer them by writing articles in future editions of our free newsletter, and added a link to subscribe within the mini-course (something she suggested).
Since doing that, our conversion from mini-course to newsletter subscribers increased 75%! What does that mean to our sales? Over 50% of our sales currently come from our newsletter subscribers who have come from the mini-course link.
One simple survey response from a single subscriber doubled our sales. Now that's powerful!
6. Build Subscriber Loyalty and Increase Responsiveness
Keeping in touch with your target market is not only smart; it can be an incredibly successful marketing technique.
We all like to be asked for our opinion. We would much rather tell somebody something than be told. The very process of consultation increases our trust level, let's us know there is a human being behind your business and can peak our interest.
We consistently poll our newsletter subscribers, and continue to see at least a 30% bump in sales and customer interaction even 2-3 weeks after running surveys.
Sharing results with your readers is also a very good way to build loyalty, trust and especially interest.
Humans all have a voyeuristic instinct - by "revealing" your survey results, we get to know what other people, of similar interests, think or feel. But here's an even better way to use surveys as a marketing tool ...
There have been recent examples where major corporations use consultative surveys to help build a groundswell of interest before launching a major marketing campaign.
For instance, letting your market help name a product allows you to pre-sell the benefits, build momentum and justifies a personalized method of launching your campaign when the time comes.
Surveys as the next major marketing technique? You betcha! - This is not a new trend; it is an established, proven one that works!
7. Let Your Customers Improve Your Products
Anyone who has been in business for 12-months or more knows building momentum is only 1-part of the equation. You have to continue to dazzle your customers, improve your products, stay ahead of competition and strive to be more relevant to your market's needs.
You can automate the process of product improvement by aggressively following up with your customers and prospects asking for their valued advice on improvements.
We follow all of our product sales, free courses, and consulting service projects with a post-experience survey.
In some cases, we follow-up with two surveys: one within days of sending the product, and another a couple of weeks afterwards.
The goal of the first is to get immediate feedback on our products or services; the second is to suggest additional information our customer would like to see, that was not included.
Improvements made from post-sale surveys have lowered our return rate for products to well below 1% - lower than many others selling similar products. Satisfied customers mean more word-of-mouth marketing, an essential technique to your long-term success.
8. Always Stay Relevant As Your Market Changes
Your business operates in a constantly evolving marketplace.
Moore's Law tells us technology completely changes once every two years. Indeed, smaller shifts in opinions, trends, beliefs, and environment occur much more frequently.
There are many examples of businesses that attain a high level of success, only to completely collapse as market sentiment changed and a competitor realized it before they did.
Digital Computers fell as an industry leader in computing when mainframes were replaced by PCs in an incredibly short period of time.
Just as you must scientifically discover the opinions, desires, emotions and motivations of your market in the first instance, you must also keep track of shifts over time.
For this reason, we have run the same survey 6-months later just to get a read on changes within our prospect list.
While we found responses were similar, the percentage distribution (percentage of responses falling into a given response category) shifted.
Essentially, their opinions on what challenged or invigorated them changed. Understanding such a shift allowed us to change our messaging, offer new products and alter our overall positioning to the market.
9. Discover What Your Sales Channels Want
Admittedly, we ignored this as do many other online marketers. We have always been good at focusing on our customers, but ignored the hundreds of partners representing our products.
There was a point in time you could get away with ignoring your affiliates. Today however, competition is intense.
Affiliate programs are quickly becoming a standard way of marketing products online, just about every company runs one.
In order to maintain a preferred slot with your partners, and ensure they continue to aggressively promote your products - you need to constantly stay in touch with their needs and wants.
10. Find Additional "Hidden" Markets
Quoting a very effective lottery advertisement, "If you don't play, you can't win."
If you want to know, "Are there other markets I have not considered who would be attracted to my products?" You won't know unless you ask.
For example, let's say you produce a course on writing a book. Your primary market is authors seeking to be published. By asking the simple question: "What are your goals in writing your book, report or course?" you may very well determine there are specific sub-markets, which will open up new opportunities for your business.
For instance, you may find you have customers who are consultants and want to advance their consulting business. Or, you may discover you have customers who are corporate employees looking to improve their business writing.
By asking one simple question, you will be amazed at how many of your customers fall into markets that may prove as lucrative (or more so) than your original target.
Survey secrets
Are you excited yet?
Your head should now be reeling with survey ideas, and you should be convinced you can both increase your revenue and simplify your business by making frequent use of surveys.
To start surveying your list, you need to pick an overall objective for your survey. We like to be able to outline the objective in a simple, concise survey statement. Here's an example:
| "To help us improve our service to you, we want to know your perception of our product. please note your responses will be kept absolutely confidential and the first 100 respondents will get "x" bonus for responding within 5 days." |
Here are some examples of information you may want to ask people about:
- Attitudes
- Perceptions and beliefs
- Needs and desires
- Activities (what people do)
- Behavior
- Demographics
Determine which of these support the objective of your survey.
Before you race off to write your first survey, there is a right way and a wrong way to conduct surveys. Here are 10 tips for designing effective surveys:
1. Keep it relevant
Two things to avoid: Make sure the content of the survey matches your market AND be focused with your questions.
Understand this, people actually enjoy sharing information about themselves IF they are interested in the subject area and they see a point to the survey.
You need to come across as someone who shows respect for your customers by allowing them to help you improve some aspect of your business.
Be clear on the intent of the survey; tell them why you are doing it, what you will do with the results, and how it will benefit them. Then, make sure your questions align with your purpose.
2. Short works best, 5-10 questions ideally
As long as surveys have been conducted, this rule has been proven again and again.
You are far more likely to get a response, and obtain better quality responses, with a short questionnaire than a long one.
By focusing on 1 or 2 objectives for your survey, you should easily be able to keep it under 10 questions.
3. Representative Market - what that means?
You want to make sure your survey responses are from those within your target market, but also that you get an adequate response within your market.
The first point is obvious; don't send a survey on small business software preferences to a large corporation or non-business owner.
The second point is this: Try to get a wide response from within your target market. As much as possible, you want views from young and old, women and men, and any other sub-markets that exist within your niche.
You can often achieve wider representation by using multiple techniques to target your audience - discussion forums, partners, existing mailing list, PPC campaign, e-zine advertising, (etc.) are all good ways to target markets for surveys.
4. Forced responses versus open-ended questions
This one is tricky.
Question design is essential to getting quality responses from your audience.
When you design a survey, understand the type of information you want to get from each question beforehand.
With some questions, you want a definite yes or no, or you want your respondents to select from multiple choices. With other questions, you may be looking for more subjective opinions.
An example of a question that works well as a closed-ended question is a "select the most appropriate price" option where you have respondents choose from a pre-issued list.
Questions on desires, motivations, or challenges are better left as open-ended questions (with a text box) because the language they use in responding is as important as the content itself.
5. Watch your wording - how NOT to pre-influence your reader
You have to be careful to not pre-determine your respondent's answer by the wording of your question.
Here's an example:
"What would you say is the best price for an incredible course on gardening that blows away all of the competition?"
Stick with the facts when asking your questions, and get someone to proofread the questions. We get someone to proof our surveys, someone we know will tell us truthfully the impression they get from each question to see if we have any built in bias that may lead to skewed results.
6. Email survey - watch spam filters
We'll cover some of the methods for distributing surveys in the next section, but if you are going to use email, watch for those spam filters.
You can use a tool such as this one to check your mail for potential spam filter triggers before sending it out.
http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/
We have run surveys with no bonuses, low-value bonuses and high-value bonuses.
We have found that bonuses DO improve response rate - sometimes as much as 100%, but equally as important is the purpose and explanation you give of why you are conducting the survey.
Bonuses need to be relevant, highly desired by the market and not widely accessible for free elsewhere.
One idea we tested increased response rates by up to 50%, the technique is to offer to share the results with your respondents.
People love to know how their opinions rank with others. By offering them a glimpse of the results, they will often participate just to see the information.
Other good bonuses are special reports, articles, private access to a site, which both gives away information, and also pre-sells or captures contact information of your subscribers. Surveys can actually be used as good lead generators.
8. How many respondents do you need?
The answer ... Fewer than you would think! There is no right number of respondents. The target we use is to have enough responses to start seeing patterns emerge.
That could be 50, 100, 500, or even 1000 respondents.
One of the first surveys we ever conducted on a market with little presence received 54 responses. From those responses, we were able to identify 3 main patterns of responses that helped us to both increase the price of our product and increase our website response by over 30%.
9. How often should you survey?
By keeping a survey short, relevant, purposeful, and sharing results, you can survey the same people month after month after month.
You don't want to bombard them with 10 question surveys every week, but asking 1 or 2 pointed questions per week is reasonable.
Conducting longer surveys each month is quite acceptable, and we have found these even increase subscriber loyalty, they know we are real, we care, and are active in the business.
10. What do you do with your responses?
It's true, you can become a master of conducting surveys, but if you don't analyze and use the results, save your time and don't bother.
The first thing to do when receiving responses to surveys is to create a folder, list or spreadsheet for each question.
Then, as results roll in, we can group them into sections to detect recurring themes or patterns quickly.
You also want to keep and measure your results over time. It's important that six months from now you can revisit those responses and compare them, detecting changes over time.
Once your patterns emerge, you need to start testing the changes suggested by your responses. Test prices, messages, changes to marketing and positioning.
The trick is to change one thing at a time, so you can be clear on impact of that change.
Which online survey tools are best!
Web surveys have become quite popular, as have the different tools available to help you conduct your surveys. Here are some recommendations:
1. Keep It Simple - Email is better than nothing
If you are starting with a list of subscribers, an opt-in list that has given you permission to send them email, this is a great way to get started. Just outline the questions in your message and request a response.
We have performed many surveys this way - the results are quick, and tend to be higher quality than when someone has to work their way through a more complicated tool.
The fact is, everyone knows how to use email. Many people will not click through to a survey link hosted either on your website or as a service.
The downside, of course, is that your results must be compiled and analyzed 1 on 1, and it's difficult to instantly show your respondents overall results.
However, if you are expecting less than 100 responses, you need results quickly, and already have an email list, using e-mail is a great way to start.
If you choose this method, you should begin by explaining the objective of your survey. Assure your respondents that results will remain private, and any public reporting of results will not contain any reference back to them personally.
Next, ask your questions, leaving space for responses and finish with a statement on what you will do with responses - including a commitment to share the results, if you so intend.
2. Web Surveys - Server Side Survey Software
Another great option is to install scripts or software on your web server (or your Web host's server) allowing you to design the survey and offer an interface from your Web site.
Purchasing software means you make a one-time investment as opposed to paying a monthly cost for a service.
Some examples of survey software include:
- iMagic Survey Pro - Free to try, $99 Full version:
http://www.imagicsurveysoftware.com/
- Wisco Survey Power - $149 Full version:
http://www.wiscosurvey.com
- Surveygold - Free trial, $299 Full version:
http://www.surveygold.com
You can find others by searching at:
http://www.download.com
Most will fall into the price range of products listed above.
Allow yourself a few hours of installation time, assuming you are reasonably technical and have full details on your host's server environment such as CGI directory, version of PERL or PHP, etc.
If you intend to run several surveys and want the freedom to obtain hundreds or thousands of responses, the initial cost of purchasing server side software will quickly outweigh the monthly cost of subscribing to a service.
For others, however a service is preferred.
3. Web Surveys - Services
Another option for developing surveys is to use a survey service, where you join as a member and use software on a third-party server.
Our preference has been either Surveymonkey or Zoomerang, both work quite well. Note that Zoomerang limits online storage of survey results for 10 days with their basic account.
Here are some of the better services for conducting hosted online surveys:
- Zoomerang - Basic account: 30 questions + 100 responses for 10 days. Free Premium account: $595/year
http://www.zoomerang.com
- Insiteful Surveys - Basic account: 10 question survey + 50 responses. Free Premium account - $24.95/month
http://www.insitefulsurveys.com
- Surveymonkey - Basic Account: 10 questions, 100 responses - Free. Premium Account: $19.95/month.
http://www.surveymonkey.com
- Hosted Survey - Basic: Unlimited length surveys, 50 responses - Free. Premium Account: Starts at $150 per survey.
http://www.hostedsurvey.com
Conclusion
Are you willing to take the risk at guessing what your market wants or how they feel about your products and services?
After running well over 100 surveys, we can tell you in every case we learned something that led to increased response and revenue and decreased costs for our business.
Now that you have the power to make a real difference to your business, we'll be looking for your latest survey soon!
Respectfully submitted,
Jeff Smith
| Jeff Smith is dedicated to helping you turn your knowledge into highly desirable, hot selling information-based products (eBooks, booklets, seminars, courses, etc.). |
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