basic guide to online surveys | 1 - maxmail€¦ · basic guide to online surveys | 5 planning your...

Basic Guide to Online Surveys | 1


The Basic Guide to Online Surveys

This guide is designed to give you insight into how Online Surveys can be used to effectively listen

to your subscribers.

Welcome to the wonderful world or online surveys. In this guide we’ll cover:

Why use Surveys

How to increase participation

Design and copywriting tips

Distributing your survey

Gathering feedback and interpreting results


Why Use Surveys?

Surveys are a great way to reach out to your customers and gather that all important feedback

which can be used to

help streamline sales pitches and offers,

make sure you’re targeting the right segments,

ensure that your product is up to scratch

or generally seek the opinion of your loyal followers.

Relying on individual contact with customers will only give you insight into what’s gone wrong in

the past, as opposed to what you’re doing right. The fact is, even devoted customers rarely ever

take the time to let you know when they’re happy—but silence doesn’t necessarily indicate your

customers are fully satisfied.

Here are some of the ways that Maxmail customers use online surveys in their businesses.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Is your customer service up to scratch? Are there areas that your business could improve on? You

may not know that something is not working properly until you ask, especially with processes

that are automated and customer facing.

Gather case study information for referrals

Customer Satisfaction surveys can be a good source of brag material, from highly satisfied

customers.


Market research for pre-product launch (to gauge buyer interest)

Chart your company’s future course. If you see a need that you’re not filling from the feedback

you receive, that could be the impetus behind a new direction that substantially grows your

business.

Post sales surveys

Just after a sale is the best time to ask for product feedback. If your customers are not delighted

with your product or service in the first week they are unlikely to be happy in the future – this is

your opportunity to offer training, advice or anything else that will help them get the full benefit

of your product/ service.

Unsubscribe or exit surveys

When your customers unsubscribe or withdraw their custom, it’s incredibly valuable to know

why. SPAM laws mean you can’t make a survey a required part of the unsubscribe process,

however you can ask for the feedback. Keep it really simple.

Competitions

The survey tool can be used to gather responses for competitions, try setting a series of

questions about your product or service – to test your customer’s knowledge and reiterate the

correct answers. Maxmail can intelligently handle the automated response if someone gets a

question incorrect.

Fun and Levity

A quick poll to your customer base to start a conversation or just to entertain and engage e.g.

who’s going to win tonight’s World Cup rugby game All Blacks Vs USA.


Planning Your Survey

Ask yourself these questions before you start designing your survey

1. What are you trying to find out?

2. Who do you want to collect data from?

3. What do you want the reports to look like and what information should they

provide?

4. What actions will your organization take based on the results?

Make a list of results headings. Here are some examples:

1. Do our customers think that we provide good customer service?

2. Who, if any of our support staff are star performers?

3. What do our customers like most about our products? What do they like the least?

4. Why do our customers love dealing with us?

5. What challenges do our customers face that we could help solve?

6. What information would be help our customers become more successful?

Next you’ll need to think about who you’re sending the survey to and whether you need to

segment your mailing lists. Do you need to create a different survey for different groups? Do you

hold the information to be able to split the mailing lists meaningfully?


Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is there a specific demographic that I want this information from?

Age group

Customer category by product or service

Gender

2. Will all questions be relevant to all of these groups?

E.g. Men’s products and women’s products may have different wording

3. Do I include lapsed customers or only those that have purchased in the last 6

months?

TIP: Maxmail allows you to create unlimited custom fields for

each list, allowing you to capture any information that is required

to split them and gather meaningful survey data .

Once you’ve done that, think about how you would like the data to look at the end, remember

open ended questions with free text answers are a great way to get specific information out of

your customers, however the results are hard to display in a report.


Designing and Writing your Survey Questions

The questions you ask and how easy it is for your subscriber to answer them will have an impact

on how many people respond. This will also make a difference to accuracy and your ability to

analyze results.

1. Have a few different variations for each question. Test them out with people in your

organization to see if they make sense and if they are clear enough to solicit answers

without too much thought. Vague or poorly constructed questions will confuse the

respondent and their answer will not be of value to you.

2. Once you are satisfied with the questions being asked, arrange them in a way that

makes it easy for survey takers to complete the process. Be prepared to go back to the

drawing board to rework your online survey design.

3. Questions need to be relevant. Segment your customers before you start writing the

survey questions and make sure all questions are applicable to all customers that you

are sending to.

4. If a question has a multi-choice answer, offer the customer a full range of possible

responses. If it’s really broad cover the most likely responses and provide an “other” box

with a text field next to it to collect further detail.

5. Ask a lot of open-ended questions. This may fly in the face of the analytic capabilities

inherent in most survey software programs, but if you limit yourself to too many yes or

no questions, you’re not really giving your customers an opportunity to speak their

mind. Allowing them to do just that is a major component of engaging them, and letting

them know you value their thoughts.


6. Make sure you include questions that will allow you to interpret the results in a

meaningful way. Even with a confidential survey you may need to identify things such as

e.g. region, age group or household earning to get value from the results

7. Surveys can easily become very wordy and cluttered. Keep the colors and background

simple so as to overwhelm your participants.

8. Eliminate unnecessary questions – keep your survey as short as possible without

compromising your results.

9. Lastly, test the survey thoroughly before it’s deployed to the masses. Test using

different browsers, email clients, and computer operating systems to make sure no

respondent is left out.


Distributing Your Survey

In Maxmail you can distribute a survey in one of 6 ways

One Off Email : Maxmail creates a unique URL for each survey, you just need to paste the link

inside your email. For best effect your email should be designed specifically for getting people to

take the survey. Have an obvious single call to action so that readers know exactly what they are

being asked to do – even if it means putting the link behind a big red button labeled TAKE THE

SURVEY.

Auto-responder email: An email template containing the survey link is configured to fire off

when a specific condition is met. The options are endless, here are some examples:

when an online sale is made – a product evaluation survey is dispatched

on sign up for an online product trial – a questionnaire is sent asking about the user’s

product knowledge and proficiency

following an online subscription to a newsletter - a welcome survey asking for areas of

interest

when someone unsubscribes – ask them why

After watching a video, or downloading a file – ask for feedback or get them to fill in

details to go into a draw.

Posting on your Website as a link: Just place the link on your website and invite subscribers to

click through to fill in the survey (WARNING: You will need to ask for contact information or

demographic detail to interpret the results of public surveys, as respondents are not

automatically flagged as being in your email marketing list like they are with closed surveys)


Posting on your Website as HTML: Get your web designer to copy and paste the HTML code

from Maxmail onto your website page. This is great if you want to integrate the survey into your

branding. You can drive people to your site with an email containing the survey link.

Posting on your Social Media sites: Distribute the survey by posting the survey link on your

Facebook or Twitter accounts, if you are distributing using an email it’s just another step in the

campaign creation process within Maxmail.

Distribute via SMS : Create an SMS campaign containing a link to your survey. Those using

smartphones will be able to click through from the link however not everyone has a smartphone

and they will need to type the link manually into a browser, so keep the URL short.

How to Increase Participation: As we’ve already established, surveys are a valuable business tool

that can arm you with a wealth of information. BUT…. the million dollar question is how do we

get people to actually spend the time to participate?

1. Talk to your customers regularly

You can’t blame your subscribers for wondering why they should invest their time in filling in a

survey when you haven’t bothered invested time in talking to them! It takes a while to establish

a report with your subscriber-base and the more you open up the channels of communication,

the more likely they are to talk back.

2. What’s in it for them?

Incentive: Promising a discount, offer or some other perk (a free white paper?) as an incentive,

will sweeten the task a little bit.

Teaser: Explain how you are going to use the results. If it’s researching a new product line, giving

your customers a sneak peek can make them feel special and the curiosity will most likely drive

them to participate.


Prize Draw: Put everyone into the draw to win something. Make sure the prize has a high enough

value to the customer to warrant the effort. Giving away something that clearly costs you

nothing can sometimes backfire, so put yourself in your subscribers shoes.

3. Keep your surveys Short, Relevant and On Topic

Keep the survey short enough to make sure people don’t get bored and abandon it half way

through. A half-completed survey that’s not submitted isn’t worth anything to you.

Be upfront about the length of the survey, slightly overestimate the time it will take rather than

underestimate – you run the risk of losing your subscribers trust otherwise.

Be careful to stay on topic. Place important questions or those that require the most thought at

the beginning and the shortest at the end.

Analyzing your Results

Maxmail helps you to segment the responses and then use them intelligently for future

marketing campaigns. Here are some of the things you can do:

View results in tabular or graphical format

Inside Maxmail you can view the responses that come in as people complete your survey. You

can choose to see results in a bar graph/ pie graph or in a tabular format. This view is fully

searchable so that you can find results easily.

Export to a spreadsheet:

With one click, you can download a summary of your results in multiple formats. If you're a

statistics nut, you can download all of the raw data you've collected as a spreadsheet.


Segmentation:

With Maxmail, you can search based on any of the information gathered and save into a separate

mailing list. You can also automate segmentation by defining rules that add survey participants to

an appropriate mailing list on the fly - based on the responses they gave. E.g. If someone chooses

"Mango" as their Favorite Fruit in the "What's your favorite fruit" survey, move them to the

"Mango" mailing list and send them a special offer.

Follow up with the Non responders

Schedule an auto-responder email (or SMS for that matter) to be sent to those who have NOT

completed your survey at a chosen time. This could have an incentive attached or just be a

reminder.

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