Do you want to learn how to survey your audience in a way that makes them want to participate?
There’s no doubt that our existing customers and fans are valuable sources of information, but many surveys tend to be long, confusing, and unappealing.
Contrarily, surveys done right help you get the best possible feedback — the kind you need to uncover problems that customers are experiencing and improve your product or service.
How Do Surveys Help Businesses?
Whether you’re looking for some insight into your customer’s experiences with your product or how you can do better as a business, surveys are instrumental. Some of their benefits include:
- Stay relevant to your customers. Collecting data on a regular basis will allow you to be on top of their needs and expectations. This is especially true for industries that are subject to changing trends, such as e-commerce. By learning what your customers want, you can always evolve.
- Beat your competition. One of the ways surveys allow you to overcome competition is by finding out the gaps in other products or services they may be using. For instance, you could ask, “What would you like to see or experience in [a type of product/service] that you’re not getting with today’s offerings?”
- Create personalized messages for audience subgroups. Your audience includes people from different age groups, geographical locations, income levels, interests, and purchase histories. It’s essential to pay attention to these things so that you can create highly targeted messages. Ultimately, this helps generate new sales or repeat sales.
How to Survey Your Audience
For those of you who are interested in knowing how to survey your audience, take some time to read our tips below.
Additionally, we recommend using UpViral to get more people to participate in your surveys, while you also reach other important goals like lead generation! More on this later.
Define your survey goal.
Just like any other marketing activity, don’t start making a survey without knowing what you want to achieve. For example, if you would like to learn more about your audience, your goal could be, “Conduct market research.”
A clear goal will allow you to formulate questions that are focused. You’ll avoid asking ambiguous questions, which might lead to a low response rate.
Create your survey.
During the creation process, you’ll need to identify the type of survey to conduct. Since you’ve established your goal at this point, this part should be easy.
Fortunately, most survey tools these days provide ready-made templates which can be edited to your liking. Jotform, for instance, has surveys focusing on social media, product testing, purchasing habits, and more.
See the screenshot below:
Other popular survey tools include Google Forms, Hubspot, and SurveyMonkey.
Make it fun. Incentivize them!
If you’re finding it difficult for people to participate in your surveys, why not offer an incentive? People in general are attracted to free things because it eliminates the risk associated with buying something.
You have two options:
Option #1:
Send them the survey along with the note that they’ll be receiving something in return, such as a discount or coupon code, a downloadable guide, or free consultation.
Option #2:
Include the survey as part of an UpViral giveaway! This is best if you want to survey non-customers, and at the same time, generate more leads through referrals. On that note, create the survey and include it in your UpViral giveaway as a custom action.
Assign a higher number of points to this custom action so that participants will likely fill it out. See the screenshot below:
UpViral is the perfect solution not just for increasing survey response rates — through our custom actions feature — but also for growing your leads and reaching other goals in your business.
Read this article: Running a Contest Will Help You Reach These 8 Marketing Goals
Keep your questions short.
As a general rule, the shorter your survey, the better.
In a SurveyMonkey article, they wrote, “The longer your survey is, the more opportunities your respondents have to get tired or lazy with their answers, or—the worst—drop out of your survey altogether.”
You may have a long list of questions, but it’s vital to identify the most important ones. Try going through all your questions and ask yourself, “Is this really worth answering or is it merely a nice to know?”
Meanwhile, longer surveys are an option if you’re looking for opinions on a topic that people are highly interested in.
Identify the best distribution channels.
Where should you be deploying your surveys? Thankfully, you can choose from several distribution channels.
If you run a private Facebook group, send your survey there. You can also share it with your Instagram and Twitter followers. Email and SMS also work!
Or you could add it as a pop-up on your website to instantly capture your visitors’ thoughts while they’re actively browsing or shopping for your products.
For those who work in retail, QR codes are an excellent option to gather feedback at your store. Customers can simply snap a photo of the code using their mobile phones and this takes them to your survey.
QR codes can be printed on receipts, product packaging, and standee signages by the checkout counter.
Know when to send the survey.
The reality is that there’s no definitive rule on the best times to send out your survey.
However, some organizations have conducted studies, revealing that weekdays — particularly Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays — are the best days of the week.
Send them preferably at a low peak time so that they don’t get ignored due to work emails. This includes early morning, lunchtime, and late afternoon.
But for those running an UpViral campaign with a survey as a custom action, the best time is anytime your campaign goes live! ✅
Over to You
We’ve discussed how to survey your audience, which starts with knowing your survey goal. There are many ways to make your survey engaging, but ultimately people are going to be much more likely to participate with incentives in place.
This is where you’ll need UpViral. It’s a proven tool that helps businesses accomplish any goal, from increasing audience engagement to filling their newsletters. Even better — it lets you meet these goals at once! 🙌🏻
Check out our case studies and get started today.
