When you run a business, how exactly are you supposed to get important information from your target audience you know is accurate? Sometimes, looking at your competitors and doing research based on other brands simply isn’t enough. You want data and feedback from your own customers so you can gauge how to improve your business efforts effectively. One of the best ways to gain this insight is by creating customer surveys and questionnaires.
Both surveys and questionnaires ask your audience their opinion on various topics so that you can gain insight from their feedback to optimize your conversion strategy and provide your customers with a better experience. You really can’t go wrong with the benefits they bring to your brand.
If you want to learn how to create effective customer surveys and questionnaires that bring your business positive results, here are a few ways to get started.
Lay out your goals
If you don’t lay out your goals prior to creating your questions, you’ll have a hard time gathering feedback that’s useful and refines your strategy. The entire point is to make connections between your audience and your business to see what could be improved and how. Without knowing your goals, it’s impossible to know what to ask and how it’ll be beneficial to your brand.
Consider what goals you have for your business that you want to reach. Pinpoint exactly what you want feedback on and, from there, you’ll be able to craft questions that help you get where you want to be.
Ask yourself this:
- What areas of my business am I trying to improve?
- How can I enhance my customer service strategy?
- What complaints have my business received in the past?
- Are customers satisfied with my products and services and their quality?
- Is it easy for my audience to get in touch with my brand?
Offer an incentive
Few customers want to take part in any survey, ever, and yours is no different. Your audience may love your brand, but that in itself is not enough for them to click through and answer all your questions. You need to dig deeper and give them a reason why they should do so that isn’t just helping you out so you can improve user engagement.
Give your audience an incentive for filling out your questionnaire that suits their needs and interests. It must be relevant to what they want, otherwise, they’ll see your offer and exit out of the page thinking it’s useless. Assuming you’ve created buyer personas and know your audience’s pain points fairly well, you should be able to offer them a deal they can’t refuse. The last thing you want is answers from people who just wanted a freebie and didn’t actually care to answer accurately.
Include open-ended questions
It might be tempting to hand out only yes or no questions as they’re simple and easy to create, but they will, a majority of the time, leave you at a dead end. They don’t do much in terms of giving you insight on what people think of your business, and they won’t do much for your conversion strategy either.
Be sure to include open-ended questions in your survey so you have the best chance of receiving accurate feedback that pinpoints rough patches in your strategy that you can improve. This allows people to get as specific as they need to be in order to get their point across effectively so your brand can thrive. This can include what customers think about your products, their opinion on your customer service department, and other areas your business can improve.
Keep it short
People don’t have the longest attention spans. If they expect something is going to take them a long time, they’re less likely to want to do it, and that includes taking your survey. Even some the most loyal of customers aren’t willing to spend 20 minutes answering your pressing questions. SurveyMonkey found that the longer a survey is, the less time respondents spend answering the questions.
Instead of getting frustrated, you can work around it by narrowing it down to the questions you want most answered and keeping it short. It may be difficult choosing which questions to keep in your survey as most of them will probably seem useful to you, but it’s important to refer back to your goals and assess which questions will help you reach them most effectively.
Wrapping up
Creating questionnaires and surveys is a fun way to engage your audience while simultaneously garnering much-needed feedback related to your brand. The best way to refine your conversions is by directly asking your customers how things can improve and what you can do to better the experience for them. How will you create effective surveys that boost your business?