Blogs

You're doing a survey to discover smart actions you can take for your business, but the feedback you get won’t be useful if you don’t get a good chunk of your audience to participate.  It all comes down to the invitation.  Here are the three ways to get your audience to act on your online survey invitation:

1. Have the right content in your invitation
2. Get your invitation successfully into the inbox
3. Hold a place in their mind

In this first post of the series, you will have No. 1 nailed down.  What you put in the invitation directly relates to how much of a response you’re going to get. You can get your audience interested by making your survey invitations short, sweet and to the point.  No big long explanations.  Keep the text down to a short paragraph and then make that link really stand out.  Here are the eight key components to include in your survey invitation:

What’s your newsletter doing for you?  If done right, it’s a powerful tool to stay in front of customers and prospects so they come to you when they’re ready to buy or donate.  Are your readers looking forward to your next issue?  Is your newsletter getting solid opens and clicks?  If you want more response to your newsletter, here are some ways you can get content that will better engage your readers.

Consumers have so many attractive choices available in the marketplace today.  Why should they do business with you?  A logo isn’t enough of a reason.  As discussed in part 1 of this post, it’s essential to clearly express your uniqueness to keep customers coming and to get more in the door.  So now here’s how to easily identify your organizations’ true uniqueness and what to do with it to have a competitive edge.  

Step 1: Send an online survey to your current customers to learn why they come to you.  You are selling something far greater than a product or service.  By sending your customers a survey they will be glad to see you care, and you will both quickly and easily find out why your customers really do business with you.  Here’s an online survey tool to use if you need one.  And here are the brand perception survey questions to get you the feedback you need to uncover your true uniqueness.  It should take your audience less than 5 minutes to complete, which will help in getting a good response.  Include the time it will take on the invitation.  I would also consider offering them a discount on their next purchase or a free whitepaper to get more participation.   You can find more about getting people to participate at this post about getting a good response. 

The holidays are over and you have opened all the greetings and gifts. Seems like a blur? But ask yourself, which of these gifts or greetings do you remember? What stood out? Why did it stand out?  It’s most likely because it was unique; different from all the rest.  Applying that idea of uniqueness is a big opportunity for your organization’s success this year.  

Every year it seems we’re busy, busy, busy, and then wham! The end of the year is here! First, I’d like to congratulate you on the wins you made this year! As economists say, it’s the drive of small business owners that tends to revitalize a down economy. Secondly, I want to share two practical ideas to help you strengthen your business for 2009. Do not miss these opportunities to connect with your customers, strengthen your relationships, and ultimately help grow your business.

1. Send transactional emails. An email to confirm new order, provide expected delivery day/time, give order tracking information, confirm a donation, remind registrants of an event, give product updates, or to thank customers for their business is an easy way to provide value to your customers and continue the relationship. Recipients say transactional emails are the ones most worth reading. Additionally, these emails are an opportunity for you to gain more revenue by promoting related products, services or events. For example, if you are a retailer confirming an order for winter gloves, include a section in the email showing other popular products to keep warm. Or if you are a wellness center thanking a customer for using your nutritional services, recommend a boot camp class and give them a discount coupon. Just be sure to use the 85/15 rule here – don’t let promotions take up more than 15% of the email.
    
2. Provide a clear way for customers to give you feedback after interacting with your business. You’re on their mind. Customers may have a suggestion, a bright idea on additional products/services they would like to buy from you, or want to tell you how great their experience with you was. You can easily give them a simple way to tell you all of this on their own time, with no rush, and anonymously if they prefer. Include a URL or link on all customer communications - receipts, newsletters, order confirmations (and all of those transactional emails we talked about) that brings them to an online survey. Customer feedback can give you insight into what may be helping or hurting your business, and what you can do to grow stronger, faster. If you are new to surveys, you can try our online survey tool free for 60 days.

There are plenty more ideas of how to improve your business for 2009 in this Free Year in Review Webinar. If you have any questions on these recommendations or anything else about your business, I’m always happy to hear and advise where I can. Just click the comment link below. Until next time, happy growing and Happy Holidays!

There are only two ways to know what your prospects want - you can guess or you can ask. When people join your email list for the first time, it’s a good idea to find out exactly what they want so that you can send promotions that emphasize their preferences.

Here’s a 3-step way to use the new free auto-responder feature and the survey feature in Constant Contact to find out what your new prospects want before you send them your first promotion.

Effective events take time, they take money. Wouldn’t it be nice to know in advance that your investment will really pay off? Online surveys can help you get the seats filled, have satisfied attendees, and give you a bigger return on your investment. Here are three simple event surveys to help you achieve this: 

1.    Send a Pre-event Survey to find out what will really drive registration and attendance before you put time and money into it. Ask your audience what topics interest them. Often it will be a topic that you didn’t think about or one that is much more popular than you realized. Is there a particular speaker of interest? A particular venue that people prefer? What day and time is going to be the best for the majority of your audience? What food or beverages do registrants like? You can find out all of these things ahead of time with these pre-event survey questions.

Capturing sales or donations during the end of this year is going to be more challenging than you’ve been used to in the previous few years. There’s no such thing as fool-proof recession marketing, but there are reliable ways to sustain your business and help ensure a strong recovery. Here are a few tips to get you thinking about ways to sustain and grow.

If you sell products
Focus your promotions on products with up-sell and cross-sell potential. That way you can gain sales early next year with add-on promotions. Make sure you track clicks and purchases so you know which customers own which products.

If you sell services
Focus your promotions on a-la-carte services instead of big service packages or long contracts. When money is tight, people don’t like to pay for anything they think they don’t need. Even one unwanted option in a package might cause hesitation. If you end up selling more a-la-carte services than usual it might impact your margins, but you’re more likely to keep your cash flow up and gain new customers who will purchase higher margin offerings sooner or later.

If you’re a non-profit (on purpose)
Focus your promotions on the specific rewards related to a donation. For example, when asking for a $50 donation, offer a choice of a tax-deduction, a free gift, a public acknowledgement, or an anonymous thank you. Don’t take the focus off your cause too much. Just remind your audience that you want them to feel even more special about making a donation while money is tight.

The oh so familiar holiday shopping dilemma is here: endless possibilities. I’m sure you’ve experienced it. You search for that perfect gift, and there are so many choices of what and where to buy that it’s a real process. You compare product descriptions and prices and after more time than expected, sigh of relief, you finally pick and purchase a gift. With so many options during the holidays, are you giving shoppers a reason to buy from you instead of the competition?

Beat out the competition by providing shoppers with ratings, reviews and testimonials from your current customers. Customer ratings and reviews minimize the risk prospects may see in buying from someone new. You can alleviate their concerns by offering input from your customers about their experiences. Here’s an example of how ratings and reviews can strengthen your holiday communications.

Reviews and rating are becoming more and more common; so give your business that ammunition against the competition and start building your library now. You can collect ratings and reviews from your customers easily with online surveys. Here’s how:

If this recession is prompting you to look for a lifeline, don’t lean too heavily on marketing tactics that require you to turn complete strangers into customers.

Consumers don’t engage in as much impulse buying or social shopping during a recession, and they are more likely to hesitate before a purchase decision because they tend to more cautiously examine the risks and rewards. That’s not good news if you’re trying to acquire new customers because people view the purchase of products and services from unfamiliar businesses as a larger risk than purchasing products from businesses they trust.

When you’re sending periodic emails to your own in-house list of customers, make sure your messages help to overcome purchase hesitation by demonstrating that you have a relationship of trust, and explaining why the benefits of an immediate purchase outweigh the benefits of holding on to the money. It’s a good idea to ask for a referral somewhere in your offers while you’re at it. Professional-looking emails also set you apart from your competition and make you look healthy and prosperous to your customers. Don’t let up just because your customers seem distracted.

If you don’t have an in-house email list yet - or if you’re just a little short on familiar faces - focus a healthy portion of your marketing strategy on building your email list. That way, you’ll gain a low-cost way to educate your audience so your business is familiar enough to overcome purchase hesitation no matter what’s going on in the economy.