Caroline Shahar, Small Business Marketing Expert

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.

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:

When do you care enough to complete a survey? For me it’s when I believe giving my opinion will impact my life. If I get a survey about a product I don’t use, I wouldn’t think twice about not completing it. The same goes for getting a survey about a newsletter I don’t read or about a company I do very little business with.

The more you know about your audience, the more you can target your surveys and get a better response. Do they come to you for a particular product or service? Are they a regular customer or do they come to you only once in a great while? Maybe you have information on their buying behavior with you. If they only buy in the retail store, don’t bother sending them a survey that deals with their satisfaction for the online buying process. From what you know about your audience, bucket them into groups with similar interests. Then send your surveys only to those who will actually have knowledge and a stake in the survey topic. Take a look at this free online workshop to help you better understand how to segment your audience.

You survey with the hope that you will get a lot of helpful feedback, right? Sure, the more information you have to base your decisions off of the better. So you may be wondering - what kind of a response rate should you expect and how do you get it? These are the two most common questions I get in my survey webinars, so let’s talk about them.

First, a slice of reality. Expect about a 10% response rate. Ten percent is a good response rate across all industries. Get your survey noticed, and you can expect more of a response. Here are two great ways to do that…

1. Use your Website
Too often I see survey links at the bottom of a webpage.         People don’t typically scroll to the bottom of a page. Do you? I know I don’t. So put the link right at the top of multiple landing pages on your website so it gets noticed by visitors. This should increase your response rate.

If the number of visitors to your website is low, drive more traffic to your site by making sure your site is optimized to be found by the major search engines. Research shows 85% of website traffic comes from search engines like Yahoo and Google. If you want to learn more about how to optimize your site, attend a free webinar about Search Engine Optimization.

Tired of spending money on leads that turn into a whole lot of nothing?  When it comes to getting new business, your existing customers are your best customers. It’s proven they spend more, and are less expensive to keep than gaining new ones. How much did you spend last year acquiring new customers?  Existing customers bring their family and friends – providing free business for you.

So what do you have to do generate the almighty referral? Make your existing customers extremely happy! Go beyond their expectations so that they want to tell others about you.

Okay, sounds great on paper.  But how do you exceed expectations to get those referrals?  It’s just a survey away.  With just a few key questions to your customers you can find out what their expectations are and what you can do to exceed them. Click here to see the key customer satisfaction questions to send to your audience.

Ever wonder what’s on your customers’ minds? I’m sure you do – they’re your bread and butter. But for some reason, you don’t ask them. Well, thanks to a recent survey we conducted here at Constant Contact, I now get why.

Can you guess the number one challenge that’s stopping the majority of small businesses from getting feedback from their customers (besides time of course!)?

Hello! I'm Caroline Shahar from Constant Contact. I'm new to this blog, but if you've taken one of our educational webinars, you may have already heard from me (read my bio to learn more). Anyone who knows me knows I'm passionate about helping small businesses and nonprofits succeed, and I hope you find my posts here helpful. To that end, please let me know what you like and don't like. Any and all feedback is helpful. And that brings me to my first post...