Gain More Knowledge to Win New Customers

We all get some type of feedback from customers/clients, whether it’s from phone calls, interacting face-to-face, or on paper-based feedback cards/questionnaires. Being closer to your customers is one of the most valuable competitive advantages you have as a small business. You can be more in tune with the needs and wants of customers and prospects in your industry. This empowers you to move faster and be less reactive than the big guys.

But what if you could get a lot more feedback than you’re currently getting? What if you could get opinions faster? And what if you could do it with less money? You can with online surveys. Here’s how you will strengthen your advantages by providing customers/prospects with an online feedback loop.  

Gain More Insights

• Listen to many customers at once. Instead of talking to one customer at a time, with online surveys you can get feedback from hundreds of customers at once.
• Get richer information. With an online survey, customers aren’t pressured to give feedback in a certain amount of time, so they can think of more to say.  If you make your online survey anonymous, you can address sensitive issues by getting information that your audience wouldn’t feel comfortable telling you face-to-face. Plus, online you have the ability to add pictures, links to sound clips or even videos to give customers more context of what you want feedback on.
• Empower your customers to give you feedback anywhere they spend time — in their inbox with an email, on your website, or perhaps on a social media site.
• Have features to make it easy for your customers to give their feedback. You can break up a survey into multiple pages with “Continue” buttons, have progress bar indicators so customers know how far along they are, and add skip logic so respondents are only given the questions that are relevant to them based on how they answered previous questions. By making your survey easy to complete, your customers are more likely to finish it and give you more data so you can make more informed decisions.  
• Benefit from invitation tracking. You can send reminders only to those customers who haven’t yet taken your survey to boost your response rate. By seeing how many people have opened and how many people have clicked to take a survey, you can play with subject lines and invitation language to see what will get more people to participate.  

Save Time and Money

• Have immediate real-time information. It’s really quick and easy to design a professional looking online survey and get it into the hands of your customers so you start getting feedback right away. Unlike with paper surveys, which require hours to compile results with manual data entry, with online surveys the questionnaire is available right away and the data is immediately captured and compiled for you. Quicker analysis will have you at the pulse of your customer needs/wants, and you will be able to respond to them that much faster.  
• Have a representative view to make decisions from. Instead of just hearing what vocal customers have to say, by using online surveys you get to hear the true voice of what your customers as a whole think. By having more feedback, you have more data to substantiate spending time and resources that you know will have an impact. (If you’re wondering if your customers are online, here are some internet usage numbers.)
• Avoid the out-of-pocket cost of postage. With online surveys, you avoid the costs associated with printing, assembling (stuffing envelopes, affixing postage), and sending of paper surveys. Let’s say you have a list of 250 customers that you want to gather feedback from. The postage alone is $220 (assuming that you’re sending them at the First-Class rate of 44 cents and including a postage-paid envelope for them to send the survey back to you.)  If the list is 500, you’re looking at $440. That’s a lot of money, especially if you’re sending a survey out more than once a year.

The more opportunities you give customers to offer you feedback, the better. Not only does it show customers you care, but you will be more informed to spend time and money where it will have the biggest bang for your buck. If you would like to try out online surveys, you can free for 60 days.  

Questions, comments? Just click the comments link below.  Until next time, happy growing!

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