The 5 easy steps to run a customer survey on your website
By Paul Green
There’s a really simple way to find out what products and services your customers actually want to buy from you: ask them!
I know that sounds obvious, but it’s scary how many business owners just second guess their customers.
It’s easy to ask for their opinion without having to do anything difficult such as picking up the phone.
Instead you can put a customer survey on your website (it takes just 10 minutes) and invite your customers (and prospective customers) to take part.
You’ll be surprised how willing some people are to help. So long as you make it easy for them, they will happily give up a minute of their time to give their opinion.
There’s an additional bonus; sometimes you will find that the people who answer your survey are more interested to the resulting changes you make to your business, and are more likely to become future customers.
Here are the five easy steps to run a customer survey on your website:
1) Figure out what you want to know: There should be a specific theme to your survey. It might be questioning existing customers about why they bought from you, or asking prospective customers what they would like you to provide. Note that survey results can often be used to generate a great PR story.
2) Put together 3-5 questions: A good website survey should take just a minute or so to do, and should require the minimum number of clicks to finish. That means three to five questions, ideally multiple choice. Only a small percentage of your database will fill in “open” questions that require them to construct a sentence as a reply.
3) Get some survey software: There are two good pieces of survey software online which you can try free for up to 100 respondents, before having to pay anything. SurveyMonkey is easy to use and asks for a monthly fee, while PollDaddy is a small annual fee. It’s really easy to build surveys, and you can place them on your website easily just by copying and pasting some code.
4) Throw in an incentive to answer: Offer a good prize in a free draw to everyone who takes part in the survey. Make sure your free draw stays legal. Set a deadline for the draw to encourage people to do the survey as soon as they get your email.
5) Send it to your database: You’ll get about 5 to 10% of your database taking part in your survey. So it makes sense that the more people you invite, the more “sound” your results will be. Be wary of making business decision on a survey with fewer than 100 replies.
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