If you want to know how to increase your business, just ask your customers. Why waste time guessing? Just ask. In particular, inquire about what it is your customers expect from you, what features of your product or service they most enjoy, what they think about your customer service, and what exactly you could be improving. Put simply, you possess the ability to track customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction directly by surveying your customers. Plus, the fact that you, as a business, are expressing a desire to hear them out in order to improve their experience with you will always sit favorably with customers.
Follow the tips below on how best to learn more from your customers through the use of surveys:
Keep Things Simple
Use multiple question types (radio buttons, check boxes, free form) for simple surveys. Make use of skip and branch logic to personalize each item on the questionnaire for more complex surveys. Skip logic allows each participant to automatically skip over items based on their responses to previous questions. Branch logic lets you send participants along different paths based on responses to previous questions.
Get Your Timing Just Right With Triggers
You reach people through different touch points and each offers an engagement opportunity. For example, whenever a business unit has contact with a customer, use a triggered email survey to continue the dialogue; or send a survey when someone unsubscribes from your list. A customer or prospect is much more likely to respond to a survey if they have just interacted with you, and surveys that are automatically emailed to people when a trigger or event occurs (transactional surveys) deliver better results.
Use it (The Data) or Lose it (The Business)
Capture unique and highly actionable data and address issues and pain points immediately by leveraging the information you gather (e.g., demographics, interests, habits, email frequency preferences, etc.) to enhance the relevance of your email campaigns. Consider adding additional questions to gauge repurchase intention and the respondents’ willingness or likelihood to recommend your brand to others. You alone get to set the criteria–the types of triggers are infinite. Just keep in mind that, to get the actionable data you need to improve your customer service, purchasing process, or user experience, a customer survey should not be self-serving (i.e., focusing on your wants rather than the customer’s).
By gathering and analyzing real-time data on your customers’ opinions and behaviors, you learn more about your customers and gain valuable insight for optimizing your email marketing programs. With actionable data, an easy and streamlined survey, as well as reaching out to them at just the right time via triggered surveys, you can “delight” your customers by creating a one-to-one marketing strategy that values their preferences from how frequently they would like to receive your emails to the type of content they desire. There is no better source for how your customers perceive you than the customers, themselves.
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