Happy Birthday America! Fireworks, food and fun times abound. How did you spend the holiday? I spent yesterday at my sister house lighting off fireworks and barbequing. It was a delightful day but also one that gave me great insight into my business.
It’s always the times when I’m not thinking about my business that I develop my biggest ideas. Let me tell you what I learned yesterday while doing anything but work.
Before the day got underway my sister had called all of her ten guests to plan the day. A pretty normal thing to do. She asked everyone what they would like to drink and eat at the celebration. The consensus was food cooked on the grill.
If she hadn’t done that my sister may have spent many unnecessary hours preparing all kinds of foods hoping to please everyone at the party. But she didn’t. She surveyed everyone and found out what they wanted ahead of time. She cut her costs and time while minimal effort. That got me thinking, how can I do this with my business? How can I save myself time and energy and find out what my customers want?
The easiest thing to do is to just ask your customers what they want! The caveat is how to do that. No method is as thorough and informative as a survey.
Survey’s come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve probably even taken one or two in your lifetime. The last two times I’ve bought a car I’ve received a survey in the mail within a week of my purchase. I’ve even gotten surveyed on the phone when a furniture company called to ask me how the delivery of my new couch went. Both of these methods work well and get companies the type of information they need to improve their services. In the last few years web survey applications have improved significantly. They have made the survey process faster and more efficient than before with real time results and 24 hour access.
You can spend a lot to get survey’s made up and data collected, but you don’t need to. There are several companies that will do it for free for you! Nothing beats free. My favorite is surveymonkey.com. Survey Monkey is extremely popular with internet users because no special knowledge is required to build a survey. You don’t have to be an html expert or have any design skills.
The application is very user friendly and only takes a few minutes to set up. You must register to use Survey Monkey but it’s still free. It’s very easy to navigate Survey Monkey, as soon as you sign in you are presented with your dashboard. This displays all of the surveys that you have created before for easy referencing.
One of my favorite features is the ability to customize. This application allows you to customize almost every part of the survey. You can customize the look of the survey by integrating your logo and the color scheme from your website to connect the look of the pages. You can even include your company name in the survey URL. Making the survey look like a web page from your site will help get higher a higher response rate because your customers will know its official.
If you are short on creativity then use one of their readymade templates. All templates are professionally designed so you still get that high end look. You can either select one “as is” or modify it to include additional questions or customize it to your specific needs. You can also create a survey from scratch. There are over 15 different types of questions you can use to build a survey. You can make multiple choice questions or insert a text box so users can write their own responses. Text boxes are a good tool to use when asking customers for their suggestions or what other types of products they’d like to see offered. You can get some of your best ideas from your own customers!
Another great feature is their validation options. This survey tool allows you to customize even the answers you get! It can require users answer some or all of the questions. This will ensure users don’t skip over the questions you most want to know the answers to. If there is one thing you really want to know you can make an answer required before they can move forward with the rest of the survey. In contrast you can also make questions optional so if you are looking for a review of a certain product but the user hasn’t purchased that product, then they don’t have to answer that question. You only get valid responses.
One feature that has been particularly helpful to me is skip logic. This advanced feature allows you to create custom paths for different participants based on how they answer a particular question. This ensures you get only relevant responses. You can delve deeper into your customer’s opinions with follow up questions only if they apply.
Once the survey is set up and ready to go the list of great features doesn’t stop there! Survey Monkey has great analytics tools to make studying the results really easy. You can filter the results to look for trends and get better insight into the data. Survey Monkey has 5 different types of charts and graphs to help analyze the data. Visuals like these help you and your colleagues pick out segments easier and faster. See if users over a certain age tend to buy one type of product over the other or watch for particular themes among users. The surveys can even be printed and used as offline surveys. You can turn surveys and the resulting data into a pdf so it can be emailed or printed for continued usage.
Some of these features are better served on the paid version of Survey Monkey. They offer a $20 a month plan and a $200 a year plan. My advice is to try out the free version of this application first and then graduate onto the paid for versions when and only if you need the extra features. All of the essential features are in the free version.
Don’t just take my word for it. Just look at some of Survey Monkey’s reviews, you’ll recognize most companies on their customer list. It’s extremely popular with large businesses and over 80% of the Fortune 100 companies regularly use Survey Monkey.
To Your Continued Success
