In a recent blog we mentioned surveys as a way of collating information about your subscribers or targets which would not be so easily obtained via returns from your email marketing software.
What questions to ask is the critical point in all of this. You do not want to waste your time asking for something which is available from the returns of an email marketing campaign, nor something which, whilst interesting, cannot be used to target.
The thing to do is to ask those questions that are most important to your subscribers or targets. Get them to tell you what they think is important.
Let us take, for instance, something for B2B:
What product would boost your profits?
The question as it stands would generate a whole plethora of answers that would be of little use to you so you need to modify it a bit. If you produce, for instance, a range of commercial printers then ask:
What features of a printer would be likely to boost your productivity?
Provide a tick box list of the items specific to your range.
In the same vein, if your provide IT solutions, you might want to know what they see as their major problem.
What one thing would you change in order to speed up your internal systems?
You will obviously want to limit their choices to items to computer systems.
As mentioned in the previous blog, there is a place for the free-text box. This can be a risk as some answers tend to be a bit off the wall, so you need to limit the range of probable replies. Accept though that a proportion will be useless.
What feature would you like to see in the next version of your graphic design software?
There is every possibility that there will be no consensus in replies to a free text question so you would be looking for trends. You can use the information to change the description of your product, emphasising one particular point over that which you thought was its best selling feature.
It is essential to take on board the answers. If you do your next marketing email might be opened by someone who will think, “That’s just what I was looking for.”
