Posts Tagged ‘Online surveys’
Market Research – The Benefits
What are the things you can learn by conducting effective market research?
Know your customers – Market research will help you better understand your customers in a number of ways including demographic information such as their age, gender and geographic spread. The better you know your customer the easier it is to fine tune your product or service towards the target market.
Know your target market – Who exactly are your existing customers and where do they live? Does your product or service appeal to specific age groups? Who are your potential customers and where do they live?
Know your competition – Market Research will help you measure your service compared to others. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and are you improving in the right areas?
Products and services – Do you have the products or services that people want? Do you represent value for money? How do your company’s products and services match up to that of your competitors? If you have a product can you, do you, should you deliver directly to your customer?
Ease of doing business – Do your customers find it easy to deal with you and when they visit your store and/or website do they find what they want? Is there sufficient advice and assistance on hand be it in the form of notices, leaflets or human assistance? Do you make it easy for people to buy from you? Are your staff properly trained, helpful, knowledgeable and available?
Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. Which are the most effective marketing channels?
Do people correctly understand your marketing message? Does the marketing material properly represent your brand? Do you advertise through the right channels? Are you reaching your target audience?
With the power of the Internet it is now very easy to conduct market research using one of the many online survey software sites that make conducting surveys and collating good market research intelligence quick, easy and extremely cost effective.
Why Website Surveys are a Benefit to Webmasters
There are many tools available to a webmaster to analyse website traffic, some free like Google’s Analytics that will allow them to monitor the number of visitors, see what pages have been accessed and the length of time visitors have spent accessing the website and a whole lot more.
However, despite the vast amount of detailed information that is available what is missing is anything to tell the webmaster what the visitor was thinking. Did they like the site? Was the layout easy to understand or just plain confusing? Was navigating the website easy and did they find the information they wanted?
A website may be generating sales but why are there some people that are visiting the website and not buying anything? Was it because they didn’t like what was being offered or they couldn’t find what they wanted?
Using online surveys webmasters have a simple and accurate method of answering these types of questions. Direct feedback from the website visitor is straight from the horse’s mouth, no longer is there the need to guess, simply ask each visitor how they found the site and if they were able to find what they were looking for.
With an online survey webmasters can find out:-
- How often do people visit the website?
- How did they reach the website?
- Is their interest in the website for reasons of business or pleasure?
- Was the information they were looking for found on the website?
- How easy was it for them to navigate the website?
- Would they recommend the website to their friends and/or colleagues?
A good website survey will be concise and will collate information that once analyzed will provide valuable information to help improve the website.
An alternative to a traditional survey would be to embed one or two survey questions within the website after specific procedures. For example at the end of the registration process the visitor can be asked if they found the procedure quick and easy; after ordering an item they could be asked if they found the ordering procedure and payment methods to their liking. To avoid regular visitors from being asked every time they visit, the website can be configured so that they are only asked once.
Website surveys take the mystery out of working out what visitors think of a website and using Online Survey Software they are quick and easy to design and once implemented will really become the webmaster’s assistant.
To see a sample website survey please follow the link: Sample Website Survey
Market Research is Important
For any organization that wants to offer products or services that are highly focused and well targeted market research is important. Business decisions that are based on good intelligence and good market research can minimise risk and pay dividends. By making market research part and parcel of the business process and conducting market research throughout the life cycle of a product or service market research will bring the following benefits:-
- Market research will help you better communicate – Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong. By asking your customers you no longer need to guess what your customers are thinking and you demonstrate to them that you are proactive when it comes to customer services and value their opinion.
- Market research helps you identify opportunities – If you are planning to launch a new product and want to know how people will react then market research will help, not only in predicting how well the product will be received, but also by testing the marketing message to see if that needs to be adjusted.
- Market research will minimise risk – Market research can identifying what is needed for a new service and product and ensure that the development of a product matches demand.
- Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – You need to be able to measure so that you can ensure that your organization is always improving. Preliminary research may be able to identify problems in the service you intend to offer or in your product, regular market research will show if progress is being made and, if positive, will help motivate a team.
Market research brings considerable benefits and it is perhaps surprising how few businesses invest sufficient resources to gather good intelligence that will help them improve business. Many may think that market research takes too much time and effort but that is just not the case anymore as through the power of the Internet online survey software is readily available and vital market research data can now be gathered in a quick, simple and cost effective manner.
Top Tips – Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Why bother?
Good customer service is the life blood of any business. Although you should try and attract new customers good customer service will help generate customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. With each satisfied customer your business is likely to win many more customers through recommendations and remember, if you are not taking care of your customers, your competition will.
Online customer satisfaction surveys will demonstrate to your customers that you care and are proactive in looking for ways to improve the service that you provide.
Where to start?
Objective – As a first step decide what the main objectives of the survey are, in that way you will be able to retain focus and find it easier to decide what questions to ask.
Analysis – In addition to the objectives consider how you will analyze the answers having completed the survey.
Keep in mind that ‘closed’ questions (where a respondent is asked to choose from a limited number of responses) are much easier to analyze than ‘open’ questions (where the respondent can reply in anyway they want).
A great deal will depend on the expected volume of respondents, the higher the volume the more important it is to have an easy method of analysing the results.
Opportunity – Keep in mind that as well as obtaining valuable market research data customer surveys are also a good way to publicise aspects of your service that your customers may not be aware of.
Before publishing the survey read through the survey from a market research view point to confirm that you are asking the right questions in the right way and that your chosen answer format will provide you with feedback that will allow you to make informed decisions.
Next, read through the survey from a marketing view point, check that you have phrased each question so that every opportunity has been taken to promote your business?
The ideal question will perform the following three functions:-
- Market research – provide valuable feedback to help you improve your customer satisfaction levels and in turn your business
- Marketing – promote aspects of your business
- Information/Education – advertise a service that you provide that your customers may not have been unaware of
For example:- Do you find the in-store baby changing facilities useful?
By asking this question not only will the store receive good market research feedback on the facility they provide but they will also promote their facilities and advertise themselves as a family friendly store, even beyond those customers who have a specific need for the baby changing facility that has been provided.
Warts and all – to benefit most from a customer survey you need to be prepared to accept criticism.
A well designed customer satisfaction survey will enable you to identify problems so that they can be addressed; regular customer satisfaction will prevent complacency and give you early warning on where you might be losing out to your competitors initiatives.
What are the questions you should ask?
Although it is a given that each business is likely to have specific and unique factors that are important in providing good customer services there are common areas that are relevant to all businesses be they a physical store, online internet store or a service industry. The following are key areas to providing good customer service.
Communication – Are you proactive in making it easy for the customer to communicate with you?
When a customer telephones is the phone answered promptly; are enquiries about products or services properly handled? A good business will make every effort to ensure that whatever the customers query it is resolved by the right person, politely, quickly and fairly.
If a problem is not resolvable immediately do you promise to respond in a given time period and do you deliver on your promise?
Use a customer satisfaction survey to check that all your employees are perceived by your customers as being helpful, courteous and knowledgeable.
Location – Do your customers find it easy to visit you, if a physical store, is it conveniently located with good access?
Making it pleasant, making it easy – For an internet business it is important to ensure that your website is aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.
Regardless of the store being a bricks and mortar or purely an online internet store, is the store properly laid out, can your customers find what they need and is there sufficient information and help on hand to explain how a particular product works?
The right quality products – You should not only measure the quality of the service that you provide but you should also monitor that the products and services that you market are what the customer wants and closely match their expectations.
Value for money – Cheap or expensive is not always a good measure, value for money is.
Do your current customers consider the products you sell or the services you provide as value for money, if not, why not?
Speed and attention – Customers want their enquiries or queries to be dealt with quickly but attentively.
Are you doing everything to prevent any delays?
A good business will try to treat each customer as an individual, does yours? Customers appreciate attention but only if it leads to a quick and satisfactory resolution of the query.
Demographics and Specific issues – Take the opportunity to profile your customers, for example where do they live and what is their age group?
The more you try to understand your customers the better you will be able to target your business.
Within the survey allow customers to highlight specific problems and provide contact details.
What is next?
Having completed the survey analyze the results.
Trends – Identify common and specific areas where the customer service is failing.
Ask yourself if any criticism is valid, be honest to yourself, is there anything that can be done to properly resolve, or at the very least, minimise the problem?
Training – Are all employees properly trained and do they have sufficient knowledge?
Where staff training programmes have been implemented have they had a positive impact on the business?
Follow-up – If a customer has raised a specific issue through completing a survey ensure that they are contacted and that their complaint is properly addressed.
Don’t squander the opportunity to resolve a problem and keep a customer.
Continuously Monitor – Based on the survey results make changes and then re-measure by issuing further surveys.
If you are interested in tracking customer satisfaction and would like to see a sample survey for a store that demonstrates some of the above advice please view the following example that can be used as a customer satisfaction survey template.
Email Marketing Services Reviews of Different Top Mass Email Marketing Software
One of the things that can make any business soar to greater heights is advertising. Advertising is a win-win situation for the advertiser or the businessman and the advertising agency itself. Advertising is considered to be the lifeblood of any business. But today, everything is much better and quicker in terms of reaching to as many people as they can and it’s all because of mass email marketing software especially when you are into making business online selling different things on the Internet through your site or through affiliated websites. This email software will guarantee you that you can reach many future clients the earliest time possible without spending too much. You just need to acquire this software, use it to build your own mailing list, a list of how many people you want to reach out or convey your message to and of course, make some promotional articles, online surveys and other ways of luring people and making them ask, “What’s in it for me?” According to some email marketing service reviews, there are now lots of software like this being promoted and here are the top two.
First, you have Aweber. Aweber can provide you with lots of marketing tools that will let you created unlimited number of e-mail marketing campaigns from flyers to brochures to online surveys and can even teach you how to create a mailing list of people who can be interested with your product. For an Aweber review, this is the best and strongly suggested email marketing software for beginners.
On the other hand, Constant Contact can also provide you with everything you need to promote your products but the only thing different, according to a Constant Contact review is, you can create your own template choosing from among the 300+ email templates so you can be as unique as you can get thereby creating a more professional look of your business. So, in conclusion, whatever you choose, any of them can be of great advantage to you. You just need to read the reviews for each of them so you can determine which one you think is most appropriate for your line of business.
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