Nowadays, it is a norm for brands to share surveys as a way to collect feedback from customers. Everywhere you go, a brand wants to know how you feel about them. They want to know what they do better. It can be bothersome sometimes, can’t it? Well, you cannot blame them. They are adapting to the times that we are in. The voice of the customer is king, they say. The customer is always right. I am sure there are so many over played jargons I can up with. But you get the picture now. You, as a customer, have a say in what you pay for.
Then again, humor me for a minute; How honest are you when you fill these surveys? What will even motivate you to fill the survey? The answers to these questions are crucial to gathering quality responses.
Sharing surveys using the pull method
As a brand, one pervading question always is, “How can my customers access my surveys conveniently?”. For so many years, suggestion boxes were prevalent in every office space. A suggestion box is a closed box with an opening at the top. Businesses print out feedback forms and encourage customers to fill these forms.
More often than not the questions on the forms are very broad. They usually have prompts such as Submit your ideas, We value your feedback, Make a suggestion and so forth. These prompts are so generic. The responses to these prompts are difficult to analyse.
It is impossible get conclusive findings from this suggestion box. How can a brand collect feedback on different issues at the same time? Place multiple suggestion boxes in different spots? How can they be sure that the right target audience give the right feedback? For instance, an individual client of a bank may share his or her feedback on corporate banking. This pull method of sharing surveys are heavily marred by uncontrollable factors such as
- Will the customer see the box?
- What will motivate him or her to pick up a form to fill it?
- Do they understand what you need from them?
Sharing surveys using the push method
With the increased shift towards online sales, transactions and interactions, brands have found the need to get creative. To share surveys, brands need to adopt the push method: place the surveys right in front of customers online. Make it so convenient and attractive for them to access and fill the survey. Convenience greatly influences the quality of the responses. Customers will be honest in their responses provided they are in the right frame of mind and it was very easy to get access to the survey.
The benefits of online surveys are vast. In fact, Pew Research noted that online surveys are one of the cheapest, most convenient means of data collection that include very limited influence from social bias.
We’ve gathered some of the best ways to distribute and promote your surveys online, so you can create a distribution plan to blow your feedback goals out of the water.
4 ways to distribute online surveys
Send email surveys: Email is the first place that comes to most people’s minds when they think about distributing an online survey. It gives you the ability to decide how targeted or broad you want to be in your distribution efforts. Email distribution typically comes in two forms: batch sends, and transactional sends. Batch sends are probably what people are most familiar with from an email perspective. They are a great way for you to target a specific group. It is also a way to quickly get your survey to those who are familiar with you . Transactional emails are emails that are sent after a user completes a certain action or event. For instance, receiving help from your support team.
Actions like these are great opportunities to ask for feedback about the experience, including overall satisfaction, what was done well or areas for improvement. You can set up some powerful transactional survey workflows, by using RightCare and RightSurvey.
Embed surveys in your website: You can incorporate surveys into your web experience, and invite your website visitors to complete your survey. After all, your website traffic includes a highly relevant audience that you probably need to hear more from, since your Google Analytics data can only tell you so much. You can use surveys on specific pages to gather information about your audience’s general perception of your organization, feedback on a new product, ways to improve, or maybe you just have a specific question you need feedback on.
Add surveys to your blog posts: A brief blog post that explains the details of why you’re conducting a survey helps participants better understand the purpose of your data collection–and can motivate them to share their thoughts. This is one of the few places you have the ability to explain the bigger picture of your online survey, so take the time to explain what the data collected here means for your organization.
Share surveys over social media: Social media is all about being social–and collecting feedback from your following there is one way to keep the conversation going. Promoting a survey in this space shows you value your audience’s opinions and gives them the opportunity to share their thoughts. Be sure to stress in your social media promotion that your online survey is a way for participants to share their honest thoughts about your organization. Make it about them–not you.
Just remember
As you use email, your website, blog posts, and your social media outlets to connect with your audience online, think about how you can use surveys to gain deeper insight into their wants and needs. Are they satisfied with what they are seeing and getting from your brand? Could you be doing a better job? Where are your problem areas?
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