Now is the Time to Survey Your Customers
What you are selling isn’t nearly as important as fully understanding who you are now selling it to and who you could target to sell it to in the future.
It is crucial to know exactly who is your best customer. If you don’t how will you ever grow your business or introduce new products?
If you haven’t done a customer survey recently, now is the time. Keeping your database up to date with essential customer demographics, lifestyle, buying habits, etc. isn’t an option; it is an absolute must. Whatever goodie you need to offer as an incentive for your customers to tell you about themselves will be worth its weight in gold when you have a 20/20 image of your top buyers and subsequent buyer levels.
There are two schools of thought on incentivized surveys. All I can go on is my own personal experience. One company I work with did surveys for years with no incentive or an incentive that offered a “work” related benefit. They got sporadic results but never enough to be meaningful. I tried incentivizing a survey with a gift card from a major coffee retailer. The result? We received so many responses that we actually had to order more gift cards. Needless to say, I got the information I needed to change messaging, update creative, and prospect with greater confidence.
The survey you create should be done in a very precise manner to capture the exact data you are missing. There should be only multiple choice answers with no write-in fields. This is because you want to be able to grid your answers and sort them in various ways. For example you want to be able to attach buying levels to these customer files and then determine the characteristics associated with your pre-determined levels.
Know in advance how the answer to each survey question will be used. There should never be a question on the survey that will not in some way fill in a missing hole or help you to find more prospects through rental lists based on this data information.
And always keep your questions in the exact same order. Why? Surveys can be done to many audiences and if your questions are always worded the same way and presented in the same order you can compare. Let’s say you go to an event and you hand out cards to attendees to gain their information. Sure you’re going to give that lead to your sales staff, but you need to also enter that coded prospect data into a database that can be compared with your customers, prospects, first time buyers, etc. Use your data—of every source—to learn about every type of customer or prospect you have.
Never forget your data is gold, so use it to continually learn. Every aspect of your product or service needs to be tied to accurate information about who can buy from you. If you don’t know with absolute certainty who that person is and what they want you may sell with luck but you’ll never sell with a plan.
Carol Lustig is CMO of Media1/Headstrong Media.
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