Want to Know How to Market Better? Just Ask

The following is an adaptation from The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing published by John Wiley & Sons.

Gathering feedback from your customers during the various stages of relationship development provides you with greater awareness of their needs and puts you in the best position to deliver the right solution at the right time. Whether you use surveys, polls, or simply ask your customers to email you their feedback, there are plenty of things that you probably want to know. The key is focusing in on what you need to know. Asking your customers to answer too many questions might drive them away, so cut out the clutter and ask only when the information is critical.

Start at the End
The best starting point for asking the right questions is the end point. By defining the problem you are trying to solve, you will then know what information you need to collect in order to make an informed decision. Determine what needs to be measured in order to give you the information you need in actionable format..

Step 1: Decision/Action
Say a wine shop owner wants to know why the attendance has declined to her wine tastings and what she can do to encourage more people to attend her events.

Step 2: Knowledge
What does she need to know in order to figure out what to do? A couple of potential factors are timing (time of year, day of the week, time of the events), content (types of wines being reviewed), or experience (could be a wide variety of reasons, from the person presenting to the availability of parking for the events).

Step 3: Data
What needs to be measured? How many events people have attended, what motivated them to attend in the past, whether they are attending more (or less) this year than last, what factors into their decision about whether to attend, and what their experience was at the last event they attended.

Step 4: Questions
This step focuses on crafting a series of great questions that not only get at each of the data elements, but also provide you with actionable feedback. From step two above, we know there are three factors that we believe may be impacting attendance at our events. Each of these factors needs to be connected to the individual’s perception of whether he or she has attended more or fewer events in the last six months than they may have attended prior to this period of time. Therefore, the questions that we want to answer are the following:

1) Event Attendance History:
Q: How many events have you attended in the last six months?
Q: Would you say that your attendance at our events has increased, decreased, or stayed relatively the same in the past six months compared to prior years?

2) Rationales for Change:
Q: If you have either increased or decreased your attendance rate, please indicate below by ranking, from highest to lowest, what influenced your decision to change your attendance:
A. Timing of events (day of the week, time of events,
etc.)
B. Content (the types of wines being served)
C. Experience (presenter, setting, parking)

3) Details:
Q: Please provide us with further information on the item that you ranked as the greatest influence on your attendance to our events.

Use a “drip” strategy, where you constantly collect small amounts of information rather than trying to do it all at once through one giant survey. You are more likely to benefit by getting real-time, actionable content if you collect information on an ongoing basis. By using just one closed-ended question in conjunction with one open-ended question, you can get specific feedback on what you need to know and provide your customers with an opportunity to share with you what’s on their mind.

How to Formulate Your Questions
Here are the five keys to successful question writing:

1) Keep it short. You are asking your participants to spend their time helping you out. You owe it to them to keep your survey short and to the point. If possible, keep the number of questions to 10 or fewer.

2) Start smart. Start with the most important questions first and make them easy to answer so that your participant gets engaged in the process. If the first questions ask too much of the person taking the survey, he or she will just stop taking it, and you won’t get any feedback.

30 Know when to use closed- versus open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions are sometimes also called quantitative questions. The benefit of these questions is that they are typically easier to respond to. Since you specify the potential answer set, they are also very easy to analyze. The challenges involved with these types of questions are that the provided answer set needs to be comprehensive, and you need to know exactly what you want. An open-ended question is often called a qualitative question. The benefits of these questions are that the participant is not limited to your choices, and you are able to get results in the actual words of the participant. The challenges of these questions are that they cause fatigue on the participant (since they are harder to complete), you tend to get more feedback from the people on the extremes (really like or dislike), and the data is more difficult to analyze.