Smart Survey System: Your Guide To Using Surveys To Grow Your Business

Surveys are going to be a very important tool in your marketing arsenal.  Problem is, many people don’t use them to their full effectiveness.

At the basic level, surveys are used to get feedback on things. That’s pretty obvious. But there are actually some other ways of looking at your usage of surveys that we are going to talk about in this guide.

Coming up in this guide, we’re going to discuss things such as:

• How to phrase your questions in order to pull out valuable and actionable material you can use in your blogging and marketing
• How to pull out emotional responses
• Different usage applications for surveys

So, let’s dive right in…

In This Guide…

• Select A Survey Tool
• The Preferred Question Type
• Using Survey To Gain Content Ideas
• Using Survey To Gather Feedback & Testimonials
• Using Survey To Find Out Why They’re Leaving
• Using Survey To Get Product Ideas
• Using Survey To Figure Out Your Price
• Using Survey To Profile Your Customer and Audience
• Using Survey To Further The Sales Process
• How To Analyze The Results
• Using Your Survey Results To Make More Money

Select A Survey Tool

How do you actually run a survey? I am not going to spend too much time on this because it is actually pretty darn simple.

There are commercial tools out there you can use. Personally, I think they’re rather expensive and for that reason most people won’t use them. SurveyMonkey is one of them.

There also the Google Forms/Spreadsheets approach. Built right into your Google account for free as part of Google Drive. Essentially, you would design a form for people to fill out and the responses for that form would be entered into a spreadsheet.

My preferred method is to use a forms plugin for WordPress and do the whole survey right in-house. This is the digitally sovereign way to do it.

Personally, I would use Fluent Forms. Plus, as a user of FluentCRM, this means I can even use the survey responses to add segmentation to a subscriber’s CRM profile. That’s pretty handy.

One thing to keep in mind, too, is that you don’t have to use a special survey tool to call it a survey. Remember, a survey is essentially any feedback medium you are using from your audience. For instance, your own blog comments would be an informal method of survey (if you are using blog comments). You could also put a question form in place of your comments as I do on this blog. Every response is a form of survey.

Another method is to use simple email. Ask your email subscribers a question and ask them to answer your with a simple email reply. This is something you could do in any email you send to your list. Plus, when they reply back to your emails, it helps email deliverability.

The Preferred Question Type

You’re going to have the option to use many different types of questions as you design your survey. You’ll be able to use radio buttons (for single-choice questions), checkboxes (for multiple choice), rankings and much more. You have a lot of options.

The most informative – and preferred – question type is the free-form answer.

Ask them a question and give them a textarea where they can type in any response they want.

The other question types can be useful when you just want to put respondents into nice little groups… or to collect segmentation information. It is much more automated that way. However, the freeform entry can give you far more real data.

Open entry questions allow them to answer you in whatever way they want – in THEIR OWN WORDS. And that is a very important thing when it comes to marketing. You want to find out how they communicate their reactions. And when you couple that with the emotional questions that you are going to ask them, you got yourself a powerful combination.

You will use the WORDS they use in their feedback to:

• Learn their emotional tone on the topic (important in marketing)
• Learn the phrasing that THEY use to communicate these things to themselves (their vocabulary on the topic may be very different than your’s)
• Learn answers you would have never thought of.

The whole purpose of the survey is to learn what is on their mind. A pre-written answer where all they can do is pick confines them to what’s on YOUR mind. Except for certain applications, that completely defeats the point of the survey.

Lastly, knowing the language and emotion they use to communicate the answers is important for matching your content to them, positioning future offers better, etc.

Using Survey To Gain Content Ideas

One of the most common uses of survey is to get content ideas. This is the kind of survey that is good to always have “on”. You could run it to your existing subscriber-base as a one-time event, but it is more useful when it is set up to be evergreen and the responses just come in as a steady flow.

Some ideal survey locations would be:

• On the “thank you” page immediately after somebody opts into your email list. This is a superb place to find out why they subscribed and what they’d like to see from you. This will help you deliver more value to your email list.
• On your autoresponder sequence. So, in one of the automatic emails your email subscribers get, you could email them a survey.
• On the “thank you” page after somebody BUYS something from you. A great place to find out what made them buy, how they found you, what they most want to achieve from your product, etc.

The beauty of those placements is that the survey takes place after the person has done something (subscribed, purchased, etc.). And psychologically, people are way more likely to do something if they’ve taken the first step already. In other words, they are more likely to give you meaningful feedback BECAUSE they have done a meaningful action first.

Some sample questions (obviously phrased toward my own market, so you can adjust accordingly):

• What are you most looking to get from me by being a subscriber to my list and my blog?
• Why did you subscribe to my blog?
• What would you like to learn about blogging and online business next?
• What would you like me to write about for YOUR benefit?
• “What is your biggest fear or frustration when it comes to online business and blogging?”
• “What are you trying to get most out of this?”
• “What is your ideal outcome?”

The first two questions are pretty to the point. You just want to find out what they want from you in the future. And then you can obviously deliver upon that.

If you have a lot of people asking a similar concept and you’ve already written about it, then you can use that as feedback as well. For instance:

• Create even more content about it. In other words, elaborate.
• Take the content you’ve already written about that topic, expand upon it, then leverage it into new content types like lead magnets, videos, podcast episodes, etc.
• Build new emails into your email followup sequence which highlights your existing content on the topic.
• Group content on that topic into a GUIDE page on your blog and link to that guide in your blog’s sidebar.

In other words, if people are asking for content that you’ve already made, then they either want more or they don’t know about it. So, fix that.