It doesn’t take much to craft a clear and concise survey, but there are plenty of businesses who go about surveys the wrong way. They think they can simply put one together with no branding, throw any questions they like on the page, disregard the length, and everything will be fine.
We all know that’s not how it works.
Marketers, for example, have to take the clarity of the questions, the time it takes to complete the survey, the sales pipeline, the branding, and the accessibility of the survey into consideration. Here, we’re going to break down 4 tips for crafting a clear and concise survey for digital marketers interested in learning more about their customers and how to guide them through the buyer’s journey faster.
1. Know your audience
Digital Marketers understand that everyone’s different and everyone has their own preferred way of doing business. Marketers segment customers into groups based on demographics, purchase history, channel, and even who they work with, which means that not every group of leads and opportunities are going to be interested in the same things.
If you’re paying attention to who your audience is, you can personalize your surveys to target specific groups and obtain specific results. If you’re targeting the wrong group with the wrong survey, you’re going to get skewed data. That data is important because the whole point of the survey is to learn more about who your leads and opportunities are in order to offer them more targeted products and personalized experiences.
When you know your audience, you know what language they speak primarily. This example is more of a proofreading issue, but unless you know for a fact your audience is 100 percent bilingual, it’s best to keep questions in the same language, unlike this example:
As ridiculous as this scenario would be, you should ask questions like “Are you bilingual” before you assume the rest of your audience is. There’s no way of knowing before you make the survey unless you ask first. The lesson here is to never assume.
2. Have a question you want answered in mind
The survey, as we’ve mentioned, needs to be clear and concise in order to gather valuable customer data that can be used to improve the overall experience. As a marketer, you want your survey to be as clear as possible because you want whoever is taking the survey to understand exactly why they’re taking it in the first place.You also want the data you gather to be relevant to your business’ interests.
If you want to know more about what kind of ads makes a customer want to buy a product, you should ask questions that pertain to that main idea.
For example: What websites do you visit?; What ads do you find most annoying?; Do you skip ads immediately?; Do you watch ads from start to finish?; What are your favorite commercials and why?
Every question should be focused on one topic, ads. There’s no room to get off topic and not enough time to cover multiple topics at once.
3. Reread questions for clarity
Digital marketers already know that if their message isn’t clear, a lead or opportunity isn’t going to go out of their way to try and decipher that message in an effort to spend their own money on a product the business can’t even make sense of. When it comes to crafting a clear and concise survey, it’s especially important that the questions being asked are easy to read for the lead taking the survey.
Something to keep in mind when creating questions is that they should be simple. If they’re personal or are actually multiple questions in one, you’re leaving yourself open to the possibility of confusing the lead. Check out this great example of a misleading question:
There are four answers to the question and only four answers to choose from, meaning there’s absolutely nothing to gain from asking this question.
Surveys need to be effortless. Most people aren’t very fond of surveys. If they do decide to actually take one, and that survey is difficult to complete, they’ll be more focused on the difficulty of the questions and finishing rather than answering them to the best of their ability.
4. Make the survey accessible on all channels
Many people don’t have the time to sit down and fill out a survey after making a purchase. If they’re in the store, the odds of them wanting to waste their time to fill out a survey are low — especially if they had to queue for quite some time.
However, they’re not a completely lost opportunity if you give them the opportunity to complete the survey when they’re home. If you ask for an email, you can send them the survey and they can fill it out at their own leisure.
Digital marketers also want to make sure the survey is scalable. Not everyone who goes to a business’ website is doing so through their computer. They can be on their phone or tablet. If the survey isn’t easy to read on all kinds of devices, the lead or opportunity can miss key information if they don’t realize they have to scroll to the right or left or zoom out.
Surveys, as we’ve said, need to be easy to complete. There should be no added work for the lead or opportunity. The more holdups they have in the process, the more opportunities there are to quit the survey and leave you with incomplete data.
The final word
Crafting a clear and concise survey is easy for any digital marketer looking to acquire more leads, personalize the buyer’s journey, and improve the customer experience for repeat customers. Surveys are meant to be clear and concise, but many businesses too often find themselves leaving people with lengthy, vague, generic-looking surveys that don’t inspire any kind of effort. By following these four tips, your digital marketing efforts will not be wasted and you give your business the best opportunity to target leads with personalized content before they even enter the pipeline.
