Why do a survey: 10 strong reasons to survey your customers

Written March 8, 2018
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by Eva Wislow

Your customers are an amazing source of information that’ll allow you to optimize the performance of your business in a strategic and smart way.

The people who bought one of your products or services can tell you exactly what’s wrong and what can be done, and they can easily let you know what’s missing and what’s expected. It’s the perfect scenario for doing a survey every now and then.

In today’s post, we’re discussing the 10 reasons why surveying your customers can take your business to the next level. If you’ve never done it before, now is the perfect time to start. Brands are getting more competitive each year, fighting over customer’s loyalty and retention, making your job harder as the time goes on.

As Mark Charley, Sales Manager at Career Booster, describes:
“All in all, your conversion rates depend on your customer’s satisfaction. If you know what makes them happy and what makes them sad, you’ll be able to think up better ways to treat them. The information you get from your customers is surely a priceless data, which if used in the proper manner, will result in significant benefits for your company.”

To maintain a competitive advantage in your own niche, start considering these hard-to-ignore reasons why you should survey your brand’s customers:

1. Measuring customer loyalty

The difference between the greatest brands and the mediocre ones lies in their different degrees of customer’s loyalty. Some brands like Coca-Cola, KFC, Microsoft, Apple are actually creating dependency.

Their users truly are loyal, many ending up using their most beloved brands until death. You see – that’s what you should also aim for in case you wish to experience long-lasting business success.
But I digress…

A great way of figuring out how loyal your brand customers are, is to calculate your Net Promoter Score. This works as an index – ranging from 0 to 100 – that tells you the average willingness of your customers to distribute and recommend your products and services to other people.

To trigger the NPS data, you should simply address your customers the following question:
“How likely are you to recommend our products/service/brand to your friends/colleagues/clients?”

Give them the ability to choose from 1 to 10. By doing so, you’ll be able to:

Notice the people who choose from 9 to 10 and tag them as potential brand advocates and promotes
Discover who is not pleased with your services and acquire constructive feedback
Note down the people who are between satisfied and dissatisfied and offer them more personalized content to win their hearts

To start collecting NPS data, you can easily use an NPS survey template and optimize for your own needs

2. Discovering the source of customer acquisition

To improve your marketing campaign’s ROI, you should first become aware of the place where your customers are coming from. By surveying your audience, you can discover meaningful information that’ll help you understand what you must do to optimize your best sources of customers.

Do a survey to find your most significant distribution channels and you’ll be able to reach as many targeted customers as you want.

3. Identifying habitual buying behavior

Buyer behavior is another element that you should consider with much care, as your customer’s buying habits will give you invaluable feedback that can be leveraged in many ways.

Survey your customers about where they like to shop and list all of your competitors. Let them choose and see which competitors stand in your customer’s way.

Moreover, you can ask your audience how they purchased your products/service. See what’s the most comfortable option for them by giving them options such as:

Store
Website
Mobile website
Catalog
Social media channels (+ which one)

Understand how they prefer to buy and focus on improving their experience according to their answers.

4. Figuring out why your prospects haven’t bought

Doing surveys can help targeting the prospects who have left your sales process before buying your products. They could have downloaded a few e-books, checked your emails on a consistent basis, but they may have eventually got stuck in the shopping cart.

You can figure out what made them say no by asking them the right questions. Try to ask questions of which answers will lead you to the main cause of their leaving. Moreover, through these surveys, you can ask your prospects what would make them come back and buy.

5. Understanding what matters most

Market research is the main keyword here. Giant companies are spending fortunes on surveys that dive into a buyer market. Why do you think they do it?

Well, to give your customers what they truly want, you need to know, see, hear, understand, feel, and think what they think. You need to know them like you know yourself. Through creative, ingenious, and unique marketing surveys, you can prompt a lot of answers that’ll answer the great question of “what your customers want most.”

6. Acquiring feedback on your products or about brand awareness

Your branding, marketing, and products – they all matter. So how and why do a survey? To analyze each.

The customers who have already bought something from you are the best persons to approach when you try to gather feedback insights concerning your products and services. They can help you understand the quality of your products, the way they satisfy the expectations of your customers, and the potential features that can be added or upgraded so the product or service would deliver better satisfaction and results.

Of course, when an important chunk of your target audience has not tried your product yet, you might wonder: “Do they even know we exist? And if they do, do they understand what we have to offer?” To find answers to these questions you might want to try distributing a brand awareness survey.

Now, you might be skeptical about whether any person would take the time to fill out such a survey. And you should. That’s why you also have to think about giving them an incentive. Our answer would be: build your surveys with Pointerpro. That will allow you to deliver a personalized report to each respondent, automatically. If your professional service of consulting or providing advice to clients, this is the perfect way to give people a taste of your strengths.

Discover how to build successful brand awareness surveys with Pointerpro here.

7. Analyzing the customer experience

Source

How do you know how customers have felt once and after using your products?

To strengthen the connections between you and your customers, you absolutely have to care. Customers see that, and they will always appreciate brands that are looking after their needs and problems.

Use a customer satisfaction survey, which allows the customer to rate his experience with your product using 1 to 10 indicators. If you’re willing to listen to your customers and leverage their critiques, your company will grow in value and power sooner than you think.

8. Makes audience segmentation simple and effective

Let’s not forget about email marketing. Brands will communicate their deepest secrets and their most valuable content through email communication.

However, in order to communicate effectively through email, you must personalize the user’s experience by delivering personalized emails. You do that by tagging and marking the nature, behavior, actions, and interests of your email subscribers, who are soon to become your most loyal customers.

That’s why doing a survey for your email subscribers and giving them specific options that would allow them to express their preferences will help you segment your big audience into smaller, easier-to-target audiences. When you have that, you can personalize your email sequence and optimize your conversions in a drastic way.

9. Obtaining referrals from your most loyal customer advocates

The customers who are big fans of your content, products, and services can be valuable brand advocates.

A brand advocate is a person who is willing to share your offers around to help your brand improve. You can negotiate a reward and deliver special relationships with a part of your customers.

10. Developing effective brand-to-customer communication

Well, in order to build strong, long-lasting relationships with your customers, you need to develop an effective brand-to-customer communication, which means that you need to be able to communicate easily whenever you or your customers have a need of doing so.

Email, social media channels, phone…these are all great ways of maintaining a good communication with your prospects and customers. However, the thing the matters most to your customers is that you care to engage.

Develop engaging surveys that have open endings, which means your customers will receive a direct message from you, or one of your employees, that will directly address his unique problems and desires.

Takeaways on why you should do surveys

Understanding, nurturing, and monetizing your customers is a fine art. In fact, you could treat the relationship with your customers as a journey rather than a result. Bonding takes time, communication, and trust.

Do your best to offer your customers the best experience they’ve ever had, and they’ll remember. Be special, original, and unique, and they’ll remember. Win their hearts by showing them that you care.

Don’t look behind and never be afraid to ask. Survey, reply, use the data, optimize, and eventually scale. Good luck in your ventures!