Four Ways To Create An Effective Customer Survey

If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of your business, conducting surveys is a great way to gather practical feedback from the people who matter most—your customers. You can use the newly gathered data to improve your marketing strategy, increase your bottom line, and strengthen your front-facing relationships. theBLOQparq (tBp) has built a vision that supports community and the relationships that form them.

Implementing the below best practices at every stage of your survey ensures you will ask the right questions and more importantly, get the most responses.

1. Identify your target market

Before you put pen to paper, you want to be crystal clear on identifying your target market. You can begin with a broader audience and drill it down until you’ve reached a more specific demographic. Your questions should be tailored to mirror your audience’s language, increasing your odds of receiving feedback. Keeping your target market in mind at each stage of your survey development will guide the correct phrasing of your questions and the vested interest your audience will have in answering them.

2. Consider your objective

With your target market identified, you can next focus on what information you want to learn from them. The best way to bring about detailed results is to construct detailed surveys for each objective. An effective survey consists of a limited number of questions that revolve around the core issue on which you are requesting feedback. As a result, the actionable data you receive can be used to make strategic decisions.

3. Keep surveys brief

Surveys are not the place to be complex, long-winded or serve up open-ended questions. Less is more. Ideally, a survey should be 10 questions or less. When it comes to multiple choice questions, you want to give your reader three to five options to choose from. Anything more can confuse or frustrate the reader, giving them cause to abandon your survey. If the maximum of five options is insufficient, this is an excellent prompt to reconsider whether you are asking the right questions or perhaps not phrasing them correctly.

4. Order of questions

The order of your questions can significantly impact your survey’s completion rate. A critical best practice for your surveys is to have your first few questions be both easy and interesting to answer. This is a great way to hook your customer and prompt their enthusiasm about moving through the survey. Once in the flow, it is then that your audience will welcome your more challenging and personal questions. In a way, you are looking to build rapport with your responders by not asking too much too soon.

Bonus Tip! You may also want to consider incorporating a motivator, such as a prize. According to PeoplePulse, 10 to 15 percent is the typical lift in response rate that occurs when incentives are used with surveys.

A survey designed using tried and true best practices like those mentioned above will help you make more informed decisions about your products, services, and overall brand identity. Crafting targeted surveys is one of many ways to build connections. Speaking of connections, tBp is all about the power of developing meaningful relationships, which is why our master planned community offers countless opportunities to network and collaborate. From surveys to starting up meaningful conversations, it’s all about consistently finding ways to be better — together.