Using a survey is a great method to seek feedback and opinions from your consumers, especially when they are geographically distributed. Without the customer’s buy-in, getting a concept, product, or campaign off the ground is akin to throwing darts in the dark and hoping to hit the bullseye. 

Launching a survey means methodically collecting inputs and working on your sales, marketing, or communication strategies.

Here are 5 ways how creating and launching a survey can especially help small business owners and organisations.

1. Collect Feedbacks and Testimonial

Using the help of surveys, you can collect valuable consumer feedback. This feedback can be utilized to create communications that will cater to your existing audience. Knowing what consumers think of your business can help guide important branding decisions. Most customers will always have feedback and something to say. When you capture their thoughts at the moment of experience, there will be clarity in your decision making process as well. Requesting feedback from customers in rich media formats (audio and video feedback, voice notes) is also an incredible sales lever. 

Collecting timely customer satisfaction data allows brands to address any customer concerns, upsell to the happy customers, and collect testimonials.

Testimonials are a great way to let potential clients do their homework before they invest in your brand. They are the social proof that assures your potential customers about your brand or product. So make sure the portfolio of consumer testimonials is always available for your leads.

2. Engage Your Customer Base

Deploying conversational or informal surveys is a great way to capture the attention of your consumers. A great engagement tool is sending surveys directly to customers to learn more about their experience with your business. It makes a customer feel heard. It shows that the business values their opinions especially when they follow up after receiving the feedback. 

You can also capture the interest of a potential lead while they are still in the purchase context. In fact, not just the prospects. You can map the entire customer journey and find the areas of strengths and weaknesses across your customer touch points.

3. Deploy Resources Smartly

Small businesses have big challenges such as resource planning and proper resource allocation. Running a survey will help streamline which sales or marketing channel a business can target initially. 

Small businesses do not have unlimited resources. It would be wiser for them to run a survey and see where their potential leads could come from. Maximise on that platform rather than spreading themselves too thin. 

The surveys can also help understand the trigger for purchase as well as the barriers in decision making. This will enable brands to create campaigns tailored for their target audience.

4. Enhance Your Customer Profile

With surveys, you can profile your target audience on the basis of demographics, age, their intrinsic motivation, income groups and other metrics useful for business communication. You can also gather their personal contact information which can be used to share about latest product developments, incentives and how new upgrades in products/services can enhance their experience. However, before collecting personal data, always keep the customer’s consent and privacy in mind.

5. Use Surveys to Generate and Identify Leads

Here is the number 1 rule if you want people to join in your prospect list- give value first. In exchange for this value, you would like to receive more information (including personal contact information) from them. How do you do so? You do so using a form or a survey.

Small business owners will definitely benefit from conversationals and ‘in-context’ form of surveys. Customers love answering surveys that do not require much effort. We help brands capture customer feedback through their favourite platform and close to the time and place of offline brand interaction. We highly recommend that you find out how this is done with the Merren. You can test our robust messenger based surveys with a 14 day free trial here. 

Feel free to visit our Frequently Answered Questions here.