Just ask them
Its is so easy to think that we know our customers best, many people of my clients have that strong relationship with their customers and even then they get surprises.
I was supporting a client recently, when they were looking to offer a new service to their customers and thought that they would just send out an email to invite them to buy. As we discussed the project further it became clear that these prospects were not expecting this email and that the group was such a mixed bag that the proposed sales pitch would fall short for most of them.
This is the situation where asking questions has to be the first step in the project, a well structured questionnaire will filter the prospect list into distinct groups. Now you have something to write about to each of the different groups. After all they will all be at different points on the sales journey.
It turned out well for my client, we crafted an email and a set of 10 questions, the email got an amazing 60% response. The caveat here is that the recipients were not being asked to buy just click through to the questions and 60% of the email list responded. They have since gone on to develop a sale programme for the different client group.
Creating a questionnaire is a bit of an art form, you must find someone to test it on before you let it out, it is so easy to ask leading or directive questions. This will give you the answers that you want but not the new information that you need.
You could run a manual survey just on an email, however this could be hard to collate. There are a couple of techy options if you are using an Auto responder service the form script will allow up to 10 extra fields. So you could create a survey page on your web site or blog and send the clients to it from an email, it might look like this. I would like this to look better but my html skills are falling short here and I wanted this posted. So please know that it is possible to tidy the presentation and try the survey.
Surveys Using an Auto Responder
Please complete the form and answer the following 3 questions yes, no or free text in the large box.
This information will not be shared and the service is provide by marketers tips. You will be sent follow up infomation based on your answers.
Yes my questions are a bit leading but you can see that the concept could be developed. The information may be tricky to extract from the Auto responder but most will export data in a CSV format. My system is self hosted and the data extracted as a txt file.
Survey Sites
The next option is to use a survey site these allow free access for small surveys up to 100 or 250 clients, for bigger surveys they will charge a monthly fee. There are lots of options for different types of question using number ranges, multiple choice or free text. These site also allow you to dress the page with logos etc. Pick your company some have funny terms and conditions where it is hard to get the data out or you loose it after a number of days. I guess you get what you pay for. There are some tricks in how you link the email to these sites, complete the above survey for more information.
http://www.surveygizmo.com/ or http://www.surveymonkey.com/ are good possibilities
If you are serious about keeping up with you customer there is survey software that you can buy and host on you own domain. I am not really up on these at the moment and I expect that a number of ISP will not let us good guys run them on their servers. I will do some more research on this and put in into a later post or pass it on to anyone that completes the above survey.
If there was a key to success in 2009 it will be the same as always but more important than ever. You must understand your clients needs, responding quickly to solve their problem and satisfy the want. It is easy to make presumptions and think we know what they want/need it is better to just ask them.
