What do business owners use surveys for? They’re a great indicator of what your customers think of your business, your product/service, and how well you’re running your operation. It helps you get the pulse from the people that matter most. We’ve got 5 tips to get the most submissions on your survey.

Trying to figure out where your business could improve? Is your growth stagnate and want to know what your customer base wants to see from you next? Consider sending out an online customer survey to get direct feedback from your people quickly and easily.

Putting together a survey that asks all of the questions you want the answers to, sending it to your email list and promoting it on your website and social media platforms is fairly straightforward.

How do you get people to fill out your survey and send in their responses?

1. Create your survey online.

A whopping 9 out of 10 people prefer to fill out survey forms online.  You could get a 90% better return rate simply by moving things online rather than via the postal service.

2. Offer an incentive.

It’s simply a fact of life; people always want to know, “What’s in it for me?” The results of this survey are extremely important to your business. Offer an incentive (such as a small freebie or a discount) to take the survey. If you make it a discount, it’s worth it for your customers, but also generates you a profit.

3. Keep it short and sweet.

Most email signup forms consist of one submission: email address. That’s because the more blanks there are to fill out, the less likely someone is going to fill it out. Even if the only extra blank is for a name.

Keep your survey short and to the point. Ask exactly what you need to know and nothing more. Create checkboxes or buttons to make it easy for people to take the survey.  Users fill out more when it is quick and easy to answer versus requiring them to write responses.

4. Create clear questions.

You don’t want there to be any room for error or confusion in your survey responses. If need be, run your survey by someone who doesn’t know your business to make sure that every question makes sense and can’t be misinterpreted. An unclear question could lead to unreliable data, so don’t risk it.

5. Test different survey methods.

The best way to get the most submissions on your survey is by sending a few surveys. Not to the same people, of course. You don’t want to bombard your audience.

For example, you could create an online form to send to your email list. You could also create a feedback box on your website. Or personally, reach out to any clients that you’ve worked with or are working with now.

The best way to guarantee you get the most bang for your buck, or in this case, get the most submission on your survey, is to keep things simple, easy, and beneficial to your customer base. Unless they’re loyal customers, no one is going to spend too much time filling your survey. Think about the customer, and what they have time for.

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Any company interested in its consumer’s habits is continuously mining for information. You want to know what interests them. You categorize them by demographics. You care about what they buy and why they buy. You want to understand their consumption priorities. And you’re in a perpetual race to discover the perfect method by which you can gather, analyze, and implement the results of this information.  One area of implementation is to enrich your content marketing.

So if you conduct a survey, we’ll outline the “why” and “what” for using it to help your business results.

Why should your business choose to use a web survey to enrich your content marketing?

• You want to discover what the market believes about your business, service, or product. Do they use your product or do they prefer a competitor? What factors affect that choice? What could you do to attract new consumers to your business? What could you do to keep former customers loyal?

• You want to collect external opinions on the internal operations of your business. What experiences have consumers had with your business and what are their opinions of those interactions? Did the consumer have a positive or negative experience with your team members? How have those experiences impacted future purchasing decisions?

• You want to know your customers. Demographic information can be valuable to almost any business. Many consumer behaviors and trends are predicted based upon quality demographic surveys from reputable data collection firms. When you understand the patterns of specific demographic categories, you can target your choice of groups and sub-groups and plan with those groups in mind.

Now that you have your survey results, what should you do with them?

• Evaluate the results individually and discuss them as a team. You’ve chosen to do mobile and online surveys because you believe the responses will be more genuine. Now that you have the results, it’s time to evaluate what they mean. What do they say about your product or service? What do the results communicate about the interactions with your team members? What do you need to change to retain customers and attract new ones? These decisions shouldn’t be made in a vacuum. Open the floor and discuss them with your leadership group or team members. Get ideas from your brightest minds. Embrace the best ideas, discuss implementation, and most importantly, don’t fear change.

• Compare the results with past surveys, with industry-wide reports and surveys that have been published in industry journals. Do your results correlate with others? What factors cause the variations of preference, positive and negative? Is your industry strong and, if not, are you outperforming the competition? What can you do to avoid the negative reactions from past reports?

All companies are looking for an edge, something that will set you apart from an increasingly crowded marketplace. Surveys can be personal feedback. But be specific. Figure out what you really want to know. And why? What are you going to do when you have all the data collected? Be a leader in your chosen industry by understanding every consumer’s wants and needs better than the next business. Treat every interaction personally. Learn from surveys so that your customers will keep coming back.

With Waftio, you can easily create web surveys for your website!  Just create your questions and choose the in-line embed option to add it to a webpage on your site.