Understanding customers is the key to providing good service and achieving business goals. Consumer behavior in the digital age is constantly changing and as a business owner, you need to make sure that you know what their priorities and pain points are.

There’s a lot of techniques to know how the consumers feel about your services and products, but conducting a customer survey is one of the most effective ways to understand your market.

The process of getting feedback through surveys will help you create a special connection with the consumers and strengthen your overall marketing strategy. It lets you get familiar with how people interact with your brand.

Some people might think that this is an old-fashioned approach, but surveys provide useful insights and detailed analysis that will allow you to make the best decisions to grow your business.

If you’re planning to create your own survey, here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started.

Step 1: Define your goals

Before anything else, you need to determine why you want to create a survey in the first place.

Don’t conduct a survey just for the sake of collecting data. You need to have clear objectives to be able to capture customer feedback that provides actionable insights. Always begin with your end actions in mind.

For example, if your brand recently launched new products, your goals can be about:

  • Knowing their thoughts on your products or services
  • Measuring customer satisfaction
  • Identifying areas for improvement
  • Discovering opportunities that allow you to offer better services

Once you’ve identified the reasons why you’re doing the survey, you can now move forward and draft the questions.

Step 2: Ask the right questions

Getting valuable feedback starts by asking your customers the right set of questions. The way you ask questions can make or break you.

You don’t want your customers to be confused with the questions you’re presenting. Ask questions that are only relevant. Cut unnecessary questions and focus on those that will fulfill your end goal.

You also need to consider including open-ended questions for your survey. Multiple-choice, scales, and yes or no queries are helpful, but letting the customers answer in their own words will provide more useful information that you need to improve your brand.

But always make sure that you only ask important ones. People tend to get intimated answering a lot of open-ended questions. If you bombard the respondents with dozens of complicated questions, there’s a tendency that they won’t make it to the end of the survey.

Step 3: Test your survey

Some business often skips this step. But it’s an essential part to find out if your survey will work out.

To test your survey, go through all the questions and try to answer them one by one. If you can’t answer a specific query, analyze if your customers will feel the same way, and remove it from the survey if needed. Stick with the questions that you think the consumers care about.

This is the perfect time to look for errors with the content such as spelling and grammar mistakes, and even the design. You can also share the test survey to your employees, co-workers, friends, or family to get their feedback.

Step 4: Offer incentives

Before distributing the survey to your customers, you need to think about how you can encourage them to answer your survey. Asking them to participate can be really challenging because some people think that it’s a time-consuming task.

Offering incentives is optional, but if you want to increase your response rates or you need to target those people who rarely respond to surveys, this will come in handy. Sweepstakes or rewards program will motivate your customers to complete the survey and provide useful insights that can boost your brand.

The prize distribution part can be time-consuming on your end, but you can always ask assistance from a sweepstakes management company like US Sweepstakes to help you with the process.

US Sweepstakes ensures that your sweepstakes are legally compliant. Our team of experts helps you deal with prize fulfillment and procurement. We will take care of the sourcing and procuring of all your prizes, and handling of the winner selection, winner notifications, and state registration.

Step 5: Distribute and analyze

If you think you’re all set, the next thing you need to do is figure out how you can distribute it to your target market effectively. Without a distribution plan, you may not collect the right amount of customer feedback that you need.

Here are some methods that will help you with the distribution:

  • Send it via email. It’s one of the best ways to leverage your existing clients. Make sure that you keep your message brief and personalized, and focus only on the survey.
  • Add it to a blog post. Embedding a survey in a blog post allows you to explain the purpose of your study. It also drives web traffic.
  • Share it on social media. Posting a link to your survey on various social media sites increases your brand visibility and it will help you tap audiences that are not currently included in your mailing list.

Once you’re done gathering all the responses, you’re now ready to analyze the data and create reports. Use everything to your advantage, even negative feedback. Paying attention to unflattering comments will help you improve your brand even more.

Ready to start your survey? US Sweepstakes can help you make your next customer survey a success with a sweepstakes or rewards program. Contact us today and one of our sweepstakes consultants will work with you.