5 Ways Online Surveys Do Wonders for Your Business

2017-04-27 10:00:00 | Khylie Gardner | business tips,small business marketing

Since the days of ad agencies and Mad Men, surveys have allowed marketers to gauge the opinions, concerns, and feelings of their customers. As the marketing world continues to become increasingly digital in nature, online surveys have created an easy way for marketers to routinely survey customers.

With so many cheap and easy online survey applications available (hello, SurveyMonkey), it should almost be a crime not to consistently poll your customers. Here are five ways in which online surveys can do wonders for your small business today.

5 Advantages of Online Surveys for Your Small Business

Market Analysis

This is probably the most obvious way to use an online survey. Small businesses can benefit from using online surveys to figure out what your target audience finds important. This, in turn, can help you to identify opportunities for growth within your brand and uncover valuable information that can benefit current and future projects.

Track Your Performance

We love to use online surveys to check in with our customers regularly throughout the year. This is a great way to ensure that your business operations and quality control processes are paying off, and has the added bonus of serving as an additional touch point with your consumers throughout their purchasing process.

Follow Up With Your Customers

Immediately after your customers make a purchase, it’s important to use a detailed online survey. This can reveal how well your product or service has answered your customer’s needs, and provides your audience with a platform to share their experience with you. Post-purchase online surveys show the customer that you are grateful to them for choosing your business and that you prioritize continuous product improvement.

Figure Out Where Customers Come From

Online surveys can be a great way to deepen your understanding of your customers’ demographic and psychographic (habitual) makeup. When you’re first trying to develop your buyer personas, posing a demographic online survey can help you discover important trends in your customer base: their lifestyles, their aesthetic preferences, their problems and their challenges. This data is crucially important for developing your products and services – after all, the best product is the one that effectively solves a problem for the people who use it.

Get The Truth and Nothing But the Truth

This tends to be an overlooked benefit of online surveys, which is why we think it’s the most important. While you are likely to get some useful information from offline forms of data collection, such as focus groups, the digital platform provides an opportunity for your consumers to be more truthful about their experiences. While the truth can certainly be harsh, the online survey’s penchant for collecting details that might have been left out in other forms of data collection is important to note. People are, after all, more honest on the Internet.