Everyone's heard of the saying "the customer is always right" and there's been a constant dialogue as to whether this is true; especially within marketing. And of course it can be argued both ways. But using your customers to help steer your digital or campaign strategy can be an extremely cost effective solution to ensuring that your content resonates.
Depending on your brand you could have tens of thousands of customers and their behaviours saved into your CRM. These customers have either purchased from you or shown a genuine interest in your brand at one stage and their opinion is invaluable.
Customer surveys are quick and cheap ways of finding out why customers purchased from you, your brand reputation, what content your customers gravitate to and what comes to mind when they think of you. This is information you can certainly guess when you’re ideating for your next big campaign but surely it would be useful to cement your assumptions with real data.
How often should I be surveying my customers?
How long is a piece of string?
The quickest and simplest way of having a constant stream of customer opinions is by sending post purchase emails and hopefully this is something that you already have implemented into your purchase journey. Questions should be simple, possibly just utilising star ratings and then an option to leave a comment.
If you’re thinking about a larger piece of work where you’ll be asking customers to take more than a few minutes to answer multiple questions in different formats about topics not necessarily directly related to their purchase, we’d suggest doing this annually or bi-annually at most.
Loyal customers might be more inclined to answer more frequently so having a segment within your CRM where you can ask ad hoc questions could be useful.
What questions should I be including?
There is a vast array of questions that you can include. You should first think about your goal. What is the objective to your survey; and this will guide you in asking the right questions.
If you want this survey to guide your channel selection for your marketing strategy, you’ll want to ask questions about:
Media consumption
Social media use
Topics of interest
Device use
Buying/purchase behaviours
Looking for help with campaign ideation. Try asking questions about:
Brand reputation (Describe our brand to your friends, what 3 words are you using)
Topics of interest
Aspirations
Ranking imagery (display contrasting images ie, beach, city, forest and ask them to rank)
This is not an exhaustive list of questions but a guide into how you can shape questions to your overall objective.
Everyone's heard of the saying "the customer is always right" and there's been a constant dialogue as to whether this is true; especially within marketing. And of course it can be argued both ways. But using your customers to help steer your digital or campaign strategy can be an extremely cost effective solution to ensuring that your content resonates.
Depending on your brand you could have tens of thousands of customers and their behaviours saved into your CRM. These customers have either purchased from you or shown a genuine interest in your brand at one stage and their opinion is invaluable.
Customer surveys are quick and cheap ways of finding out why customers purchased from you, your brand reputation, what content your customers gravitate to and what comes to mind when they think of you. This is information you can certainly guess when you’re ideating for your next big campaign but surely it would be useful to cement your assumptions with real data.
How often should I be surveying my customers?
How long is a piece of string?
The quickest and simplest way of having a constant stream of customer opinions is by sending post purchase emails and hopefully this is something that you already have implemented into your purchase journey. Questions should be simple, possibly just utilising star ratings and then an option to leave a comment.
If you’re thinking about a larger piece of work where you’ll be asking customers to take more than a few minutes to answer multiple questions in different formats about topics not necessarily directly related to their purchase, we’d suggest doing this annually or bi-annually at most.
Loyal customers might be more inclined to answer more frequently so having a segment within your CRM where you can ask ad hoc questions could be useful.
What questions should I be including?
There is a vast array of questions that you can include. You should first think about your goal. What is the objective to your survey; and this will guide you in asking the right questions.
If you want this survey to guide your channel selection for your marketing strategy, you’ll want to ask questions about:
Media consumption
Social media use
Topics of interest
Device use
Buying/purchase behaviours
Looking for help with campaign ideation. Try asking questions about:
Brand reputation (Describe our brand to your friends, what 3 words are you using)
Topics of interest
Aspirations
Ranking imagery (display contrasting images ie, beach, city, forest and ask them to rank)
This is not an exhaustive list of questions but a guide into how you can shape questions to your overall objective.
Survey rewards and incentives.
You should be providing a reward or incentive to customers to encourage them to complete the survey. You are, of course, asking them for a lot of personal information and customers will expect a certain level of value exchange. The simplest incentive is a discount or free gift on their next purchase. Free gifts can also help clear old back stock; especially if they’ve already done to sale and still haven’t sold.
Make the customer aware that there is a reward for their help from the initial email but ensure that the code is unique and not available until the work is done. Having it appear on a thank you page once the survey is complete is the best way to do this. Otherwise you’ll have savvy customers scrolling to the end of the form and using the discount without completing the questions!
Analysing your results.
Collecting data is useless if you cannot or do not analyse the results. Again, the intricacies of this analysis will depend on your overall objective but I’d suggest compiling data into several dashboards separated by attributes. You’ll want a master dashboard with overall data from all participants and then either separate dashboards or the ability to filter by attributes like demographic or location.
This way you are able to pull out data specific to a subset of people. For example, media consumption could be completely different for 25-35 year olds compared to your customers who are over 40. Therefore your channel selection needs to cover each and creative nuances between platforms and demographics need to be catered for.
Similarly different locations might have different sentiments when it comes to interests. British customers might love to consume content about travel, jet setting and life in warmer countries. Whilst Spanish customers might favour content about fashion over travel.
All these insights help with planning and ensuring that you are providing the best experience for any and all customer.
Interested in planning your own customer survey, have data you need analysing or simply want to upgrade your e-commerce campaigns? Leave your details in the form below and one of our experts will get back to you!
