To get relevant information from your customers there is nothing better than surveys. Ask your subscribers what they want. That's your power.
Here are three different ways to use surveys - even one-question surveys - to achieve this.
1. The magic email
This is the simplest of the three techniques and the quickest to set up. All you have to do is pose a question to your subscribers in the welcome email you send them. You can get anywhere from 15% to 30% of your new subscribers to respond to your welcome email and tell you what they most want to know.
After a subscriber has clicked on the link in the confirmation email, they can, for example:
- See the final confirmation page on your site, where you can give them access to download the free report you may have to offer (highly recommended).
- Receive an email that says: "Thank you for subscribing to my free weekly email updates, could you do me a favor, could you reply to this email and tell me what your biggest question is about ... (whatever it is you want to know about your customers)? I will use your response to create more materials for the site. You would help me, yourself and all users. So give it a try: reply and tell me what you want to know. Thanks.
The insights you get from these responses will help you create content with much better results than the usual posts and updates.
You will get people to tell you what they really want to know and at almost zero cost.
Why does it work?
Because they are highly engaged: they have just signed up for your email list and are therefore eager to receive information from your company. They have high hopes.
Welcome emails are opened and get higher response rates than virtually any other type of email (except, perhaps, transactional emails). That's why they are so valuable.
Be humble. Ask for help. This technique works very well in social networks. People like to help. If your audience has positive feelings about you, they will want to help even more. When they get to be helpful and give their opinion on something they see it as an accomplishment.
2. Three magic questions
Ask 3 essential questions:
- What is your most relevant question about X (text box for answer)?
- Did you find it difficult to find information about it? Please rate from 1 to 5, where 1 is the easiest and 5 is the most difficult.
- What prompted you to start your search today (text box for answer)?
This survey format was designed for recruitment pages ("what prompted you to start your search?"). But these questions also work for email messages and display ads. Try changing the wording to "What motivated your interest in X?".
Although this survey seems fairly straightforward, it has several powerful things going for it. First, it only has three questions. The fewer questions you ask in a survey, the better. There is often a lot of back-and-forth about what questions to ask, and many surveys end up hovering around 5 or 7 questions. This is a very short survey, but it gets a lot of responses.
It is achieved by
a) Knowing what people really want
b) Know if what you were looking for was hard to find. This question differentiates you from the rest of the market and helps you convert it into sales.
c) The third question seems a little strange at first, until you've actually done one of these surveys. It's the one that measures how desperate (or motivated) someone is to find information. It's amazing the level of detail with which some people answer this question. In fact, the word count of the answers is measured to quantify and score them.
3. Abandonment surveys
It consists of asking people why they have unsubscribed from a subscription list.
Example:
Please tell us why you wish to unsubscribe to our list:
- The content I receive is no longer relevant to me
- I receive many emails from this company
- I receive a lot of emails in general
- Does not apply to me
- I don't remember giving my permission to send me messages.
- Another
Have you stopped to look at why some of your subscribers have recently unsubscribed? Knowing why they're leaving could help you decide what content to create... almost as much as what your new subscribers tell you.
