Anatomy of a Marketing Survey
Feb 22 2009
We recently finished our first ever marketing survey for Babble Soft. And we announced the winners on our blog on a post called Babble Soft Survey Winners (yes, I get points for coming up with such an original title!). Should I have done one earlier? Yes, of course. But what one should do and what one does in an entrepreneurial endeavor don’t always match up…especially when you are doing the business on your own (before I found Nicole Johnson), part time, and/or after hours. The process went smoothly enough, I learned a few things, and of course I love sharing with fellow entrepreneurs so here it goes…
We first decided we needed to do a quarterly newsletter to our existing users and announce the survey there. We used Vertical Response to deliver our newsletter because between them and the leading competitor, Aweber, they were the only one who offered ‘pay as you go’ emailing. Since we only plan to send a newsletter once per quarter, we felt it would be better to pay by the email address instead of signing up for a monthly ongoing service which we wouldn’t end up using 8 out of the 12 months of the year. I posted the newsletter on this blog and on our new Babble Soft blog where we emphasized the great prizes people would win for filling out the survey that we created on the fabulous free survey tool called Survey Monkey. We only had 10 questions so we were able to use their free services which I have to say is pretty darn cool. If I ever had a need to do a more sophisticated survey, I would definitely pay to use their service. It’s pretty easy to analyze the results.
We received a good response rate but because we also published the link to the survey on what we thought would be a good competition sites for parents, we had quite a few people who filled out the survey who had never used our applications or had even heard of us. On one hand, it was good additional exposure, but on the other hand, I don’t think it ended up being from the right crowd of people. However, we did get some good data from existing users and new parents that affirmed some of our current product development decisions. Overall, I was amazed at how many people are out there who spend their time trying to win prizes! I was also amazed at how some people didn’t really care who you were, they just wanted their prize.
Key Takeaways
- It’s a good idea to do a short survey (7 to 10 minutes to complete) from time to time. Offering prizes guarantees more responses but not necessarily the right responses.
- Have some independent people review your survey to make sure it’s understandable. We had a few people review it and it helped us word our survey more effectively.
- Using cost-effective or free tools like Vertical Response and Survey Monkey will make your life easier.
- Be really careful where you publicize your survey because if you don’t it’s highly likely you’ll end up with some yahoo’s (i.e., those out for a quick buck) answering your survey. Then you’ll have to give prizes to people who really have no idea what you do. It’s kind of painful actually…especially when it’s your company and products that you’ve created from scratch.
- Don’t do a ‘random winner’ selection. We did a ‘random winner’ contest. This may cut down on the quantity of people who complete the survey, but if you can figure out a way to select people who have either used your products or would have been great potential users or end up giving you wonderful feedback, you’ll feel much better. I’m guessing the quality of responses might increase even if the quantity decreases.
- Make sure to follow up with the people who respond by informing them of who won and where to see the results. It can result in additional exposure.
- I don’t have a 7th takeaway but I like the #7 so if you read this far, thank you. Plus, I’m annoyed that although I have selected the number button in WordPress when creating this list, it’s displaying bullets in both Firefox and IE. So you’ll just have to take my word (or count) that this is the 7th takeaway!
We have identified some key users from our survey who we have either engaged with or will engage with to help us with some internet marketing. This will be a new experience for both Nicole and myself since we will be taking a little bit of a risk because most of our users are not traditional internet marketers…which I’m crossing my fingers that will end up being a good thing!
If you have any experience with marketing survey’s please share your discoveries in the comment section below.
Author: Aruni | Filed under: entrepreneurship, marketing | Tags: marketing survey | 3 Comments »
Surveys should not be too long. I have sometimes given up when filling up survey forms halfway as there are just pages after pages to continue. It makes no difference even if there’s a prize to win, at least not to me 😉
Immomsdaughters last blog post..Teaching Kids The Value of Money
I learned in my MBA consumer behavior class that you should do a few indepth interviews with folks to get an idea of what answer choices would be appropriate for a survey. For instance, I was doing a survey on # of resumes for recruiting and provided survey answer choices that went up to the 100s, but in reality peoples’ answers were under 100 count and majority under 50 count. Now I don’t know the breakdown of the under 50 count. Something you should consider also is using LinkedIn poll feature. It’s free or paid if you want it targeted.
Sophias last blog post..My quest to find people to work on a business idea with
@Immomsdaughter – I agree…long survey’s lose people. 🙂
@Sophia – that’s a good idea on doing a few in depth interviews. I’ve used LinkedIn for general business polling but our Babble Soft poll was catered mostly to parents of newborns.