Do you know what your customers want? Are you fulfilling their needs? Do they want something more from you?
If you don’t know the answer to those questions then you need to ask.
And that’s exactly what I did.
2 weeks ago I sent out a survey through Mail Chimp and Survey Monkey to ask my current (and future!) customers a few questions. I wanted to make sure that my ideas and practices are in line with what they want. Although it’s just me running my little business, I view it as a partnership with my customers. They have a void and I fill that void.
As I’m going through all of the feedback, I thought I’d take a moment to share a few important tips I’m learning along the way.
Keep it short and sweet. I purposely kept the survey short as people are busy and don’t have a lot of discretionary time to fill out a long survey. As you build your survey, keep it between 5-10 questions with the format being “choose one of the following” versus “fill in the blank”. Although a good mix of the 2 works well too. I asked questions like:
Where did you find me?
Where do you follow me?
What do they like and what would they like to see?
I also asked what other blogs/magazines they like to follow.
Let them know it’s short. In my twitter and Facebook posts I made a point of letting them know it’s a quick survey. And in the body I told them it would take no more than 5 minutes. Again, we are all busy but if you make it really short, the more people will participate.
Have an incentive. It doesn’t need to be huge but good enough to entice people to fill it out. I offered up one of my newest product which went over really well. Perhaps you could offer a $5 gift certificate to your shop or free shipping.
Follow up. No one likes to give constructive feedback and see no results. Have a plan in place to publicly or privately address issues people may have had or just simply thank them for leaving feedback. They want to know their time was valued and appreciated.
As this year is quickly drawing to a close and I’m prepping for the holiday madness, I now have many new items to add to my product list for next year.
Have you done a survey with your customers? If so, how did it turn out? If not, then what are you waiting for?
Photo credit: Online Survey
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