subject: How To Use Surveys To Gather Market Data And How To Analyze This Data [print this page] There are a few types of surveys that can help you gather data about visitors to your site:
Website Intercept Surveys: Use these surveys to determine why a customer comes to your site. Give them a few seconds to look around, and then pop up a survey that asks them why they came to your site. What problem were they trying to solve?
Product Surveys: Ask your customers what they think about your product and how you should improve it.
Concept Surveys: If you're trying to come up with a new product, you can survey your existing customers to see what other needs they have. Give them a choice between several product options, and have them rank each choice.
Exit Surveys: If you're wondering why people are leaving your site, pop up a survey when they leave. Ask simple questions like: "Why are you leaving our site?"
Cancellation Surveys: These are for customers who cancel their subscription to your product. Ask them why they canceled. If you have a number of services, you can direct them to different products or a cheaper product based on their answers. If they canceled because of price, maybe you have a less expensive product they'd be interested in. Don't make it too difficult to cancel, but build the survey into the cancellation form, so they're forced to answer it. Also ask them if they plan on returning.
Try to make your questions open ended. Rather than offering them choices, use an edit field. The only reason to use drop-down lists or radio buttons is when their answer will dynamically update the page, such as sending people to different pages based on their responses to a cancellation survey.
Keep your survey in the background. Make sure it doesn't pop over your site.
Use surveys to tweak your sales letter. Sometimes you have several different types of customers that come to your site. You can ask them a couple questions when they arrive at your site, and then send them to a sales page tailored specifically to their situation.
In order to collect and analyze survey data, use a web-based solution. There's a free site called limesurvey.org. There are also paid options such as surveymonkey.com and askdatabase.com. Most of them cost from 10 to $20 a month. If you don't plan to use surveys on anon going basis, you can cancel after a month and you'll have spent only 10 to $20 to gather customer data. If you'd rather do it yourself, use Google Docs Spreadsheets. They allow you several different question types, and you can email the survey link to your customers or put it on your site. Use this only for basic surveys that don't require customers to skip questions or answer questions based on their answers to prior questions. For example, you don't want to force them to skip question 9 if they answered no to question 8.
