Marketing Article

Six Tips for Creating an Effective Online Customer Survey

Because of the wide availability of opportunities to create surveys using free online survey software, you can quickly and easily gauge customer satisfaction or interest in new product offerings via customer surveys.

When using a free or subscription-based online tool to create a survey, however, you must be certain that the survey is carefully designed to yield the most valuable data.

1. Preliminary Research

Online survey software makes it easy to create multiple surveys, which means you don't need to create one survey to address all of your market research needs.

So know what it is you want to know:

What information do you need from your survey?

What do you plan or hope to do with that information?

Different goals require different types of data from customers or potential customers. For example, the information you gather prior to launching a new website will be different from the information you'll solicit before adding a feature to an existing website.

2. Determine the Target for your Survey

Almost all survey software enables you to enter an email list. How do you determine which people to include on that list?

Choose a specific group of people you want to survey:

Existing customers

Potential customers

Purchased sales leads

Customize your survey for the target group. When you create a survey for college students, for example, the tone and language will likely be different from that of a survey for senior business executives.

Writing questions tailored to your target audience will increase the response rate of your survey and result in more valuable data.

Marketing Article

Lessons for 2014: What Was Missing in Your 2013 Holiday Marketing Strategy?

Shopping has entered a new era, evolving to accommodate a soaring fanatic mobile user base and rapidly improving capabilities of smart phones and tablets. The 2013 holidays were no different. IBM reported that Thanksgiving weekend set records for mobile sales and traffic, accounting for nearly 40% of online traffic, as well as nearly one-third of all online traffic on Cyber Monday.

Now that the holiday season is behind us, here are lessons about what marketing teams can do to make the holidays in 2014 even merrier.

Digital Window-Shopping

Photos on mobile are the new "holiday window shopping." Consumers scurry along sidewalks that are bustling with shoppers to scan interesting products in windows. Wanelo, for instance, is an extremely popular mobile app because it features photos that users flip through as if they're window shopping. Marketers can expect to see the "view and swipe" shopping experience become ubiquitous, especially as marketers use big data to put the right products in front of customers to minimize the need to search and filter.

Tinder got this approach right as a dating app, and Tumblr has skyrocketed because it's driven by visual images. People don't want to read a list of names with one-sentence greetings next to small thumbnail photos. They want to swipe through full-size pictures and tap a single button to say whether they're interested or not.

That experience of visual, quick-swipe shopping will likely be replicated throughout 2014, especially leading up to the holiday season.