Large enterprises can afford to hire their own marketers and develop their own surveys in-house. For them, this is the most economical way to find out what their customers are thinking. However, if you own a small business, you might not have the financial capacity to hire someone to create a survey for you. This is why online survey tools have become so popular.
Since many of the online surveys are free to create, you don’t have to spend a dime to find out what your target market is thinking. All it takes is a little free time and you can have an effective marketing survey ready to send out by email that will look like you spent hours on developing it. What’s more is that you don’t have to waste a lot of paper to create a survey that might never get sent back in. You simply send a link by email and the survey application can tell you when the email was opened, when the survey link was clicked and when the survey was completed.
Marketing Reasons to Create a Survey
As with any marketing tool, creating a survey is useful for many different purposes. Here are some of the reasons businesses of all sizes use surveys to make improve their services.
- To find out if there is a market for a new product. Surveys are critical instruments for this purpose. You don’t want to waste time and money developing a product that will ultimately flop because no one is interested in it.
- To find out if your audience prefers your product or a similar product from another company. This gives you a lot of information as to how your product is doing in the market compared with other products. It also gets your product in front of more people who might have thought they only had one choice.
- To assess your business’s performance in a particular area. If you aren’t able to be on the front lines of your company every day, you might want to find out about your customers’ experiences with various departments in your company. This will give you valuable information about how you can improve in certain areas to make your company even better.
- To solve a problem. If your company is in a quandary about how best to do something, ask your customers. They will provide you with creative solutions that you might never have thought of. Using the brain power of many people can help you break through your company’s stalemate.
There are even more reasons to create a survey for marketing purposes; however, those are the most common. Use your imagination and you can come up with a survey for just about anything. In addition, most online survey creation websites provide you with reporting tools so you can see in an instant what your customers are thinking. You will be able to make changes in a much quicker manner than you would be otherwise.
How to Create a Survey Online
Not only are online surveys valuable marketing tools, but they are also simple and fast to create. Websites are popping up all over the web that offer free survey creation applications. To find the survey software that is right for your needs, simply do a search on any of the popular search engines. You will be able to visit all the sites you want to before making a decision on which website to use for your surveys. While almost all survey sites make it free to create a survey, some of them do offer paid services that provide upgraded features.
Once you decide which site to use for your survey, you will first need to register on the site. To create a survey for free, you will only need to provide your basic contact information. If you want to pay for extra features, you will also need to provide a method of payment, usually a credit card or online payment service.
Now, you can either create a new survey from scratch or develop one from a template. Most survey creation websites offer numerous templates for free, but some of them will only offer one or two templates for free and charge for the rest. If you don’t want to customize your survey very much, a free template should be fine for your purposes.
Send Your Survey Out, Get Results
After you have created your survey, sending it out to your customer base is easier than making the survey in the first place. Simply enter your customers’ email addresses, write a personal message and hit “send”. Your customers will get your survey, click on the link embedded in the email and complete your survey. You will get notified every time someone completes it, if that’s how you set up your notifications. Otherwise, you can always go back to the website to monitor your survey results and create reports to provide you with the desired information in a user-friendly format.
If you’ve never tried to create a survey before for marketing purpose, perhaps it’s time to think about making one. You can get important data about your company and its performance with just a few simple questions. There aren’t many marketing tools that can give you so much information for such a little investment.
By,
Sameer Bhatia
Sameer Bhatia is founder & CEO of ProProfs which is a leading provider of online learning tools for building, testing, and applying knowledge. ProProfs Survey Software offers marketers and trainers powerful-but-simple features without requiring them to download or learn expensive software. Sameer has a background in technology with a Masters in Computer Science from USC (University Of Southern California) and is an ed-tech industry veteran.
