Demographic Surveys - what's your gender, age, income, occupation, marital status, etc.

Sometimes people don't want to take time to fill out a survey. To encourage them to fill out survey offer them a freebie if they fill it out. Some ideas are free ebooks, free advertising, free reports, free internet services or a free e-zine. Hold a free online contest or sweepstakes and ask visitors to fill out a survey before they enter.

If you don't yet have an e-mail address list you could post your survey on appropriate newsgroups, forums and e-mail discussion lists. You could also upload survey software to your web site or use a free survey service on internet. To find such services just type in keyword "survey" in your search engine of choice.

How then, do you pinpoint a good customer against a bad one? What kind of information do you need to know about your customers? Here are 8 critical but very basic information that you must gather:

1. Who are they? 2. What do they buy? 3. When do they buy? 4. How do they buy? 5. Why do they buy? 6. Where do they buy? 7. Are they satisfied? 8. What is their buying power like?

One way of getting information that you need is to simply conduct a survey on your mailing list. Hot tip! Make it easy for your subscribers to fill up survey and give them an incentive to do so!

The same pareto principle should apply to your online business: 80/20 rule. The principle just means that 80% of your sales are generated by 20% of your customers.

If this is the case, instead of spending huge sums on customer acquisition, it may be a more prudent measure to spend resources on knowing and understanding more of this 20% segment. Cultivate good relationships with this 20% segment and reward customers here for staying true to you. (Again, this knowledge is only possible if you have surveyed or kept track of your entire customer base.)

All in, having happy, loyal and satisfied customers will result in a business that prospers. And you can achieve this through direct marketing and knowing what, where and how to please your customers!