Survey Your Site Visitors!Written by Brent Niland
The Internet is changing face of marketing research. Time was when research involved among other things, printing and mailing surveys, data entry, and long distance telephone calls. Because of time, effort, and expense involved, surveys were done infrequently or not at all. Without valuable information collected from surveys, marketing opportunities and client feedback were often missed. The Internet is changing all of that.Online surveys provide a fast, efficient, and flexible way to learn more about your customers and prospects. The speed of response and flexibility of online surveys can provide an organization with critical information quickly. A product concept developed in morning can be tested and results received next day! Strategic decisions can be made in a fraction of time. Online surveys can take different forms. Below are examples: ·General Website Survey - This survey is placed on a website and is open for all site visitors to take. Because survey is open to all, sampling cannot be controlled or considered a statistically valid poll. However, general website surveys can be significant for two reasons: oWhile not scientific, information collected can provide an organization with valuable information. For example, a professional baseball team asked following question on their website, "What item would you most like to see offered at concession stands next season?" Following this question, several food items were listed. The number one response was, cheese curds(of all things!). Although this cannot be considered definitive answer to proceed with cheese curds next year it does give team reason to test market product next season. Without this information, team would have missed a potential opportunity to provide their fans with food they desire and additional revenue from concession sales. oWebsite surveys can also increase repeat visits to website. A well done, fun survey that changes frequently can provide motivation for site visitors to return to website repeatedly. It is also important to provide respondent with real time results of survey once they have submitted their responses. This provides satisfaction of seeing how their responses stack up with other respondents. ·Market Research Survey - The market research survey involves developing a survey for a targeted population. If you are a diaper manufacturer you may want to purchase a list of women between 20 and 35 with children under 3 years old in home, for example. The difference between purchasing a list for a standard survey and a list for an online survey is that you are buying their e-mail addresses rather than their home address or phone number. A market research survey involves following steps:
| | Tinkers to Evers to ChanceWritten by Bob Osgoodby
Chicago Cubs infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance formed most memorable double-play combination in history of baseball. In our marketing efforts, we can learn a valuable lesson from this "double-play" concept.While email is nice to use in your ads, it is not structured, and you may not get information you really need. You can have them reply to a specific email address or to an email with a special address such as: bob@adv-marketing.com?subject=BOB1234 this will allow you to act upon that email. If you use a mail reader such as Eudora, you can automatically send a response to any mail with subject BOB1234. Of course, you can have different offers with different subjects work same way. This can also work wonders for tracking purposes so you know where your leads are coming from. Another way, is to have your contact information point to your web site where you have a form they can fill out. The form will allow them to send you an email in a precise format. Example - When someone subscribes to one of our Newsletters, we get information in exactly same format from everyone who subscribes. Will you lose an occasional customer who won't visit your web site? Sure, but they're probably "tire kickers" anyway. If you provide a link in your ad to precise page to fill out form, loss will be minimal, and benefits will far outweigh any potential loss. Since information is now in an exact format when received as an email, there are things that can be done that would be extremely difficult to do with regular email. When fielded by your email system, first thing done is to immediately send a confirmation notice that it was received. This is your first contact back, and it lets them know they have made contact.
|
