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7 Best Practices for Customer Market Research Surveys
Customer market research is absolutely critical for companies to make informed decisions based on market data analysis. However, many organizations are understandably unfamiliar when it comes to designing these types of surveys. Here are seven best practices for designing an effective survey.
Understand Your Purpose
Chances are you want to jump right into creating questions. However, market research companies will tell you that you need to begin with a clear purpose. Conducting customer market research all begins with having core goals.
These goals are necessary in order to effectively tailor your survey to get you the information that you need. Failing to do this can lead to long surveys that provide unclear information that can’t be used for market data analysis.
Keep Your Survey as Short & Simple as Possible
One of the greatest tools to increase your customer completion rate and improve the quality of responses is to keep your survey short and simple. Questions should be written clearly and concisely, ensuring that participants understand what is being asked.
Additionally, be sure to only include questions that specifically address your goals for the customer market research survey. Keeping a survey as short as possible will decrease the odds that respondents get tired in the middle and quit.
Consider the Best Way to Distribute It
Market research companies will tell you that how you distribute your consumer market research surveys is integral for getting good response rates and getting it in front of the right people. Are you looking for general feedback from frequent customers? Do you want information from a specific demographic? These are important considerations.
There are many affordable methods for distributing your survey including direct e-mail, SMS messages, and sharing the survey link on your social media channels. However, attaining information from some groups such as consumers who have never shopped with you might require more specialized distribution or even hiring a market research company for expertise.
Get Feedback on Your Survey
One of the most critical mistakes that companies make when it comes to developing customer market research surveys is failing to get substantial feedback on survey drafts. Check within your organization for people that have expertise in survey research design and have them look it over.
Additionally, get insight into how someone unfamiliar with your organization views the survey. This can be done simply by asking friends to read through it and give feedback. If you are unsure about how to ask specific questions, consider something like an A-B test to see how multiple options are received.
You Don’t Need to Survey Everyone
If you are conducting customer market research with existing customers and you have a relatively large database of customer information, you don’t need to survey everyone. Instead, consider taking a random sample of your customers. This will give you quality data that you can use for market data analysis.
Another benefit of not surveying everyone is that you can conduct more surveys over time without generating survey fatigue. If you are looking for feedback from a relatively small subgroup, you may decide to survey everyone in that group. It just depends on your needs and the size of the population.
Minimize Open Ended Feedback
When conducting customer market research, people are much more likely to respond by clicking something than they are to type out an answer. Thus, while you may be tempted to ask lots of open-ended questions, minimize these as much as possible as they can quickly lead to people dropping out of the survey.
In general, if something can be answered with a click, ask it that way. This will also help with your market data analysis by streamlining the data processing of questions with as little back-end work as possible. This isn’t to say don’t ask open-ended questions. Instead, just minimize them to improve the quality of responses.
Say Thank You
Another major misstep that many companies make when constructing a survey is ending with a very generic message or default screen. This is very impersonal and doesn’t send the right message to a customer that just spends five- or ten minutes providing information to you.
Instead, ensure that you are creating a custom thank you page. Typically, this would have your logo, express appreciation, and – depending on the purpose of the survey – include some sort of call to action.
Want to Outsource Your Customer Market Research to an Expert?
If you would prefer to offload the stress of your customer market research to someone with expertise in the area, Business Intelligence is more than happy to help you. Contact us for a free consultation.