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Qualifying Prospects on the Web
The web offers some wonderful new tools for marketers.
One of the most important is the online survey.
Online surveys can serve marketers in two major areas.
First, they are an excellent tool for identifying the needs and buying
inclinations of your prospects. So they are an excellent pre-qualification
tool. But they can also be employed for test-marketing and market research.
The simplest implementation of an online survey is the
HTML form that can be completed by visitors. The data is posted to a file,
database, email or some combination.
The number of providers of online survey technologies
has exploded in recent years. Sophisticated survey capabilities are available
from a dizzying array of vendors. They include integrated databases and
automated email responders.
Online Surveys for Better Business Decisions
If you Know Your Customer your company can better serve
it’s market, which is an important element of business success.
A corollary of this rule is to Know Your Competition.
A well-designed and well-executed survey can not only
identify potential prospects from a base of leads, but can also provide
enormously valuable information about needs, buying influences and competitive
threats. Businesses are given many opportunities to collect survey information,
although many times they don’t take advantage of them. They include:
- Registerting attendees for an event
- Logging visitors to a trade show booth
- Signing up for a download, product or report from
your website
- Recruiting and classifying business partners
- Responding to a marketing campaign or promotion
- Measuring customer satisfaction following a sale
Experience with our clients has shown that although
surveys are often conducted to identify and qualify prospects, there is
additional valuable information that is unexpectedly gleaned in almost
every instance.
Online Survey Design
Every survey should start with a clear objective. Whether its purpose
is prospecting or gaining a better understanding of a potential new market,
the objective should be crisply defined.
As the survey is developed, it should be tested on candidates
who are similar in background to the intended audience. Testing will reveal
if a survey is too long, leading to a high rate of abandonment, or it
can identify questions that have been worded in a way that confuses or
misleads the respondent, leading to bad data.
Depending on the particular information desired, there
are a number of types of questions that can be employed in a survey. They
include:
- True / False
- Multiple Choice - Choose all that apply
- Multiple Choice - Unrestricted (for example, add
“other” text field)
- Multiple Choice - Single answer restriction
- Importance Scale - Rate from “Extremely Important”
to “Not at All Important”
- Rating Scale - Rate from “Excellent”
to “Poor”
- Custom Rating Scale
- Relative Ranking
- Open Ended (essay to text field)
The good news is that there is a question type for
almost any kind of information desired. The challenge is to make sure you
use the right type of question for each particular piece of information
you are seeking. Also, care should be taken in formulation. For example,
if your first relative ranking question goes from Excellent to Poor, all
ranking questions in the survey should be ordered from “good”
to bad” rather than the other way round.
Implementation Options
Traditional surveys were conducted face-to-face by individuals. Today,
many surveys are conducted over the telephone. Response rates and accuracy
for one-on-one surveys are very high relative to other approaches. However
the major downside to conducting personal surveys is that they are expensive.
Direct mail has also been used to gather survey information.
Respondents are mailed a survey form and encouraged, often through some
form of reward, to complete the survey and drop it in the mail.
The advantage of direct mail surveys is that they can
reach a very wide audience of respondents. The disadvantages include very
low typical response rates and the inability to provide ancillary information
if a respondent is unclear about exactly what is meant by a particular
question. Also, the responses must be converted from paper to a database
for analysis, which can be expensive and error-prone.
The Web provides a new medium for surveys that can be
extremely effective, and offers advantages that go beyond personal interviews
and tele-surveys. Market-Vantage can help you implement an on-line survey
that offers most of the benefits of one-on-one surveys while leveraging
the Internet to dramatically reduce costs. Online surveys can even mimic
the conditional branching capabilities of one-on-one surveys but without
the complexity, providing focused, targeted questions at different classes
of respondents in a way that is completely transparent to the respondent.
The advantages of on-line surveys include:
- Convenience. Respondents can complete
a survey at any time, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, whenever it
is convenient for them.
- Precision. The survey can include
samples, graphics, and pop-ups that provide detailed explanations so
that a respondent can get background information if a question is unclear
to them. This greatly reduces the number of “Not Sure” responses,
which are not very useful.
- Flexibility. Designing an effective
paper-based survey for different types of respondents is very difficult.
Even worse, responding to such a survey is complicated, because certain
responses require branching to different follow-on questions. Online
surveys can handle conditional branch and merge flows invisibly and
elegantly.
- Immediate Results. Responses are
captured “on-the-fly” in a database that is accessible instantly,
on-line, and properly secured. Our clients can see the responses as
they come in. An executive in the company HQ can see leads captured
at a trade show booth half a world away, in real time!
- Compelling Multimedia. Take advantage
of the sights and sounds that the Web can bring. Animated graphics and
audio can make completing a survey fun and exciting, which can significantly
increase response rates.
- Virtually Unlimited Responses.
With paper-based surveys, you have to decide up front how many to print
and mail. Telemarketing surveys are limited by cost and manpower. But
on-line surveys work whether your audience turns out to be in the hundreds
or the thousands. Online surveys know no geographic boundaries either.
A Web Browser (and an optional password if appropriate) is all that
is required.
- Instant Follow-up. Your on-line
surveys can automatically generate emails based on event triggers. For
example, an email can be sent to the respondent upon completion of the
survey, thanking them for participating or delivering an on-line incentive
prize. Additional emails can be automatically generated based on answers
given.
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