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Weekly Campaign Idea: Survey Your Audience

Learn how to create a customer survey using ShortStack and get valuable feedback to improve your business.

By Dana Kilroy ・2 min read
Campaign & Contest Ideas

Creating a customer survey is one of the most powerful ways to get quick, reliable and focused feedback on a specific topic. While creating a customer survey is not the easiest task, if it’s done properly, the results are invaluable. So how can you use a marketing campaign to run a customer survey? Your first thought may have been to use a software such as Survey Monkey (which can be valuable) but have you ever thought of using ShortStack to do this? Using a ShortStack form you can create a survey, publish it and drive traffic to it from all of your online channels. The best part is your answers are collected straight into your ShortStack database so you can access and organize the information to best fit your needs.

6 Things to Remember When Building a Customer Survey

1. Keep your end goal in mind when creating your questions: Knowing that you potentially have your clients at your fingertips to answer your questions could cause some excitement, but it’s important to stay firm about what you’re asking. A great example of this is asking for an entrants name and age. Sometimes this information is valuable, but if you’re wanting to know which new product your fans like best, do you really care what their name is? Unless you’re planning a personalized follow-up strategy you can chop this question. By always asking yourself “why am I running this survey?” you can avoid irrelevant and unnecessary questions.

2. Make some of the questions optional: With ShortStack you can require people to fill in a field or you can allow them to leave it blank. If you’re having a hard time cutting down your questions, consider having the question be optional so people can choose whether they answer it or not.

3. Avoid asking lead questions: A leading question is one where you lead the participant towards a specific answer. For example, “Do you feel sad when you watch the news?” versus “What mood do you feel while watching the news?” By asking someone if they feel sad you’re leading them into thinking whether they’re sad or not versus taking an overall look at what emotion they actually feel. Avoiding lead questions is important so you receive the most honest answers from your participants.

4. Add an extra incentive: Most people don’t mind providing feedback for a brand, but it never hurts to throw in an extra incentive like a chance to win a prize or a small gift for responding. This is referred to as a lottery incentive.

5. Don’t over survey your fans: Fans and customers are great, and receiving customer feedback is great, but over surveying your fans can result in fewer and less valuable responses.

6. Include links to your other online channels: When you build your customer survey on a Campaign you have the ability to provide link backs to your other channels. Linking to your website, blog and social channels is a great way to get your entrants to continue communicating with you after they’ve filled out your survey.

An Example of a Customer Survey Campaign

GungHo Online Entertainment America, Inc was looking to gather fan feedback about the classic Game Arts games. Their survey was focused, simple and specific. Using ShortStack you can have an unlimited amount of entry fields and answer options. Game Arts offered a variety of questions from multiple choice, dropdown and open-ended so they could obtain as much valuable feedback from their audience as possible.

About the author

By Dana Kilroy ・2 min read
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Dana Sullivan Kilroy is a communications professional with more than 20 years of experience delivering compelling content. Her work has appeared in national, award-winning publications and sites, including: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Fast Company, Inc.

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