Surveys and polls are very useful when you’re looking at collecting data from large groups of people in a short amount of time.
Polls
A poll will collect completely anonymous answers of a single question on your website.
As someone visits your home page, for example, a box will pop up in the lower corner and simply ask the visitor a single question.
These questions can be left open-ended, but I can tell you from literally deploying hundreds of polls, that those with a single multiple choice question see the highest level of interaction.
If you think like the visitor of your website, would you answer a difficult question that’s popping up at you if you were here looking for your own information?
The answer is probably not!
Let’s say your product is an iPhone app, and visitors come to your site to learn about your product.
As they are browsing, a single question popped up and said...
What feature do you value the most about apps on your phone?
- low file size
- easy user navigation
- helpful in-app purchases
- low cost or free, or
- Other
Do you think you’d have a decent response rate?
Probably!
Do you think that kind of question is helpful to you when you’re thinking about planning your product marketing, pricing, and strategy?
Well if you’re interested in meeting the needs of most of your prospective customers, then odds are, yes this is important to you.
Surveys
Surveys are helpful to get a pulse on how your current customers feel about your products or services.
I like to send a survey of abbreviated buyer persona questions that we perform during customer interviews to a large group of existing customers.
This allows for the potential of large quantities of responses about specific questions with your company.
The same recommendation applies in surveys as it does in polls - you should think about offering multiple choice questions rather than open ended questions.
I might recommend having 5 multiple choice questions followed by one “write in” answer question just to gauge the audience.
These kinds of questions will be great to show things like, “75% of our clients feel we are best at XYZ,” or “only 30% of our customers say we perform great customer service.”
I recommend using a tool like Typeform to offer your survey, which has free and paid plans, and allows you to customize the design and delivery type of your survey.
One final point about surveys - Really think about how important this information is to you.
If you want to get lots and lots of feedback, I’d recommend dangling a carrot out in front of your clients to get them to participate rather than just hoping they submit a response.
It’s important to note that most people typically do not respond, and sometimes, very few will.
If you’d like to entice more people to respond, offer a $10 Starbucks gift card or something similar to those that participate. Also, if you are encouraging people with some kind of prize for participation, you can usually ask more difficult questions, like more open ended questions where they are expected to type in their response.
