Are You a Startup? The Benefits of Conducting Online Surveys

One of the most crucial, but often overlooked, aspects of running a successful business is market research. At the heart of your market research lies a survey, which is conducted to gauge demand for your product or service, among other things. It’s at this stage where you ascertain whether your offering is essential enough to your audience that they are willing to part with their hard-earned money for it.

Therefore, it’s crucial that you know what to do with a survey and how to make it work for you — one step could make or break your startup. As a startup, or even an established SME, you need to pick and choose carefully where you invest your money. In this post, we’ll show you how to use surveys effectively and get maximum value for money.

Find out the “Why” in the Numbers

Looking at the numbers is a crucial part of running any business. You should already know, and have clear goals for, your customer acquisition cost, ROI and customer lifetime value, among others. But businesses are about people. If you don’t invest the time in objective research, you’ll know what the numbers are, but you won’t understand why they are that way. Engaging your end users with relevant, targeted questions will help you identify where you need to focus your efforts to serve them better and grow your business.

Find out if You’re Offering the Optimal Product or Service Experience

User feedback is vital for making sure that you’re always providing users with they want, need and expect. Surveys are the most efficient way of collecting this data. While it’s important to gather data on how your customers or clients are using a product or service, your focus should extend beyond that. Consider the entire experience, from what users make of your website to how customers rate your customer service. If you provide a great product, but your website is difficult to use, or you have a streamlined system for pushing users to buy your service, but can’t provide a consistent level of quality customer service, then your business and bottom line will suffer.

Conducting a survey can give you valuable feedback. Consider collecting this feedback at multiple stages. Don’t just use survey data to inform changes to your product or service, but also ask users for their thoughts before you roll out an important update or make a major change. This way, you can ensure it aligns with what your customers really want.

Identify How Customers Are Finding You

Using online marketing tools to identify how your customers are finding you can be very useful. Unfortunately, they can also be inaccurate. A customer may have first visited your site via social media, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where they first heard of you — they may have received a flyer or brochure, or been recommended to you via a friend or colleague.

With word of mouth referrals contributing up to 50% of total conversions, which can’t be measured effectively with analytics tools, it’s impossible to expect an online tool to provide you with accurate data.

Identifying the first point of engagement correctly is crucial to success. Without knowing this, you risk overvaluing — and, therefore, overspending on — certain channels that won’t yield the results you’re looking for. So how can you ensure you have the right strategy? It’s simple: ask your audience how they found you directly.

Validate Your New Product or New Service Idea

There is a reason why you are a startup: You’re at the starting point of your business. But eventually, you will want to add more products and enhance your services (or even introduce new ones). Developing new services, processes and products can be costly — both in terms of time and money. Therefore, it’s paramount that you validate your ideas. Do you know the leading reason that many startups fail? It’s not cash flow — that comes in second. It’s because there is a lack of need for the product or service in the market.

What better way is there to validate the market need than by asking the people who are already using your current products and/or services? Getting them involved in the product development process not only provides you with useful feedback, but it also builds trust with your existing customer or client base by demonstrating that you value their opinions. This, in turn, leads to increased loyalty.

Optimise Your Conversion Funnel and Improve Customer Retention

It doesn’t matter how great your products are or how slick your website looks if users aren’t converting. Making a sale is the end goal of every business. Surveys let you find out exactly why users decided to convert. Consider asking your customers what made them decide to hit that purchase button and why they chose you over a competitor. You may even be able to establish a USP you wasn’t aware of, which you can use in your promotional materials to drive even more customers down your sales funnel.

But it’s not just about customer acquisition. For long-term success, you need to build up a base of loyal customers who keep on coming back to you. Customer retention is crucial — it’s much easier and cheaper to convert an existing customer than it is to acquire a customer who has never heard of your brand. Take advantage of surveys to ask your customers what you can do to improve your service — consider offering a discount code or other incentive in exchange for their valuable feedback, and secure a sale, all while you’re collecting valuable data.

Collaborate with Specialists and Use the Right Tools for Maximum Efficiency

When it comes to running a survey to improve your business, it’s not enough to just have the right ideas. You need to work with the right people and use the right tools. A cheap market research tool may seem like the quick and easy option, but you’ll end up wasting time and money on data that may very well be useless. Instead, choose a market research company that knows the ins and outs of market research. A company with the right experience and knowledge will design, programme and run your startup’s survey and can operate bespoke survey panels to ensure you get relevant, high-quality data from engaged and qualified respondents.