Whether you interact directly with clients on a day to day basis in Toronto or elsewhere, or whether you work with clients through email or online platforms, thriving in business means meeting and exceeding their desires and expectations.
Surveying your clients is a digital marketing strategy, that is a great way to strengthen the relationship with them and can contribute to increased revenues for your company.
4 benefits of surveying your clients:
- Gauging overall client satisfaction, and discovering clients where there opportunities for improvement.
- Uncovering opportunities for new business. As your client’s business grow and change, they may require new or different services from your company.
- Learning about what your clients would like to know more about (struggling to find topics for blogs? Let your clients tell you what they’d like to know more about).
- Informing your clients about services that you offer, but that they may not know about, or have forgotten. Questions like: “Would you like to know more about these services (checkbox list)” are great for this.
But, how do you know what hopes lie deep in your clients’ minds? The answer may seem obvious: you ask questions! However, considering that your clients are, likely, multitasking and busy, you need to engage them strategically. Before preparing a marketing plan, a well designed survey may be the best starting point to discover and go beyond what your clients dream. Here are five things that we at SeeThrough Web consider essential when designing client focused surveys.
1. Have a clear goal in mind.
When designing your client survey, know what you want to accomplish. Are you looking to improve products, create new ones or to increase your conversion rate?
The clearer your goal, the better will you be able to ask the right questions.
Also, remember to make your goals measurable. For example, if you know that you want to increase sales or increase traffic to your website, be sure to know what success will look like and how you will measure it.
2. Keep things simple.
Keeping your client surveys simple, short and to the point will ensure that your busy clients actually become and remain interested in starting and completing your survey.
Asking questions that are short and to the point will minimize confusion and will allow your client to answer them in a shorter amount of time.
3. Keep your clients’ options open.
Open the options for your clients by designing a survey that combines both open-ended and close-ended questions.
Close ended questions provide set answers for your survey participants, giving you an easy tool to categorize their answers. However, they do not allow you to really get at what is on their mind, what they think about an issue or why they tend toward a particular behaviour.
Open-ended questions will require some more work on your part as it may harder to categorize and quantify them. They will, however, facilitate a deeper conversation and your participant can really tell you what they think and why.
4. Maximize website engagement.
Adding relevant and optional web surveys to some website pages may be a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of your business.
For example, after a client leaves a pricing page, you may want to know what things they value most and how they would prefer to spend their resources.
The surveys themselves may also be a good way to bring traffic back to your website. If you use an e-mail marketing campaign to recruit client survey participants, you may want to add related links for them to visit your website or blog for more information on a topic or product.
5. The good and the things that could be better.
It is important to design your survey questions looking for specific information regarding how your client sees themselves, especially what they feel they are good at, what their concerns or challenges are and what questions they have lingering.
Getting your client to tell you what they excel at can have many potential benefits. First of all, by finding this out, you will know the strengths that your team will be building upon.
For example: a client who has never used search engine optimization (SEO) will need a different type of coaching and support than one that had already begun to implement their own SEO strategies.
Asking these questions can also strengthen your relationship with your client since they will know that you acknowledge that they have skills and talents to bring to the table. Asking a client what their concerns or challenges are opens the door for you to engage with them and to use your expertise to put their minds at ease. They will know that you too have very much to bring to your professional relationship, always with their success in mind.
Designing strategic surveys takes much more than coming up with questions, it takes some focus, thought and simplicity. Contact us to find out more about this exciting way to strengthen your client relationships and increase your business revenues.