Smart Survey System: Your Guide To Using Surveys To Grow Your Business

Surveys are going to be a very important tool in your marketing arsenal. Problem is, many people don’t use them to their full effectiveness.

At the basic level, surveys are used to get feedback on things. That’s pretty obvious. But there are actually some other ways of looking at your usage of surveys that we are going to talk about in this guide.

Coming up in this guide, we’re going to discuss things such as:

How to phrase your questions in order to pull out valuable and actionable material you can use in your blogging and marketing
How to pull out emotional responses
Different usage applications for surveys

So, let’s dive right in…

In This Guide…

Select A Survey Tool

How do you actually run a survey? I am not going to spend too much time on this because it is actually pretty darn simple.

There are commercial tools out there you can use. Personally, I think they’re rather expensive and for that reason most people won’t use them. SurveyMonkey is one of them.

There also the Google Forms/Spreadsheets approach. Built right into your Google account for free as part of Google Drive. Essentially, you would design a form for people to fill out and the responses for that form would be entered into a spreadsheet.

My preferred method is to use a forms plugin for WordPress and do the whole survey right in-house. This is the digitally sovereign way to do it.

Personally, I would use Fluent Forms. Plus, as a user of FluentCRM, this means I can even use the survey responses to add segmentation to a subscriber’s CRM profile. That’s pretty handy.

One thing to keep in mind, too, is that you don’t have to use a special survey tool to call it a survey. Remember, a survey is essentially any feedback medium you are using from your audience. For instance, your own blog comments would be an informal method of survey (if you are using blog comments). You could also put a question form in place of your comments as I do on this blog. Every response is a form of survey.

Another method is to use simple email. Ask your email subscribers a question and ask them to answer your with a simple email reply. This is something you could do in any email you send to your list. Plus, when they reply back to your emails, it helps email deliverability.

The Preferred Question Type

You’re going to have the option to use many different types of questions as you design your survey. You’ll be able to use radio buttons (for single-choice questions), checkboxes (for multiple choice), rankings and much more. You have a lot of options.

The most informative – and preferred – question type is the free-form answer.

Ask them a question and give them a textarea where they can type in any response they want.

The other question types can be useful when you just want to put respondents into nice little groups… or to collect segmentation information. It is much more automated that way. However, the freeform entry can give you far more real data.

Open entry questions allow them to answer you in whatever way they want – in THEIR OWN WORDS. And that is a very important thing when it comes to marketing. You want to find out how they communicate their reactions. And when you couple that with the emotional questions that you are going to ask them, you got yourself a powerful combination.

You will use the WORDS they use in their feedback to:

Learn their emotional tone on the topic (important in marketing)
Learn the phrasing that THEY use to communicate these things to themselves (their vocabulary on the topic may be very different than your’s)
Learn answers you would have never thought of.

The whole purpose of the survey is to learn what is on their mind. A pre-written answer where all they can do is pick confines them to what’s on YOUR mind. Except for certain applications, that completely defeats the point of the survey.

Lastly, knowing the language and emotion they use to communicate the answers is important for matching your content to them, positioning future offers better, etc.

Using Survey To Gain Content Ideas

One of the most common uses of survey is to get content ideas. This is the kind of survey that is good to always have “on”. You could run it to your existing subscriber-base as a one-time event, but it is more useful when it is set up to be evergreen and the responses just come in as a steady flow.

Some ideal survey locations would be:

On the “thank you” page immediately after somebody opts into your email list. This is a superb place to find out why they subscribed and what they’d like to see from you. This will help you deliver more value to your email list.
On your autoresponder sequence. So, in one of the automatic emails your email subscribers get, you could email them a survey.
On the “thank you” page after somebody BUYS something from you. A great place to find out what made them buy, how they found you, what they most want to achieve from your product, etc.

The beauty of those placements is that the survey takes place after the person has done something (subscribed, purchased, etc.). And psychologically, people are way more likely to do something if they’ve taken the first step already. In other words, they are more likely to give you meaningful feedback BECAUSE they have done a meaningful action first.

Some sample questions (obviously phrased toward my own market, so you can adjust accordingly):

What are you most looking to get from me by being a subscriber to my list and my blog?
Why did you subscribe to my blog?
What would you like to learn about blogging and online business next?
What would you like me to write about for YOUR benefit?
“What is your biggest fear or frustration when it comes to online business and blogging?”
“What are you trying to get most out of this?”
“What is your ideal outcome?”

The first two questions are pretty to the point. You just want to find out what they want from you in the future. And then you can obviously deliver upon that.

If you have a lot of people asking a similar concept and you’ve already written about it, then you can use that as feedback as well. For instance:

Create even more content about it. In other words, elaborate.
Take the content you’ve already written about that topic, expand upon it, then leverage it into new content types like lead magnets, videos, podcast episodes, etc.
Build new emails into your email followup sequence which highlights your existing content on the topic.
Group content on that topic into a GUIDE page on your blog and link to that guide in your blog’s sidebar.

In other words, if people are asking for content that you’ve already made, then they either want more or they don’t know about it. So, fix that. 🙂

Now, the last two questions are pretty much going for emotions. Question that use emotional language can get emotional reactions. Words such as “fear”, “frustrated”, “exited”, “love” are words that can be used to get how people feel about things.

Using Survey To Gather Feedback & Testimonials

You always want to collect as much feedback from your customers and audience as you can. You want to be basically a “sponge” for feedback. This means you want to be asking for feedback in all of the places where it would make sense to do so.

So one of the things that you can do is place surveys into your products – even free products after they have been consumed. You can place surveys at the end of courses, inside of your lead magnets, in your newsletter… anywhere that makes sense.

The survey could be specific to what they just finished or it could be something general such as “How am I doing?” or “Is there anything else I can help you with?” It could be very informal but this type of feedback is really powerful and you can get a lot of great information.

One of the benefits of using a WordPress-focused forms plugin (like Fluent Forms) is that you can build hidden fields into your survey form that contain the exact location where that form was embedded. This way you always know the context of their feedback and what it was about…. even if you’re using the same form in multiple locations across your site.

Gathering Actual Testimonials

Simple feedback is one thing. Testimonials are quite another.

The thing about a testimonial is that you want it to be very clear, rather succinct… and basically you want it to be ready to be published and used in your marketing. Even the people who have the best things to say about you and your business will often not voluntarily offer testimonials. Or when they do, they are just rather long and laborious and not ideal to be published.

You can use survey forms to gather testimonials. And when built right into your products (as a course unit, or as an automatic email which goes out to customers after a period of time), you will get testimonials.

They key is to provide guidance. Now, what do I mean by that?

In plain language, you are giving them sample testimonials to go by. You present 1 or more great testimonials that are written in the way that you want them and you provide them right inside the survey for the respondent to go by. It obviously doesn’t mean they have to copy it, but it accomplishes two things:

It shows that they are not alone in leaving you great testimonials and feedback. It is a kind of bandwagon effect.
If shows them how best to write their testimonials.

You will get much better testimonials in your surveys this way.

You can even use conversational forms in some cases for testimonials. Fluent Forms supports conversational forms. They are like “fill in the blank” forms where you give them some pre-written statements and they fill in the parts specific to them. This is another method to provide guidance on how to write an effective testimonial.

Now, what if you don’t yet have any testimonials? Well, you can write them yourself. Literally just write what you think would be a great testimonial for your own product. The very obvious caveat here is to NEVER, EVER claim that the testimonial is real. You are simply providing it as a template. A lot of people just don’t know how to write usable testimonials, despite their best intentions. You’re giving them a guide.

Using Survey To Find Out Why They’re Leaving

It is a fact of life on the Internet that people will sometimes want to get a divorce, so to speak. In our own context, this could mean they wish to unsubscribe from your list, cancel a membership, or request a refund.

And knowing WHY they are leaving is insanely important. It might not always do much to float your ego, but it is data you NEED to improve what you’re doing and raise your game.

They key here is to ask them to fill out an exit survey.

There are many ways you can ask people to fill out an exit survey, such as:

A screen they’re redirected to when they cancel their membership.
An automatic email which goes out to them after they’ve canceled a subscription.
An auto email which goes out if they receive a refund.
In some email CRMs, you can even ask people why they unsubscribed.

It is important to remember that just because somebody cancelled or received a refund doesn’t make them NOT a buyer. They still bought it! But, now they’re leaving. You definitely want to know why so that you can find areas for improvement.

My suggestion is to tag people as “Cancelled” or “Refunded” when this occurs. Then, set up an automated email sequence that directly sends them an exit survey.

The questions for this kind of survey are quite straightforward.

“Why did you cancel your subscription to XXXXXX?”
“How can we improve?”
“What could we do which may get you to consider re-joining us some time in the future?”

My personal recommendation: Don’t use the survey as a sly means to try to convince them to change their mind. They’re already leaving. You just want to know why.

Also, I would make the page which embeds your exit survey friendly and welcoming. You may possibly even record a quick video to encourage them to fill out the survey. Make it feel welcoming and never make them feel wrong about cancelling or requesting a refund. Your job is to leave a good impression on their way out the door.

Using Survey To Get Product Ideas

The key to any product selling well is product/market fit. You need the thing being offered to be tailored to what the target market needs and wants. If there’s a mismatch, it isn’t going to sell well at all. All the cute conversion tactics in the world on your sales page isn’t going to matter at all if there’s a fundamental problem with product/market fit.

Surveys are a fantastic method for finding out what people need and want.

I highly recommend that you begin using surveys as early as possible on your website. You don’t want to waste your time crafting offers for products nobody wants.

But, how can you create a survey that is basically asking people what they want to buy? It feels awkward, right?

Need To Be A Little Strategic

You do need to become strategic on how you approach this or they may not give you a straight answer. For instance, you sometimes see the following:

People will see that you’re surveying in order to make a paid product and they’ll just clam up. They’ll be thinking: “I don’t really care because you are just going to try to extract money from my wallet for this answer”.
People will SAY they’re interested in a particular product idea. You then go and do the work. Then, when push comes to shove, they don’t actually buy the thing.

The first thing here is that we need to survey them in such a way that the price barrier is REMOVED from their thinking. We want product ideas without the money barrier coming in at this point. The right offer is a far more important thing than the price point. With the right offer, the price tag is a lot easier to determine.

Secondly, always keep in mind that the ONLY true measure of interest is them actually TAKING ACTION. When it comes to a paid product, the only true measure is whether or not they’ll actually give you money for it. Take any survey feedback that says “Oh yeah, I’d buy that!” with a grain of salt. The only true survey feedback in that regard is whether they actually do buy it.

Now, of course, we don’t want to spend a lot of time making something they won’t buy. So, we need to think about the process for this. And that’ll involve some survey as well.

The Questions For Product Idea Surveys

A really good question might be:

What free product would you love for me to create just for you?

Free, you ask? Yes, the point there is simply to remove the price barrier from the equation. You want them to just tell you what they’d simply LOVE to have, but without tainting it with any emotion about price.

The Co-Creation Process

A great process to find out what your people need and want – and verify it as you go – is to use a co-creation process. The idea here is that you’re creating a product in baby steps and then going back to your people for feedback along the way. In this way, you are almost partnering with them to create the perfect solution that they want.

You want to start this off by removing all price considerations. Start off with an email or a blog post which simply states that you’ve been meaning to create something to give away and you could really use their input on it. You’re essentially saying:

“I want to give you something for free… I have some ideas but I want to really just make sure I have got it right so I am asking for your input.”

From a marketing perspective, this builds tremendous goodwill with your readers.

Now, in those requests for free product ideas, you begin to look for common answers, ideas and topics. Summarize them and then decide on your top option.

Next, before you create anything at all, you go back to your audience and VERIFY. Essentially, survey them again. Say something like:

“Hey, thanks for the survey; I got a lot of great input from you guys. I think what it is you guys that most want is __________. Is this correct? And if not, let me know.”

Doesn’t have to be those exact words, of course. 🙂

The response from this verification survey will accomplish two things:

You’ll have their help in really fine-tuning the idea so that you are REALLY pin-pointing what they want.
You’re getting them to take a proactive role in the CREATION of the product. And from a marketing perspective, this makes them FAR more likely to take you up on the real product down the road.

The next step? Be a man (or woman) of your word and make that thing for free. Yes, for free. Now, the key here is that you’re not making a full-on product. This won’t be some multi-module course or anything. This free product should indeed be something very valuable to them, but not so much that you are screwing yourself over by making it and giving it away.

Now, give this freebie to them. They asked for it. And, you sit back and gauge the reaction to it. Make them opt in for it using a squeeze page.

If the reaction is proven, then you have the makings of a paid product right there. That is a form of verification. So, now you can proceed with making a more complete solution and that’ll be one you offer for money. And, ideally, I would PRE-SELL it. Offer the more complete solution with a price point and see what percentage buy. If the numbers are good, go make it. That’s the ultimate verification right there. If the numbers don’t justify it, then use survey to go back to them and tweak the offer again.

In the end, NEVER create a product to sell without verification that there’s a demand for it and they want it.

You need to be using survey for this.

Using Survey To Figure Out Your Price

Figuring out your price for your product is usually a touchy subject. You could just throw a price tag out there and see what happens. But, you can use more direct surveys to get some indication of price point. It isn’t as difficult as you might think.

Now, you probably don’t want to come right out and ask, “What would you be willing to pay?”. It’s just too blunt. Their shields go up really fast. Plus, it doesn’t mean very much anyway, since the only true test would be them actually paying what they said.

What we’d prefer to do is get at their price tolerance through some strategically worded questions. Two examples might be:

“What would you expect to pay for this?”
“If you were offering this product yourself, would would you charge for it?”

The idea behind these questions is to have them talking price while trying to remove themselves as the one doing the buying. To have them think objectively about it.

A completely different approach would be to ask them questions to gauge their personal buying habits on other products. The point is to get an idea how liberal they are with their money. For instance…

How many times do you eat out during an average week/month?

You could ask the same on other non-essentials a person may buy (i.e. Starbucks). The point would be to get a gauge of their level of spending. Plus, you can equate your price point later to these items that are very real to them to put it in perspective (i.e. “this product will only cost you the average cost of one meal out”.)

Another option would be based on what is called Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitive Meter, which is a marketing technique created to determine price sensitivity. Questions would be on the order of:

At what price would you consider the product to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? (Too expensive)
At what price would you consider the product to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good? (Too cheap)
At what price would you consider the product starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it? (Expensive/High Side)
At what price would you consider the product to be a bargain—a great buy for the money? (Cheap/Good Value)

Source: Wikipedia

With questions like that, you could even use little number sliders if your survey system supported such a thing. The questions themselves do the heavy lifting here, so open-form entry isn’t really needed. We really just want the numbers when gauging using the Van Westerndorp questions.

Using Survey To Profile Your Customer and Audience

In order to make your best products and even just to make your best content for your blog, you need to not look at your readers as this big collective, anonymous group… but instead as a group of real people. It is a group of individuals.

The better that you understand the basic personality of the people you are talking to, the more effective you can be with your communications to them. Your ability to bond with your audience as well as to market to them has a lot to do with your ability to communicate to them.

It seems really simple on the surface, but the subject of communication actually goes a lot deeper than just talking. It really comes down to actual duplication on the other end. The person that you are speaking to or writing to needs to have a full comprehension of not only what you say – but the vibe, the feeling – everything.

Now, the way to do that is to communicate to them with certain words and language that they have full reality with. And the best way to do that is to communicate it to them in the way they would communicate it to themselves. You want to get into their head and you want to know what bothers them. And you want to find out how THEY communicate this to themselves. If they were thinking inside their own head about it, what words would they use?

This is why open-entry questions are so important. In the answers that you get from people, you want to look for common emotional phrases. But, of course, you need to ask the kinds of questions in your survey that will bring out these responses, too.

What is your biggest fear or frustration when it comes to ________?

If you think the word “fear” is too much there, then you could tone it down. For instance…

What is your biggest obstacle?

or…

What is that thing that really gets under your skin when it comes to ________?

The whole idea here is that we’re asking them to look at the barriers and things that are stopping them from what they want, and we’re asking them to react.

A followup question might be:

What might happen if you are not able to __________?

Here we’re diving into their fears of not accomplishing it.

Now when you get feedback from things like this, you can learn alot about your audience. For instance, here’s a screenshot of survey results from a survey I ran many years ago leading up to the Blog Masters Club program.

As you can see, I was getting some really good emotional responses (underlined in red). Things like:

Fear of not being good enough
Fear of being perceived as illegitimate.
Fear of failure
Overwhelm
Not feeling unique in any way.

All powerful stuff. And in terms of product ideas (in green), it is clear that technical barriers are a big frustration for people.

So, depending on the kinds of questions you ask, you can derive a lot of data about your audience and create a very solid customer profile.

Using Survey To Further The Sales Process

Let’s move just a little further on this…

In sales and copywriting, there is a classic formula which goes like this…

Problem -> Agitate -> Solve

The idea is simple:

Make them really aware of the problem.
Bring them to the point that they feel a need to do something about. They have a need for change.
Present your solution.

Many of the questions above go to the heart of the first step: problem. We’re asking them about their frustrations and the things getting in their way. Their are other questions you can ask in order to agitate the problem and make it clear that there is something there to be handled. Then, there are questions that discuss solutions.

Some questions that could get them to envision solutions might be:

“If I were able to help you solve ____________, what would that be like for you?”
“If we were able to solve the problem of ________, what would that mean for you? How would things change?”

These questions help guide them from a focus on their problems to potential solutions. They also associate YOU with their solutions in their mind.

Here’s a simple 3-question setup that walks one through problem, agitate, solve:

What frustrates you about ________?
What bothers you most about that?
If I were able to help you solve those problems, what would _______ be like?

#1 gets them into the problem. #2 agitates it. #3 shifts to the solution.

Another 3-step formula is BE – DO – HAVE. The be-do-have trio has been talked about in personal development circles many times. I believe it has its origins in the ancient Vedic Hymns, but it also shows up in Hindu, Buddhism, among other places. You can actually base a set of survey questions around these 3 components. For instance:

What makes ________ unhappy?
What needs to be done to address this?
What would happen if this were resolved?

You can see how this easily parallels the problem-agitate-solve model.

“What makes _____ unhappy?” So, if you were in the tomato gardening niche, you could ask “What makes tomato gardeners unhappy?” Another twist I could ask my own audience might be, “What is currently making bloggers frustrated?” This is the BE part of the formula, and is excellent fodder for getting emotional language from them.

“What needs to be done to address this?” This is the DO part of it. Gets the person to propose solutions and think about actions that need to be done.

“What would happen if this were resolved?” The HAVE part of it. What would be the result of handling this issue? What would they have because of it?

From a marketing perspective, surveys like this are great.

How To Analyze The Results

As should be VERY clear at this point, open-entry questions are the best kind of answer format. You’ll get the most data that way. Of course, this also means you could end up with a TON of reading to do to analyze those results.

I encourage you to embrace the opportunity. You’re going to be far more effective in working with your target market the better you understand them. You cannot do that by keeping them at a distance. These surveys you’re doing are communication from real life human being to YOU and you should treat it accordingly.

Here’s the general method for analyzing the survey:

For each question, read the survey entries individually.
As you go through them, begin to classify them into “buckets” of similarity. For instance, if a particular problem point keeps coming up repeatedly (even in different words), you can group them together and just keep a tally of how many times it is brought up.
Highlight emotional language as you go through.
Also highlight the exact words they used to describe the problem. Look for repeated use of the same phrasing.

As you do this, you can use a spreadsheet or any other medium that works for you.

Some of the fancier survey tools (i.e. SurveyMonkey) have the ability to do word analysis on the responses and create what is essentially a tag cloud based on the entries. The words used most often will appear larger, and the less common words will be smaller. This is a great way to quickly pinpoint words which are coming up repeatedly within the answers.

If you’re not using a tool like that, there are options such as TagCrowd. Here’s what I got when I plugged 28 random responses to a survey into TagCrowd:

I recommend that you store not only your analysis results of every survey you do, but also all of the “raw” entries that way you archive every single thing people said. It is great for record-keeping and you can always go back and reference it again.

When you set up a form in Fluent Forms for your surveys, I recommend that you keep all of the entries. Do not use Fluent’s built-in ability to purge entries or trim after a certain period of time. I recommend you keep those entries and perhaps even export them for safe-keeping off site.

Using Your Survey Results To Make More Money

Now, the entire point of all that we’ve talked about here is to gather data about your audience so that you can USE it. You want to use it to:

Create better content
Create things they will buy
Increase conversions
Create sales offers which are much more finely tuned to the target audience

So, make sure that you maintain the mindset that your survey results are ACTIONABLE.

Always ask yourself:

What am I going to do right now as a result of this survey data?

For instance:

Did you derive any testimonials that you can now format and place into your marketing materials?
Did you gain some great ideas for future blog posts?
Did you learn more about the problems your people are experiencing that you can tailor a product around solving?
Did you get actionable data you can use to adjust your pricing upward or, yes, even downward?
Did you learn more about the emotions of your avatar that you can integrate into your sales offer to hit the right chord with them and really resonate?

Remember this…

Survey Results = Market Intelligence

You will be lightyears ahead of where you are now as you use survey more and more. The more you know about who you are serving, the better you can serve them.

You should never be left guessing.

Simply ask.

Got A Question?

Have a question about this article? Need some help with this topic (or anything else)? Send it in and I’ll get back to you personally. I think that’s better than a blog comment. 😇

Smart Survey System: Your Guide To Using Surveys To Grow Your Business

In This Guide…

Select A Survey Tool

The Preferred Question Type

Using Survey To Gain Content Ideas