Questions, questions, questions

There comes a time, perhaps even on a regular basis, that a small business owner gets stumped when thinking about what to do.

• “Are we still offering what customers want?”
  
• “Should I increase our product offerings?”
• “Do we need to lower our prices?” (<–Daft question! …see upcoming give-away)
• “Do they like what we do?”

…and so on.

But here’s the thing…

The answers you need are in your customer’s head

So just ask!

A great small business is one that understands you need to listen to your customers, because they have all the answers you need…

As I write this, here at ENHANCE we are busy conducting a quick survey of our customers who enrolled on our free Recession Buster Series. The idea of that mini-course was to provide killer business strategies to help small business growth in a recession.

We want to know – Is it working? …Have we provided the right business material? Are these small business marketing strategies liked by our members? Do people prefer videos, MP3′s or transcripts? (we’d given all three!) …and so on.

Their answers have immediately helped improve the product

We’re not even into day 3 of collecting the results and already it is easy to see what we need to do to make what we offer even better.

There are comments I never expected – even more intriguingly, some of the areas people are highlighting as ‘favourite content’ I would never have guessed!

To put it simply – Their answers are solid gold for me and ENHANCE.

…So, how long did this take to do?

From start to finish the survey took only 15mins to create

Seriously. Having decided to do the survey, within 15mins not only was the survey created but every customer of the Recession Buster Series had been informed.

(in fact, we got the first response just 10mins after that!)

So if you want to discover what your customer is thinking, to find out if you are marketing a small business in a way that gets results, then you need to do this…

Seven quick steps to survey success

Okay, here’s a quick few pointers to get you going. Quick, simple and easy…

1. Have a mailing list of clients – if you’ve been using something like Aweber (click HERE for details), then you’ll have this. If not, use your customer database and link it to your email software. (Don’t know how? …well find a techie who does!)
2. Decide your questions – What do you REALLY want to know from your customers? I suggest you maintain a focus for your survey. For example, we didn’t ask all of our clients about every aspect of ENHANCE. We only asked those who had been on Recession Buster Series what they thought of that particular free mini business course.
3. Create questions which get the best quality of answer – This is not a ‘happy clapping’ exercise where you force customers to give positive feedback because you only asked positive-framed questions! We’re talking about getting USABLE data that allows you to improve your business. The website I am about to suggest allows you to have multiple answers, choices, scales, comments, etc …you name it, it has the flexibility to collect the information you need.
4. Create survey – We recently used Survey Monkey (click HERE for details) because it was quick and easy and FREE! You can also use something like ‘ASK‘ which has more options for how to control and place your survey (i.e. do you want to have it pop-up on your site after a certain activity, like a sale). I’ve arranged a $1 trial if you want to check it out HERE. Whatever way you choose, just follow instructions and in no time you’ll have your survey created
5. Add a thank-you – If your customers are going to go to the trouble of giving you information then least you can do is say thank you! It could be a special discount coupon, a free report, a 2-for-1 offer. There’s actually some sense in letting your customer know about the thank-you gift beforehand – for example: “Every customer who takes part in the survey gets a special report on XYZ, as our way of saying thank you”
6. Publish and promote your survey – Having compiled the questions, created an online introduction for your survey (see Survey Monkey and Ask for details), simply email your customers with a short email explaining the survey.
7. Analyse your results and make the changes – Needless to say, it will be a pointless exercise if having discovered all that great info you then do not bother to implement it!!

That’s it – the only additional notes I would add are:

• Don’t over do it! Seven or eight questions is enough. Any more and customers will be annoyed by the survey… which of course would be a crazy situation!!
• Consider emailing your customers a reminder if at first you don’t get enough responses. Any form of survey is always better when you have a good number of responses to consider. If you have only a few responses your data will likely not be representative of all your customers.

So…

Next time you are wondering about the best way to do something or how to fine tune your small business marketing strategies or how to keep the customers coming back for more,  just remember…

YOUR CUSTOMER HAS ALL THE ANSWERS YOU NEED!!!