Get Personal with Your Customers : 5 Best Practices to Make Your Survey More Engaging

A recent survey shows that almost 60% of retailers do not have sufficient reliable data to personalize their campaigns or ensure that their targeted marketing efforts are successful.

So how do you get “personal” with your consumers?

Talk to them, engage with their experiences; simply stated you need to understand them. And to help you with this you need specific data relating to your consumer behavior. Their habits, emotions, and preferences should be at the epitome of your strategy.

Retailers, use a multitude of processes to access these informations. You may use loyalty campaigns, freebies and lot more (almost anything your marketing team would tell you to do). Nevertheless, with all this effort, the base methodology is still the same. A response collection activity. Backed by Data Analytics and real-time responses. Such surveys help gather information about a consumer’s personal interests and opinions and thereby help target your sales effort.

However, such surveys alone, lately have not quite supported your targeting efforts. This is mainly because they have not been receiving the response that they were expected to generate. Customers and marketing environments are changing as we speak. Here are Five best practices to keep your surveys engaging and productive.

1. Keep the survey short and simple – It is human nature to always want things quick and easy. Hence, It is better to have a short survey that focuses on a single objective rather than one that covers multiple objectives. The reason is that long surveys are often ignored or left halfway through by the consumers. Short and simple surveys generally have higher response rates.
2. Keep the questions short – You need to keep your questions short and to the point. It is better to ask for one piece of information in one question. Or else, the customers are likely to lose focus or get confused. It is also better not to have too many possible answers for any given question.
3. Avoid jargon – You may know what it means maybe even your manager, but not necessarily your customer, You need to, as far as possible, avoid words that are industry-specific or technical. The consumers need not be familiar with such words. As mentioned before, it is always better to keep it simple.
4. Use close-ended questions whenever possible – Close-ended questions are easier to answer as well as analyze. Hence, as much as possible it is better to use close-ended questions involving answers like yes/no or a rating scale etc.
5. Consider offering incentives – A recent research by a survey firm showed that offering incentives enhanced response rates by 50% on an average. People are always likely to do something if they are appreciated for it. Hence, here we seek to appreciate them for having spent their time on our survey, by offering some kind of incentive.

These are some of the points that can help you roll out an effective survey.Technology also plays an important aspect of your response collection. As technology has become mainstream in almost every industry, consumer feedback is another area where the retail industry can make use of technology. Using a Survey app, like Reach Out can ease the whole process of feedback, both for the consumer as well the retailer. It makes feedback a more engaging experience than regular surveys.