How to Survey Your Customers and Prospects
Email Marketing - Justin Premick - February 12th, 2008 - Permalink
It’s tempting to ask your subscribers a laundry list of questions when they sign up to your list, isn’t it?
You want to know things like how they heard about you, what competitors they were looking at, what questions they have for you, do they want you to contact them by phone (and what’s their phone number?).
The trouble, as we’ve discussed before in several posts and in our web form webinar, is that the more information you ask for in a signup form, the fewer people fill it out.
So how do you learn more about your potential subscribers without driving them away?
Read on for ideas and a video.
Survey Customers and Prospects
The key to getting subscribers to tell you all about themselves is to be patient.
Start by building a relationship with them, and then, once they’re comfortable enough with you to do so, prompt them to tell you more.
One of the most popular ways to do this is by emailing a survey to your subscribers.
But Don’t Surveys Cost Money to Create and Send?
Up until just recently, I would have said “It depends.”
Some survey providers like SurveyMonkey offer limited free accounts, but typically survey providers do charge for their services.
However, that all changed the other day, making it easy for you to survey your customers and prospects.
So what changed?
Email Your Customers Surveys Using Google Docs and AWeber
If you’re not familiar with Google Docs, it’s a free online suite of word processing and spreadsheet software.
It’s a useful tool just for having spreadsheets handy from anywhere. But here’s where it gets interesting for email marketers.
Less than a week ago, they announced that you can create forms in your Google spreadsheets.
All you have to do is create a spreadsheet, set up a form, and email the link to your subscribers through AWeber — they’ll go to the survey, fill it out and you’ll automatically compile their responses!
How to Send a Survey Through AWeber: Watch a Short Video
To show you just how easy this is to do, I’ve recorded a quick video where I create a survey in Google Docs and email it through AWeber:
What Can You Email Surveys About?
Anything you want to know that can help you serve your customers and prospects (and market to them) better!
A couple ideas to get you started:
What Will YOU Survey Your Customers and Prospects About?
Share your ideas below!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
February 12th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Hi Justin,
I just watched your video even though my sound card isn’t working and even without the commentary this looks so simple and powerful. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I made the mistake of doing a survey by regular email last month and was expecting to get a responce from 100 or so subscribers. Instead I got over 950 responses. With seven questions in my survey it took me two weeks (a lot of late nights) to extract and compile the results into an Excel spreadsheet. With this new Google/Aweber combo it will all be done for me instantly. Wow! Thanks for sharing this. I will definitely be putting this to good use in the future.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Excellent video, thanks!
That’s really very easy, if one doesn’t mind relying on Google.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:37 am
That’s really cool. I’ve been thinking about surveying my main list for a while but had been put off by the time and cost involved. This looks like a fantastic solution.
February 13th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Hi,
This was great Justin. I never even thought of using google docs.
Great post.
February 13th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Hi,Justin,
Thank you very much.excellent advice and support.
February 13th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Amazing! Never knew these capabilities existed in Google. Thank you.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Awesome. Short and to the point, near perfect.
More like those please.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Wow! Who knew it would be that easy, great video!
February 13th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Phenomenal post.
It never ceases to amaze me how one can take advantage of the tools Google provides if they just look deep. I just wrote a post the other day on how you can get a company phone number, full mailbox, call transferring, forwarding, you name it using Google’s Grand Central — you guessed it. All for free.
Virtual PBX system for nothing. Now that’s business!
Justin, you got some good stuff here, Keep up the awesome work.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[…] Read the full article here. Share This Article With Others! These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
February 13th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I run a website for a restaurant and one of the key things needed is to find out what your customers feel about your business detail by detail. This was something I didn’t think I could do, and thanks to your service you pointed it out that not only could I do it, but it wouldn’t be as hard as I thought. Please keep showing these videos, you’re more than a service that sends out emails to people.
February 13th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
What a great time saving tool. Tips like these will pay for the entire Aweber service for many years. Keep digging for us.
February 13th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
very useful indeed… hope there’s a way to pre-insert the name/email fields though.
nonetheless, this beats the free version of surveymonkey hands down!!
thanks Justin.
February 13th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Thanks all for the great feedback - I’ll keep my eye out for more like these!
ck,
I was hoping for that too - it’d be nice to be able to add on to the query string, i.e. &column_a={!name}&column_b={!email} or something like that, but thus far I haven’t seen any evidence of support for that.
Might want to drop a line to Google Docs support requesting the ability to do that.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
[…] The article that caught my eye today was about creating surveys and using the AWeber tools to mail them out. […]
February 13th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Phenomenal video, so easy, and free!
It’s really amazing how far web design,list building, and the internet have some…makes some pretty high end (previously) things so easy to accomplish!
February 13th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
The video is great. A tadbit fast for me but I get the point. Thanks heaps.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Great take on an alternative to Survey Monkey. I love Survey Monkey, but its nice to have options.
Thanks!
February 14th, 2008 at 12:14 am
[…] However, if you’re just looking for a basic, quick & easy tool that’s free, Google Spreadsheet should do the trick! Thanks to Aweber for alerting me to this market research tip. […]
February 14th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Wow. What a great way to do survey’s. We currently use surveymonkey but this seems like a great way too.
Thanks.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Any opinion on using a survey at the same time as filling out a request for a catalog? How would that response be?
Also i was havin trouble viewing the video everyone was raving about. When I click on the Video link, nothing happens.
February 18th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Hi Florence,
I can’t say I’ve seen any studies on doing that. You might be able to combine the 2 by offering to include a coupon/discount code with the catalog if people fill out the survey as well.
If you’re having trouble viewing the video, please make sure you have the latest version of Flash player installed on your computer.
February 19th, 2008 at 8:30 am
My problem with Google–which, don’t get me wrong, offers some great things, and I use many of them–is that they maintain their databases and all information collected indefinitely. Their privacy policy is, well, scary. I’ll use them for things that don’t ask specific personal questions of my members (and even then, I have second thoughts), but for anything where I actually wanted personal responses or private information, I’d rather pay for a service.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Justin,
This is some powerful stuff!
In the past, doing even a short SurveyMonkey survey took me hours to complete.
I need to be able to ask questions easily of my list.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:47 am
[…] The last survey I did for one of my lists was done on SurveyMonkey. I put together ten multiple choice questions and one fill in the blank. It took me almost two hours to complete! […]
February 19th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Nice job Justin (and Google)!
If you want a bunch of anonymous surveys, this is a bargain-basement way to begin.
The real power of surveys, though, comes from how you slice and dice your message based on segmentation. Much better to use aweber as your survey tool (limited functionality and design notwithstanding), or to use another survey tool to send people to list A or B or C depending on their answers, so you can speak to them directly based on those answers.
For example, if I discover that my market consists of three main segments - people who don’t even have AdWords accounts, people who have an account and are spending less than $100/month, and power users whose online businesses depend on AdWords traffic - then I’ll want to send different types of follow up and broadcast messages to those lists.
Will Aweber allow me to import the Google Doc results into Aweber and connect it to existing subscribers based on the email address?
February 19th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Hi Howie,
Great point.
There’s not currently a way to update subscriber information in bulk (it can be done on a 1-by-1 basis at the "Leads" page of your account) but I can certainly see the value in being able to import those results to your subscriber records and will be in touch with our Development Team to discuss how we might be able to accommodate that.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I thought this video was awesome. It really provide a cool way for me to solve a particular problem I was having with certain social networking sites. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you
February 19th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Justin,
One thing we do, which bothers leads is we have their name, we have their email address already in our aweber system. But them we send them to a page where they have to enter it in again?
So, I would not have then enter their name and email again, (cause you know it already) unless there was a specific purpose for why you were collecting it, so you could send them something based on their unique responses, I suppose or address immediate needs they provide.
Kinda like Howie was saying.. if you could take these results back into aweber specific to the individual lead, that’d be sweet.
But as for Google adding these features, cool stuff. There is a lot of powerful collaboration stuff in Google Docs free… and it works awesome.
February 19th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Jeff,
Thanks for seconding Howie’s point on subscriber updating. I can definitely see the value in being able to more seamlessly drop those results back into AWeber.
As for not asking people for name/email, I totally agree with you, but unfortunately since Google Documents is an outside system, we can only pass them that information if they give us a way to integrate it into their form/spreadsheet (such as in the query string.)
For those just looking to get aggregate information rather than user-specific data, there’s really no need to ask for name/email at all - even though I happened to do so in my example.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I found this information just in the nick of time (and quite by accident!). I think it’s fab and the video was very helpful too. No need to worry with survey monkey or zoomerang now then
… and no more excuses for not putting a survey together! Thanks guys.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Could it get any cooler or easier than that? Well, maybe a little, but not much.
Why am I not using these tools more often? (that’s a rhetorical question)
February 20th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Wow! That is exactly what a small business marketing consultant like myself has been looking for. How often have I wanted to integrate google docs which I already use with an autoresponder function, this is easy to use and most of all time saving! Thanks Justin, keep bringing the tips!!!
February 21st, 2008 at 8:59 am
[…] It is very easy to do. All you have to do is create a spreadsheet in Google Docs, set up a form, and email the link to your subscribers through an AWeber broadcast message to the list of subscribers you want to learn more about — they’ll go to the survey, fill it out and you’ll automatically compile their responses! Here you can watch a video that shows you how easy it is to set up. The great thing about it is that you don’t have to spend days analyzing your replies. It is already done for you in the spread sheet. […]
March 23rd, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Don’t forget the power of BAIT! Sometimes customers don’t have time to respond to a survey and need that extra incentive to take action. I recently sent a survey and offered customers an extra gift if they take action. Needless to say I got a good response
March 27th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Absolutely awesome video and idea!
Thanks Aweber (and Google!)
ciao
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
[…] Re: How To Create Best Selling Products Every Time - Today, 03:18 PM Ricky, Awesome article! Thanks! Does anyone know if there’s an advantage to using Survey Monkey over something like combining Google’s "Office" tools and an autoresponder? The "Google + Autoresponder" method is explained in the video below: How to Survey Your Customers and Prospects - Email Marketing Tips on the AWeber Blog […]
April 10th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
This is soooo helpful! Thank you VERY much.
April 12th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I think that when doing on-line surveying it’s important to try to stick to tick boxes as much as possible rather than asking for text answers, as people are more likely to fill out tick boxes.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Hi Brad here.
Very timely video, and well done.
I am on the month trial right now and was about to give another service a try because of the importance I feel surveying your list has.
This feature combo fills my needs nicely.
By the way I asked your support staff on 4 occassions how I could do surveys throw AWeber, (and analize the data) and they did not know.
Only one out of the 4 knew about this tutorial.
Just a heads up.
Great training great service more bells and whistles than I can use, thanks for your efforts.
April 21st, 2008 at 8:22 am
Hi Brad,
Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll make sure everyone’s more aware of this survey method.
Glad to hear this is useful to you!
April 21st, 2008 at 9:34 am
hi Justin,
just want to mention that the survey worked like a charm. i was organising a MeetUp using MeetUp.com and the venue required personal particulars of all my 150+ attendees. without this tip that you have given us, it would have been a nightmare getting the information from so many people and compiling them.
needless to say.. the event last friday was a success :O)
once again… thanks!!
from sunny Singapore