In terms of efficiency and costs, a very useful way of getting more information about clients or potential clients who are on your subscribers’ list is to send questionnaires via email.
Nevertheless, some marketers ignore these tools whereby the product or service which they promote may be radically improved.

So, why is it necessary to run a survey?

Do you want to develop a powerful relationship with exisiting clients and prospective clients? Give them an opportunity to interact with your product. They will supply the best answer which you can use to improve your product.
Surveys are tools that you will definitely need, if you’re a marketer who thinks in terms of sales and wants to create an experience in relationship with your brand. You will see that you need surveys:
- To learn more about your clients’ preferences;
- To be able to give them exactly the product or service that they are interested in and that they need;
- To find out what makes them unhappy;
- To improve your communication with them;
- To improve your products and services.

Help your clients and subscribers get a voice, let them tell you about their preferences and whether they are happy with your services or not. Most importantly, you have to listen to them and take action accordingly. And questionnaires are a good opportunity that you can use to get to know what they really want.

If you listen to them and take their answers in consideration, then you get to have every piece of information you need so that you can satisfy everybody’s needs.

At the same time, clients can be unhappy with your products or services in several cases. Just don’t wait and think “why, oh why?”. Find the reason yourself. Ask your clients directly, by means of specific questions that you should insert in the questionnaires you send and let them suggest and complain.

Set your objectives

Before sending out the questionnaire, set your objectives. Analyse the problems that your product may have. Think how you can solve the problems by sending a questionnaire:
- You can improve the quality of services and products;
- You can improve your communication with prospective/existing clients.

And you do that in order to build, in time, a solid relationship with them and retain them.
Given these premises, you can send the questionnaire to your client list and – based on the answers – the quality of your supply will increase.

Targeted surveys

Surveys can be designed so as to cover some specific types of services that you can offer. Surveys can be of various types, so that you can establish exactly your client’s satisfaction rate for every one of these services or products. Do you want to know how your clients perceive transportation services, repair shop services or how your personnel treat them? Find out what they think, send them questionnaires via email.

Divide your database in categories, depending on the clients and services that they use. You can design a questionnaire for kind of service you offer, to figure out what the satisfaction rate is.

For example, if 20 persons used one of your services during one single day, they should get shortly after that a follow-up questionnaire to investigate their satisfaction rate. In this way, the way in which you evaluate your services can make you stand out against all other competitors, because every time a client needs your services, your request his opinion in order to see his satisfaction rate. This will eventually help you improve your services, by either incentivising your employees who treat your clients well, or by correcting the problems, if any.

If, generally speaking, many marketers consider that satisfaction surveys are punctual events, the solutions which White Image can provide let you analyse the satisfaction over a longer span of time. This is how you get to use two coordinates: (1) you will know those clients who have not changed the way in which they assessed one of your services and who are always unhappy, therefore you’re running a risk to lose them, and (2) you can use the satisfied clients as opinion leaders.


Inactive clients can pose other problems

At some point, you may have to deal with persons who are registered in your database as clients, but they have not purchased anything for a long while. You can use surveys to find out why they have not bought from you for a while. On top of that, to talk them into filling out your survey, you can offer them a discount for a certain product/service as a thank-you token for having answered your questions.

Mistakes to avoid in surveys

1. One first mistake that any marketer should avoid is never ignore the importance of a questionnaire. One of your clients may have been unhappy for one of your services and has not had a chance to voice that. That is why you should be one step ahead of your client, giving him an opportunity to assess your product, even though you may not want to know that answer, before he starts complaining against you or before losing that client.

2. When you design your survey, just think of the time your recipients have on their hands. They should not need more than 2 or 3 minutes to fill out a questionnaire. In general, closed yes/no questions are advisable, but they should still have the chance to describe their reasons of un-satisfaction. Don’t make the mistake to ask only questions that will not clarify your client’s satisfaction rate.

3. Word your questions carefully. Do not make it hard for your clients to understand what you mean. Questions have to clear and to the point. “To what extent the information you got was accurate and complete?”, “How would you describe the quality of our repair services?”.

4. Don’t just send your questionnaire out: your clients should know what your email is about and why they got it. Before the actual questionnaire, which can be on a secondary page or within the body of the email too, just insert one paragraph to tell recipients what your questionnaire is about, how long it will take to fill it in and what the purpose of that questionnaire is.
5. If the interaction with your client is quite frequent, then you should avoid sending questionnaire too often. Try to find the best timing and spread your evaluation over a longer period of time, could be weeks or even months.

There is no golden rule that you can use to make a questionnaire run smooth. There is no “best timing” or “ideal frequency”. Everything depends on the targets you set and on the importance that you attach to your own services, which you do in order to satisfy and retain your clients.