respondent

By Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD

Many of you have asked us,

“how many people do you need for an accurate survey?”

The answer isn’t simple, but I can boil it down for you, with some basic principles that should meet the needs of most businesses.

First, what do you want to do with the data? What questions do you need to answer and how complex do you need to get?

• For certain kinds of data analysis—for example, if you want to do complex analysis and “cut” the data lots of different ways–you need at least several hundred respondents.

• If you just want to look at frequencies, though–in other words, if you just want to know how many people are interested in a particular product or service–100 or so might be enough.

Regardless of how many responses you get, the CRITICAL issue is what the “survey geeks” call representativeness.

• That means that you hope the characteristics of the people who respond, as a group, “look” as much as possible like the people in your customer base, as a whole.

• So you hope, for example, that you get roughly the same % of men or women that you have in the customer base, the same age distribution, and so on.

• One of the things we’re going to do in our new membership site is show you how to get this.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want to know about EVERYONE. Instead, you really want to know about a particular group, or segment of our customer base.

• Maybe you want to know if the frequent buyers are interested in a membership site.

• In that case, if you’ve already segmented your list (using surveys and data from your shopping cart) to segment your list properly, you can go in and select that group, then send the survey invitation JUST to that group.

• That’s just one of many reasons that segmentation is so powerful.

The bottom line? Anytime we do surveys, we want to get as high a percentage of customers as possible to respond.

And it comes back to the mantra we give you over and over: The best way to get good information from your customers is to show them “what’s in it for them.”

• You do that by giving them an incentive to take the survey (a free report and a chance to win something cool, such as an iPod, for example) and by
• showing them clearly, in the survey and the invitation, that we’ll use the information they give us to give them more value.

To get a quick, easy SYSTEM for doing surveys this way, go here.

By Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD

Lead generation is one of your most important jobs as a businessperson or marketer.

Today, we’ll show you how applications of surveys–quizzes and “Ask” campaigns–can be a huge tool in your arsenal, one that many of your competitors overlook.  And survey data can give you great background for generating leads, by giving you information about your target market so you can target content and messages.

NOTE:  We are NOT suggesting that you use market research as a lead source!  Any time you use a quiz or an Ask campaign to generate leads, you MUST have an opt-in form up front and you MUST make it clear that this is marketing, not market research.

Your market research can help you generate leads by informing you about your market and helping you target messages, offers, and content–but it can’t be a lead source, directly.

Here are 3 ways you can use survey s to generate leads.

1)  One of the most effective ways to generate leads is to use quizzes.  People love quizzes because they’re interactive, engaging, and FUN.  The key to making them work is to have 2 key parts:

• In the first section, ask them 4-5 multiple choice questions.  Show them their answer, the correct answer, and give them some valuable content telling them WHY it’s the correct answer.
• Then, in the second section, get information about skills, abilities, and needs, related to your product or service.
• Use that to give them a customized recommendation for your product or service or one that you’re selling as an affiliate.

You can find out more about how to put quizzes to work here.

2)  Put up a lead page or “squeeze page.”  If you don’t know how to do one easily, you can do what we do:  Use Traffic Geyser’s lead pages.  You can get a free trial here (full disclosure:  Mike is CEO of Traffic Geyser and I’m an affiliate).

On that lead page, ask your prospects to tell you their #1 question about the area your product, service, or business focuses.

• You can use video and other forms of social media to drive traffic to that lead page; the answers to the questions will start to give you information about what your market wants to know.
• From that, you can build a list AND create your first product!

3) Look around in your niche—could you form a partnership with another marketer and collect data from his or her list?

If you’re putting together a product that isn’t a direct competitor of theirs and you can share the data, they might be willing. This is a great way to get data about your target market!

We’re NOT suggesting that you treat those as leads … But once you have the data on the niche, you will have a picture of the target market that you can use to help you generate leads by putting out content that is targeted to that market.

These are just 3 of the many ways that surveys can help you generate leads.  We’ll give you more information on lead generation and listbuilding with surveys in our next post, so stay tuned!

Randy Dickinson, of ImpactThinking.com, interviewed me yesterday about how surveys can help businesses create products and services that keep customers buying, get proof to convert prospects, and target messages to customers so that they feel you know them personally.

This is “as recorded,” unedited, but I thought you’d enjoy it, because it has some really great content about how to use surveys to power your business.

To hear it, just go here.

The new FTC ruling has a LOT of people running scared–and with good reason.

We’re not lawyers and we’re not giving out legal advice.  But you probably knew that  . . . We do know a LOT about PROOF and about how SURVEYS can give you that proof.

So we’ve made a new video for you . .. . Let us know what you think!

One question we hear often from the MySurveyExpert community is,

Are multiple choice surveys misleading?

Here’s the bottom line:  They are, if you don’t know what you’re doing and you write them incorrectly.

And “loading” questions or writing “leading” questions can actually cost you money.

Why?  Because the simple fact is is that you need to know what people think; leading questions don’t tell you that.

And here’s the thing:  The more accurately you find that out what your customers think, the more money you’re going to make.

So knowing exactly

• what people want,
• what they’ll pay,
• when they’re satisfied (and when they’re not)

can double, triple, or even quadruple your profits.

That’s why you’ve GOT to write good questions.  Leading questions are bad and costly.

But here’s the problem:  it’s not always obvious when a question is “leading”  or “loaded.”  Sometimes, they’re really tough to spot, particularly when you’re writing questions about your own products and services.

Here are some tips to avoid that leading questions, tips that will help you write GOOD survey questions that make you money:

1. Use neutral language.  Avoid any terms (either positive OR negative), anything that might get an emotional response.
2. Balance your response options.  If you’re asking people whether they agree or disagree with a statement, make it “Agree strongly, Agree, Disagree, Disagree Strongly,” not “Agree strongly, Agree, Disagree.”  You want both “sides” to have the same number of responses.
3. Review, review, review.  Go through the survey yourself, several times, to look for “loaded” or “leading” questions.  Then put the survey away for a couple of days, then come back and look at it again.  Then, ask a couple of other folks to look it over for you and get their input.
4. Once you’ve reviewed it, pretest it.  Get a small “subsample” of your customers (20 or so is usually enough), have them take the survey, then give them a few questions that ask THEM whether they thought anything was leading, whether they saw any problems with the survey, and so forth.

Follow these guidelines and you’ll be finding out what kinds of products your customers want, when they’re satisfied and when they’re not, and much, much more.

And your bottom line will skyrocket.

To get a foolproof system for doing all this and more, get Turn Surveys Into Cash.