Many of you have asked us,

How do I make sure respondents are giving me accurate information?

Getting accurate information is critical.  The truth is that most of the time, unless you’re asking about really sensitive topics, customers won’t lie.   So for most of the topics we’re likely to cover in business surveys, we really don’t have to worry a lot about them deliberately deceiving us, except when it comes to questions such as income.

But there’s a lot more to it than just whether our customers are consciously lying in surveys.

• We have to worry about whether their responses have a “positive skew” or “negative skew:”  In other words, whether customers are saying they like a product more than they really do or dislike it more than they really do.
• We have to worry about whether they really READ the question and THOUGHT about an answer, as opposed to just “flying through” the survey and randomly marking things.
• We have to worry about whether they had “response set,” where they keep marking “agree/strongly agree” through a whole run of questions.

The list of ways  that inaccuracies creep in goes on and on.  And we need to worry about this, because if we don’t get accurate information, we have “bias” in our data.  And that can lead to bad decisions that cost us money.

How do we combat these problems?  How do we really “get inside our customers’ heads” so we can create and sell the products they want and get the proof we need to convert prospects?

Well, there are LOTS of ways to do that.  The best way, bottom line, is to write a good survey.

Here are some more specific tips:

• I think that the absolutely most important thing here is to write good, clear questions and tell them how you’re going to use the data to give them more value.

• Be respectful of their time:  One reason people “fly through” a survey without reading it carefully is because it’s too long, too disorganized, or poorly written.  Show them you’ve taken the time to write good questions, organize them well, and walk them through it with transitions.

• To avoid “response set,” in which people just keep checking the same answers, vary the way you ask questions.  In other words, if you have a series of statements and you’re asking to choose options from strongly agree to strongly disagree, word some of the statements “positively” (“I liked the ___) and some negatively (“I thought the ___ was too long).

• Explain to your customers WHY you need to know something, show them how you’ll put the information to work for THEM, and assure them that the information won’t just be turned into an immediate attempt to sell them something.  That will increase cooperation and accuracy dramatically.

• It’s also critical to ensure that their answers are completely confidential; customers are VERY concerned about data encryption in surveys, for good reason.

If you follow these guidelines, you’ll go a long way toward getting data you can use to take your business to the next level.

Many of you have asked us,

How do I use surveys to find out what my customers want to buy?  Can I really use surveys to CREATE a PRODUCT?

Absolutely!

Top marketers use product creation surveys all the time to get an absolute road map for creating products their customers will buy.  That’s their secret to hitting it out of the park with top-selling products, over and over again.

The problem is that lots of people don’t know how to write a survey that will give them that road map.

In our new product, “Turn Surveys Into Cash,” we’ve created a template that you can modify, quickly and easy, to create a product in your business.

Let me explain how the process works:

You describe the product in a survey question, in 2-3 sentences.

• Phrase it in terms of your trying to create value for the customer.

Then, say to the customer “If this [name of product or site] cost $x, how interested would you be?  Very interested, somewhat interested, or not interested at all?”

Everyone who says they’re “not interested at all” gets a second question, asking if they’re interested in the product at a LOWER price point:

• “OK, how about if the [name of product or site] cost [$lower price point].  How interested would you be?”  (same set of response options)

• To do that, you create a “skip pattern,” so that the folks who said they were “very interested” or “somewhat interested skip this question and go on to the next one.   (Skip patterns are easy to create–we teach you how to program them.)

It’s not a perfect science, but if you get 30-40% or so who say they’re at least somewhat interested in at least one price point, you should figure that it bodes well.

Why?  Because people tend to understate interest in thee sorts of surveys.

• Plus, you haven’t really had a chance to demonstrate the value of the product or site–so if you get decent interest without that, you’ve probably got pretty good support for the product or site.

In our new product, we give you even more information on how to find out what your customers want and how they want it delivered, so you can boost your profits by creating products your customers will buy, quickly and easily.

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 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.

We’ve had LOTS of people ask us,

How do I get people to respond to my survey?

They’re asking that question with good reason, because this is one of  THE MOST IMPORTANT issues:  Simply put, if you don’t get good response to your surveys, you can’t use them to make more money.

So how do you get the responses you need?

Here are some tips:

1.  First and foremost, you get response by showing your customers “what’s in it for them” in taking your survey.  It needs to be ALL about them, so that they see why they should spend time and effort to give you information.

2.  You do that in many ways, but 2 of the key ways are to (a) offer incentives for taking the survey (such as, everyone who takes it gets a free report AND a chance to win something cool, like an iPod) and (b) designing the survey so that it reads as if it’s about THEM, not about YOU and how YOU can make more money.  If you do that, you WILL make more money, because you’ll get the information you need.

3.  Write a good survey!  If you learn how to write clear, effective questions, to make your survey a conversation, and to report results to your customers and show them how you’re using the data, they’ll learn over time that your surveys are worthwhile. That takes some skill, but you’ll be surprised how fast you can learn to do good surveys, particularly with the simple recipe we’ve put together.

4.  Send multiple invitations to do the survey.

5.  Show your customers how you put the information they give to work to give THEM more value.

There are other techniques that we’re teaching, but this should give you some information you can use to get responses to surveys.  To get our other techniques AND our complete system for using surveys to ramp up profits, go here.

Try these tips to increase response to your survey.  And let us know how you’re doing!

One of the big questions we’ve gotten at MySurveyExpert is,

How long can a survey be?  How long SHOULD it be?

Usually we gauge this by how long the survey takes.

Most of the research shows that the absolute MAXIMUM you can push people is 15 minutes.

But that’s actually a pretty long survey.    It can be done, but you’d better offer a KILLER incentive.

• I recently did a survey for a client that averaged about 20 minutes.
• We got 800 responses (from a big list), which was good.
• Here’s how we got such a good response:  She offered a $40 coupon for a product or service from her cart AND a chance to win a Kindle.

In general, shorter is better.

But the critical issue in getting people to do ANY survey is to show them “what’s in it for them.”

I’ve refused to answer 5-question surveys because it was “all about the marketer:”

• the survey didn’t offer any incentive for me to take it,
• it wasn’t conversational,
• the questions were clearly designed to get information the marketer could use to make money.

It’s OK to ask questions that will help you make money. After all, that’s the reason for doing the survey.

But if you do that in a way that shows the customer how you will use the results to provide VALUE to him or her, and if you make sure there are LOTS of questions about the CUSTOMER and what he or she wants (always lead with those), you’ll get a much better response.

So length is definitely one of the things that can make people angry, but so can bad questions, poor design, and lots of other things.

Here’s the bottom line:  If you do good surveys and keep the length reasonable (within 15 minutes), you should be able to get good results.

To make sure you can do good surveys, go here to get our survey system.