By Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD

Today, we’re starting a new series on the blog to answer some of your most common questions about surveys–everything from “Why surveys?” to “how many responses do I need?” to “how can I use surveys to build my list?

We’re going to begin with the most basic question we get: “Why surveys?”

Well, the answer is straightforward: Surveys make money, pure and simple.

Top marketers, Fortune 500 companies, bestselling authors–they’ve all been doing surveys for decades to convert prospects, create products to order, and much more.

Here are 10 ways you can follow their example and make money with surveys:

1) Create products to order:  My partner, Mike Koenigs, calls product creation surveys the “million dollar strategy,” a sure-fire way to create products your customers will beg to buy. After all, if you ask your customers and prospects what they want, create it for them, then tell them you’ve done that, don’t you think they’ll be invested in your product or service and BUY it?

2) Convert prospects with quizzes: Probably the second biggest problem our customers tell us about is that their prospects don’t convert. One awesome way to increase those conversions is to use quizzes. These work like gangbusters because they’re interactive, engaging, and FUN for the customer. Plus, we’re teaching our customers how to give a customized recommendation for their products and services in the quiz, which will really help ramp up your conversions.

3) Develop a membership site: We’ve designed a template for gauging interest in a membership site, finding out what content your customers would like in it, and what they’re willing to pay. It’s the same logic as creating products to order and it works great. We used this for one of our customers and she had an absolute formula for creating her membership site!

4) Segment your list: Surveys can give you the information you need to segment your list, so you can tailor messages, offers, and products to particular customers. That means you can send different messages to men and to women, to frequent buyers as opposed to those who don’t buy as often, to people in areas that have been hard hit by the economy. This one technique can increase your click throughs and conversions by as much as 45%!

5) Get testimonials: Surveys can get you awesome testimonials quickly, easily, and inexpensively. We have an awesome technique, a testimonial generator we used to get as many as 190 responses for one of our clients!

6) Prove it: Testimonials are just one form of proof. You should be getting 2 more: case studies and the gold standard, statistical data that PROVE your products work, your services change lives. Surveys can give you all 3 forms of proof and the UNIQUE advantage of surveys is that it can get you those statistical data.  And those statistical data will give you the information you need to comply with the FTC guidelines on testimonials.

7) Keep them happy: To keep your business growing and thriving, you’ve got to know when your customers are satisfied. Customer satisfaction surveys do that job for you, giving you an ongoing stream of information about your key products and services. What’s more, they’ll tell you when your customers AREN’T satisfied, so you find the ticking time bombs in your business BEFORE they explode.

8)  Build Your List: Surveys can let you build your list, in a number of ways. If you partner with someone else who has a list, you can collaborate on a survey and build your list. If you put a quiz out and use video and social media to drive traffic it, that’s another way surveys can generate leads and build your list. We’ll have more for you, so stay tuned.

9) Create an autoresponder series: When you do product creation surveys, or if you just do simple one-question surveys to find out your customers’ biggest problems or pain, you can take that and create an autoresponder series that addresses their questions and shows them how your products and services will let them take the next step to solving their problem or easing their pain.

10) Get an instant product:  That’s right, we’re even using survey technology to create instant products you can have up and running on your site, generating money on autopilot, in as little as 2 weeks! Stay tuned to find out how.

These are just some of the ways surveys can make money for you. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to go into all these topics and more, in great detail. This is awesome content that isn’t being put out anywhere else in the Internet marketing space, so stay tuned!

We’ve been telling you a great deal about how to link social media with surveys; combining the 2 tools really ramps up the power of both.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review shows how powerful–and simple-it can be and how surveys can not only increase the power of social media but also answer the all-important question, “Is social media getting me anywhere?”

And here’s the best news: The survey reported on in the Harvard Business Review article used the EXACT model of one of the templates we’re providing in “Turn Surveys Into Cash.”

Two researchers sent out a survey to customers of a Houston bakery. They then set up a Facebook fan page and invited everyone on the bakery’s list to become a fan. The bakery began updating the page with pictures of its tasty goods, intros to their employees, positive reviews of the bakery, and updates of contests and promotions.

After 3 months, they sent out another survey and this time, they received many more responses than on the initial mailing. They compared several groups of customers, including those who became fans, Facebook users who did not fan the page, and customers who weren’t on Facebook.

What did they find? Well, in a nutshell, the fan page had a positive effect on customers who became fans: Customers who replied to both surveys and became fans turned out to be the best customers, according to the survey. Fans were the most likely to say that they’d choose this particular bakery over others, whenever possible.

This simple model is one of the ones we’re teaching folks to use in the MySurveyExpert community–it’s a “before and after” design in which you measure where your customers or prospects are before you give them something–a fan page, Ecourse, coaching program, or whatever–and then measure the attitudes or behavior again, after they’ve used your stuff.

It’s a super simple but incredibly powerful way to find out what’s working and what isn’t!

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.

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.