One mistake I see MANY marketers–even TOP “gurus”–making is that they rely almost exclusively on open-ended questions in their surveys.

I’m going to show you why this is a mistake and how to avoid it.

In business surveys, I recommend that about 85-90% of your questions be closed-ended (meaning you write choices to give the respondent), rather than open-ended.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. From your point of view, open-ended questions just give you too much information.  Imagine getting thousands of responses with long, open-ended answers.  Wading through it all and trying to come up with a real analysis of what’s there requires not just a lot of time but also a lot of skill.
2. In most cases, your customers HATE open-ended questions.  They take far more time and thought to answer than closed-ended questions do.  That means you’re less likely to hear from a broad base of your customers AND you’re more likely to irritate them–something you NEVER want to do with a survey.

But open-ended questions DO have their place.

You can include them in a survey after open-ended questions, to ask things such as “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about ______?

• That way, you can pick up information and ideas you might not have thought to ask.
• You’ll also start to pick up some of the language of your customers, language you can use in your marketing.

Open-ended questions are also really useful to get information you feed INTO closed-ended questions in surveys.

• So, if you ask questions such as, “What’s your most important question about _____?” or “What problem or issue about ______ keeps you awake at night?” can give you impressions that you can then test, in a survey, with closed-endd questions.

Follow these suggestions and you’ll see your response rates–and your profits–grow.

To learn a quick, easy, foolproof system for writing closed-ended questions, check out our survey system.

Last week, I wrote about the power of surveys to help you profit from the downturn.  Now we’re taking it a step farther and showing you some specific steps you can take to take control of your fate:

Find out who your customers are:  If you don’t know basic demographic information–such as age, gender, location, and they kind of business or employment your customers are in–you could be in deep trouble.  To market effectively, you simply must know who among your customers has been hard hit by the downturn.  Having that information will allow you to target your marketing effectively by segmenting your customer lists and offering discounts to individuals in hard-hit groups.  You can’t convince them that you “feel their pain” if you don’t know what kind of pain they’re in.

Remember, not EVERYONE has been hit hard.  Baton Rouge, the city in which I live, is still doing well economically.  It’s important, then, to target offers differently to people who live in areas such as this than you do to people in hard-hit geographic areas or demographic groups. If you can market heavily to areas that are stronger and offer special discounts or incentives to those who are harder hit, your click through and conversion rates will rise dramatically.

Find out what your customers want to buy:  Even people who haven’t lost their jobs or the value of their portfolios are changing their buying behavior.  Remember, Wal-Mart’s sales are up.  Companies that can offer the products and services to help people weather the economic storm will do well.  So think of some possible products and services your business could offer and find out how your customers are likely to react to them.  Get creative and create the products and services your market needs right now.

And remember that social media can’t give you what you need.  The problem is that you hear from only a PORTION of your customers in social media.  Often, it’s the people who either love your products or hate them!  You need systematic evidence from a broad cross-section of your customer base.  Get that evidence and you can create the products your customers want and sell them to those customers.

Find the weak spots and correct them:  Every business has some Achilles heels, things that need to be worked on–but far too many don’t know what those problems are until it’s too late.  Make sure you’re getting an ongoing stream of information about what customers like and DON’T like about your products, services, and particularly your customer service.  Find out what needs to be fixed and fix it, right away, to ensure that you keep your customer base strong.

Bring more people into the funnel:  Referrals are gold.  Why?  Because the people your customers and clients are connected to in their networks are generally like them in key characteristics, such as age, income, education, etc.  Because research has established clearly that the people we hang out with in our social networks are similar to us, referrals and “customer evangelists” are one of the most efficient, low-cost ways to expand your reach into your target market. 

Think about it:  You have a pool of people who are very much like your customers and your target market sitting right there, you just have to find a way to connect with those people.  And that’s what referrals do.  So put requests for referrals into every survey you do. 

And here’s a hot tip:  DON’T just ask people to think of “friends” who might want your products or services, ask them to think about people in particular places, such as civic associations, sports leagues, places of worship.  You’ll get MUCH better results.  (And in our new survey product, we’ve included a model for exactly how to do this.)

Convert those prospects with rock-solid proof:  Once you’re bringing those prospects into the funnel, you’ve got to find ways to convert them.  The best way is with systematic evidence that your products work and your services change lives. 

Case studies and testimonials are great, but they’re not enough.  It’s much more powerful if you can combine that “qualitative” evidence, the “stories that stick,” with hard data that say 86% of the people who bought this product were very satisfied, 90% of the people who came to the seminar took away useful information, etc.  Put that evidence together with the case studies and testimonials that you can also generate through surveys and you’ll increase your conversion rates dramatically.

Follow these steps to using surveys effectively and you’ll find yourself among the firms who conquer the economic downturn and actually profit from it.