Craft Questions Carefully

Restaurants and other small businesses have long relied on comment cards and talking to customers.

This article by Jennifer Heldt Powell on Small Business Matters is definitely local Boston based, but has important implications for online ecommerce – certainly it’s easy to get online patrons to participate in a quick survey, but an incentive might be especially important.

Appeal to your customers for feedback, your online tools allow you to reach more people on a broad range of topics important to your online business success.

“Feedback equates to smart choices for your business,” Ms. Powell quotes Mary Crogin, Constant Contact’s senior business and marketing manager for online survey. “It really comes down to having confidence in the decisions you are making for your business.”
She writes It’s sort of like GPS for your company, and that’s a great analogy.

Surveys can be run an ongoing basis, like a modern-day comment box, or they can be limited to a one-time event.

She goes on to write the trick is to keep the questions simple and ask only what you need to know rather than everything you want to know. A survey should take no more than five to 10 minutes. I think even less…answers should be anticipated with checkboxes and an optional ‘additional comments’ field.

It’s not necessary to offer an incentive, but it will likely help garner more responses. It could be anything from an entry into a contest to a discount on a future purchase…

Click Here to read the entire article.

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