One of the #1 Keys To Online Success Revealed...

Surveys are golden when you're trying to figure out what your customer wants. Another thing I find helpful is using a forum in your industry. Some of your customers are bound to be a member of the forum and asking questions.

Identifying the need will certainly lead to success, if you address it correctly.

Benjamin Ehinger

Ken,

What you're saying should be a part of every marketer's customer nurturing. I think client lists are much more responsive when the marketer promotes give and take, also sometimes referred to as push and pull.

If all you ever do is push information to your list, the result is a one-sided conversation . . . a dictatorship of sorts. You can only hope that folks are listening, enjoying and benefiting.

But when you attempt to "pull" information from your audience, both you and they feel like the other side actually cares enough to listen to suggestions, criticism, and feedback.

Go survey your audience right now.

Steve

Surveying is good some marketers just think about CPA surveys to make money but when you actually do a market research with surveys, you get good results after.

Ken,

Honestly... surveys took one of my businesses from 6 figures a year to 7 figures a year, and here's why.

I had been writing my copy based on what I THOUGHT the market wanted.

So one day, I sent out a survey to a list of about 5,000 buyers... and asked them what the single biggest reason was for them buying my product.

I asked them to be personal, and give me true, honest feedback.

and out of the 600 or so responses I got back, it took me days... but I was able to see a pattern emerge. Out of 600 responses... they almost ALL fit under the same 10 or so "reasons why"

And in many cases, what they told me and what I assumed was WAY off the mark.

so, over the next few weeks... I started weaving most of those survey answers into my copy, my emails, and the rest of my marketing.

Literally, just changing the headline and lead of my sales page doubled my conversion rate from .90% to almost 1.90%.

and it came right from the answers to the survey.

Now, I feel there's almost a science to running surveys... because you really need to know the right questions to ask, in order to get the right kind of feedback.

It's kinda like testimonials... I always tell clients that testimonials, by themselves, aren't that powerful. Those that say "Shawn is such a swell guy" are not the kind you want""

You want testimonials that talk about a specific result/deadline.

Same with surveys... you almost have to lead the person into the right kinds of questions to get answers that will help you. Asking someone in a survey "did you find this ebook helpful" is not going to help you much.

So, good post... and I agree... surveys, for me, has allowed me to get the ACTUAL slang/wording/verbiage my markets use... so I can then turn around and use that in my copy and emails.

Yes, something very similar, albeit less formal, but not all at once because I arrange these "feedback requests", trying to ask open-ended, non-assumptive questions, at intervals throughout my various autoresponder series. So, I'm encouraging feedback, but I don't want to have to deal with it all at the same time, given some of my list-sizes. People get it whenever they get up to that point in the series, and so on. It's manageable for me.

I've learned so much from my subscribers this way. Things that have been really useful to me in knowing what to do and often more importantly what to avoid doing (and why).

It was only really by starting to do this that I originally came to appreciate that across my entire range of totally unrelated niches, my traffic demographics are apparently very similar. (I now know why, and more about how to target and attract them, which I do increasingly, but it was feedback that first taught me).

And your curiosity-arousing headline, for all that it was a curiosity-arousing headline, is dead accurate: this really is one of the keys to online success.

In the dating advice for men niche, I survey my customers about once every quarter. I survery my prospects around the 3rd to 7th e-mail (gives me just enough time to build and demonstrate value at that point) and at least a couple times a year on top of that.

I also have "roundtable" discussions with my customers about once a year from both the product and coaching pools (yes, there is interlapping).

Doing all 3 of these things I've been able to streamline my processes, find new niches, build loyalty, and one of the best benefits of all...... I don't have to come up with any product ideas because they come up with them for me by telling me what they want or need.

RoD

great points everyone, thanks... right Alexa re building it into ar series

...another tip is, I always do competitive research by openly asking questions like "what are my competitors doing better than I am?" and "if you ran my business what would You do differently?" and other targeted, brief questions. It really helps to a) validate you're on the right track with much of what you're already doing, b) see how important things are to customers and c) take action based on what most of them are saying over time; the patterns like you saw Shawn.. right Rod re products/service ideas, it helps. True, Steve re push vs pull mix, it's important to make a two-way conversation

Also I often ask things that highlight my competitors' weaknesses, eg questions like this one in which over 82% said "Yes it's important", eg "do you think it's important that who you're learning from prove with screencaps that they actually even do/are successful in what they're teaching?" or semi-loaded questions like "Some of my competitors charge insane $1997 prices for cross-marketed bs launch crap, that's one of my pet peeves about this industry. What else do you Hate about vendors in this industry?" and boy do you get an earful, lol

the biggest thing I like is all the huge percentage of positive comments, which would make good testimonials

good topic, worth keeping alive/kicking around, it's one of the big missing pieces that's important from most people's biz mix...

-k

I've been thinking about this ALOT lately.

For the reasons and impact on his business, that Shawn noted, this is likely one of the most valuable threads I've read here in, say, at least a week or so. So often, the opinion/feedback of the customer is pushed to the side, or neglected, in pursuit of other "more important" business endeavors.

Feedback, however, is essentially a customer telling you EXACTLY what they want.

To delve even further, does anyone here have any specific tips on how to actually "word" their survey questions? Are there any words we should be avoiding when formulating survey questions? Any other considerations?

Lately, does anyone have any specific tactics related to maximizing participation in surveys? Do you give something away, or promise something, if someone takes the time to respond to a series of survey questions? Or...is that defeating the purpose?

I don't subscribe to threads very often, but this thread has quickly become one of the most valuable I've read in awhile.....

Earlier, I came across an article (thanks, Google!). I had tried to post it, but to no avail. Let me try again....
4 Online Marketing Survey Tactics That Break Through the Noise - MarketingVOX

Previously, I had written a long winded post about my thoughts on that article, however, it failed to post and I lost all that writing (I hate when that happens).

It's very interesting in that it details how researchers, from Carnegie Mellon, proceeded to do research that revolved around people's willingness to give up personal information, in a survey, dependent upon the type of website they encountered where they were asked for that information.

Essentially, they presented people with 3 different types of websites....each of a different quality and aesthic.

What I found interesting is that they concluded that "that the volunteers may have thought the least official-looking website would also be least likely to store or use their answers."

So, people, at least the research seems to indicate, that people were more likely to give up personal information they didn't "feel" like their answers would be used.

Intuitively, you'd think that things would be the other way around....that the more official looking a site is, the more likely people would be willing to give and separate with that information.

....there are so great points later in the article, but just thought I'd share.

I've been extremely busy with client projects over the last 14 months but prior to that, I use to survey my list in each niche I have infoproducts in once per year.

By doing so, it consistently tells what they want me to offer in the way of products and ongoing content. It's been 80-85% accurate. I could improve the accuracy by doing survey/feedback during a prelaunch content stage and fine-tune the final product to get it even closer to a 100% sure-thing.

When I do a survey, I like to use Lime Survey. It's open-source PHP script that gives you a lot of flexibility on the types of questions and the amount of answers you can collect data on.

Never thought about surveys... for me it always sat in the same seat as holding contests to drive traffic, and gain participation from users.

Surveys are great part of market research, I run automated surveys as part of my sales funnel and on the back-end of customers sales as well as periodically with my different lists.

What I have had MORE success with though honestly is blogging - in each one of our niches we blog 3-4 times each week with many of those testing niche topics and wording - I have to say the results are amazing.

Without exception, we get 4-6 blog posts out of the hundreds that go WAY further in terms of interest, traffic, and participation than the others.

I then drill into the comments - participate in the discussion and get a very good idea of not only what questions the readers have, but WHY they are asking those questions.

I am in the middle of developing our next information product right now (about 50% done) taken directly from one of our top blog posts on a niche blog so far this year. By all accounts, it will be a big seller.

Jeff

Excellent advice. It is true you when you know what your customers want -- you can easily create, promote, and write messages they will love.

I think another great way that can be a little more time consuming, is a few times a year simply send out a broadcast message to all your subscribers and ask they what they would like to learn more about.

You then can reply back to each and everyone. Like I said this may be time consuming -- but your subscribers will see that you truly care about them by personally messaging each and every one of them.

Further more you can see what the majority of them are asking, then go and create or promote an excellent product around that.