As a small business, it’s important to engage with your customers or clients and get feedback to know what they think about what you do and can help you implement ways to improve your service. Creating a digital survey or encouraging online reviews are both powerful ways to gain this knowledge and promote your business.
With email blasts, social media channels and websites, you now have many ways to get your survey out there to your visitors and followers.
But what’s the best way to digitally create a survey?
I’ve used Google Forms to create a visually pleasing form/survey. I like how you can simply customized it with your brand colors and even a upload a photo for a header image. Once created you can use the link to it over and over, and even go in and edit the form even after it’s been sent or posted. The link can be pasted into a social media post, embedded on your website or added to your email blast.
A client of mine has used Survey Monkey to create a survey then they put the link to it in an email newsletter to their subscribers. The problem was they are a non-profit and didn’t get as much participation as they’d hope. No fault to them, just the nature of what they do. However, if you are a retailer, restaurant or service provider, you may be able to get more feed back and results from your survey.
How to get more participation in your survey?
Offer an Incentive
Lots of people feel like they’re too busy to take a survey so offering them a discount, a gift certificate, a free item, etc. in exchange for their submission of your survey. This will greatly increase the response rate.
How to deliver your digital survey
Once you’ve created your online survey, prominently post it on your website. This ensures that anyone who visits your website will see it.
You should also periodically share it on your social media accounts. Don’t spam your follower’s feeds with it, but share the survey enough that a large portion of your audience gets exposed to it.
If you have an email or customer list, send an email blast explaining the survey, include a link and ask them to fill it out.
Get online Reviews
Another powerful tool online is to get your customers to post a Review of your business online. Facebook and Google are both strongly recommended for this, as well as Yelp, Angies List or other business listing sites that might be relevant for your type of business.
Not only can you get real feedback, reviews posted online are an important part of what people think about your business, a tool that potential new customers take into consideration when deciding if they will choose to purvey your business or use your services. More and more people use a search engine to look up a place or service provider. With more and better reviews, your business can show up higher in the rankings, getting you better visibility online too!
Like we mentioned for surveys, getting a response can be tricky, so offering a contest or incentive will get you more reviews.
Use your colleagues to help gain reviews. Make sure your employees or colleagues know you have a social media page to start. Then ask to trade reviews. You post a review if they’re business is listed on Google, Facebook, etc. and in exchange they also post one to your page(s). Start by “liking or following” their social page(s) – if you haven’t already – then post a review to their page. Be honest. Don’t just sprinkle it with flowers, be real and share a brief experience you had and why you’d recommend them.
Information gleaned from experience, and from an article I read on 3/28/2017 on TurnStyle titled “5 ways to Survey your Restaurant Customers”
~Georgia Gietzen,