MarketTools Blog

Even the best-designed customer satisfaction survey won’t yield results if people don’t receive it, open it, and answer questions.  To maximize your survey response rates (or diagnose a response rate issue), here are five areas to consider.

1)  Sample:  Who are you trying to reach and how frequently?

• Make sure you’re sending your customer feedback survey to the right people.  Don’t send a product or support survey to a billing contact, just because that’s the contact name you happen to have on file!
• Prevent over-surveying by implementing touch rules that ensure no respondent receives survey invitations too frequently.
• Be sure your email addresses incorporate the latest contact information from your CRM systems.
   

MarketTools research has shown that survey design parameters directly impact respondent engagement.  This essentially means that by modifying the survey design parameters, we can have an effect on engagement and, correspondingly, impact data quality – and turn a “bad survey” into a “good” one. 

A previous blog post from Brenton Wells talked about SurveyScore, an important component of the MarketTools TrueSample data quality process, and how it measures respondent engagement level to help researchers optimize the design of surveys (learn more about SurveyScore).  SurveyScore Predictor is a tool that gives researchers a means to adjust and improve design parameters in order to optimize the SurveyScore results for a survey.  When the SurveyScore is high, it’s more likely your survey respondents will complete your survey and give your questions the considered response you’re looking for, leading to higher-quality survey results.

Although it’s hard to imagine now, an article in Wired Magazine reports that “there was a time when casinos only grudgingly tolerated slot machines”.  Now slot machines represent two-thirds of all gaming revenue and three-quarters of the gaming floor acreage in Vegas. Market Researchers could learn a lot from the evolution of slot machines from novelty to casino gaming staple. 

Here are three slot machine innovations that have some interesting parallels in the market research industry:

Guest blogger Jennifer Becker is the Director of Research, Brand Strategy at Airfoil Public Relations, a high tech firm in Detroit and Silicon Valley – and a MarketTools customer.

If you think that creating online surveys for public relations is totally different from market research, think again. Whether creating a survey to support media relations or launch a new product, the design fundamentals and purpose – to gain brand exposure – are the same, even when the end audiences are not. Whether it’s a story, or your product or service that you’re selling, you want that audience – be it media or customers – to buy!

A strong survey is a strong survey, regardless of how your business ultimately leverages the data. In fact, if you can approach a publicity-based research project with the same objectivity as a market research survey, you will ultimately produce the highest-quality data possible, something media gravitate toward. Your sample should be representative of the population and your questions as focused as possible to elicit data meaningful to the story you hope to tell.

So, you’re proactively using online surveys to get quick answers to questions about what your customers are interested in, or what they think about a product or service. Brilliant! Online survey tools like Zoomerang and online panels such as ZoomPanel sample are used by some of the world’s most respected brands and market researchers to conduct fast and easy online research.

But before you field your next survey, here are six signs your survey results may not be all that useful.

1.    Your mom is the only person that completed your survey
Um.  Yeah. At least she loves you, right? The truth is that relying on friends and family to help make product, marketing, or business decisions is probably not the best way to roll.  An online sample provider can provide survey respondents who are truly representative of the audience you want to reach. 

You also want to ensure that you’ve calculated the correct size for your sample population, which has a major impact on the statistical validity of your results.  Zoomerang offers Sample Size Calculators to make it easy to understand how many survey respondents you need to get more accurate survey results.

How can online market research help or hurt a new fad?

Probably one of the most unique and interesting fashion statements in the last decade comes from a small town in northeastern Mexico called Matehuala.  If you haven’t seen these bedazzled pointy-toed boots yet, the image posted here alone is worth 60 seconds of your day. There is something about these boots that absolutely fascinates me – yet just as quickly as they reached Yahoo News’ most popular stories, that same article explains that they are already being replaced by “high-heeled Ropers”.

We’re pleased to announce the rollout of the following new capabilities in TrueSample, designed to provide researchers and clients with more powerful capabilities to ensure the quality of their online market research sample.

Want to learn more about online market research?

The just-published first edition of The Essential Guide to Online Market Research offers practical advice to help you take full advantage of everything online market research has to offer. Although the world of online surveys and online market research is a vast topic, this e-book offers some nuts and bolts in a condensed format that’s easy to read.

Beginning with the basics, you’ll get a thorough understanding of why you should conduct market research (in case you are on the fence) and why online market research is taking the industry by storm. Then the book covers the pros and cons of “do it yourself” research versus hiring a service bureau or a full-fledged online market research firm to handle the heavy lifting for you.

There are two groups we always consider when evaluating decisions related to the management of our online panel – our customers and our survey respondents.  Keeping both of these groups engaged and happy with the quality of their experience is essential to the success of our business.  
One of the most important ways to keep survey respondents engaged is to make survey invitations available on the channels where they are already most active online.  And since the only constant variable online is change, it’s vital to keep pace with the new ways consumers prefer being communicated to online.

This post was adapted from the MarketTools Zoomerang blog.

I attended a large conference in San Francisco on web optimization recently. As I walked into each of the many sessions, I was vigorously handed a sheet of paper and asked to fill it out. 

The purpose of the sheet was to get feedback on the sessions and the speakers. The only problem was, just about everyone who politely took the paper left it on their seat, on the floor, or just stuck it in their bag without filling it out. It made we wonder how many of those sheets actually get filled out and turned back in.