Sometimes when you own your own business, you wind up sort of living in a universe of your own creation. You’ve got a To Do list a mile long, a pile of products to make/list/sell/ship, social media to manage, blog posts to write, and more. You get so busy doing all the things that you never really stop to think about who you’re doing them FOR.
When was the last time you took a moment to survey your customers and ask them what THEY want? The end of the year is the perfect time to do this, because you can go into the New Year with a ton of new ideas based on their responses. Pull up Google Forms and get crackin’, then put together a little prize package and draw a winner from the responses (this provides your customers with an incentive to fill out the survey in the first place).
Tips for Creating a User-Friendly Survey:
- Keep the question number to a minimum; 5 is ideal, 10 is probably the most you want to do.
- Offer as many “easy” questions as you can – multiple choice, check all that apply, fill in the blank. Open-ended response types of questions take a lot more time to fill out and are more likely to be skipped or to cause someone to leave the survey altogether.
- Take the survey yourself, and time yourself doing it. That way you can say, honestly, “This survey will only take 3 minutes of your time.”
- Ask specific questions so you get the specific answers you want.
- Offer an incentive for filling it out, such as a prize drawing from all responses or a coupon code on the confirmation page.
So go on, ask your customers! Find out how you’re doing and what they’d like to see more from you in the New Year. You might be surprised where it takes you and your biz!
photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/la-citta-vita/5185095579/”>La Citta Vita</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>cc</a>