Get to Know Your Customers With New Survey Service
E-mail marketing provider Constant Contact today unveiled ListenUp Survey, an online customer feedback program for small businesses that’s designed to be easy to use, comprehensive in scope, and perhaps best of all, affordable.
“You also get new ideas about how to better run your business, you get the information you need to retain your most valuable customers. A lot of small businesses can spin their wheels trying to please a segment of shoppers that are not the ones buying the most or referring the site to others. With surveys, you can identify, measure and follow up on all of this.”
ListenUp Survey’s point-and-click interface, step-by-step wizard, prewritten survey templates, list management and reporting features, and free live support are designed to make it easy to conduct effective online surveys without having to start from scratch.
“We truly focus on small businesses, the ones with zero to 25 employees, not up to 500, and not many vendors really do that,” said Oriola. “We know these people are busy so we have fully staffed phone support and make sure the product is easy to use.”
Templates or D.I.Y.
You can choose from more than 40 online survey templates in five categories: customer satisfaction, market research, new product development, nonprofit and Web site feedback. Each survey template includes questions, and you can modify the templates by adding or deleting questions, changing the order, edit the text and insert page breaks and background colors. This is done with a click-and-drag interface, so it’s not difficult to make changes on-the-fly.
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| Query Acumen: Ask the questions that will bring you results that can help you make smarter marketing decisions. (Click for larger image.) |
If you choose to create your own template, a step-by-step wizard guides you through the process, and Constant Contact provides a free resource FAQ containing tips for writing your own survey from scratch. Whether you D.I.Y. or use the templates, you can insert your company logo on the greeting and closing page.
The survey content is comprehensive, allowing you to ask all types of questions: open-ended ones asking for a comment; multiple choice queries that may require just one selection or many; weighted answers on a numerical or customer satisfaction scale and so on.
For example, if you want to test the market for a new product, questions you can ask include: how interested someone would be in buying the new item; a ranking of what they consider the most important features; what attributes would make them more or less interested in purchasing; how much they’d be willing to pay and so on.
Choose Response and Distribution Options
You can also set up a survey to allow or disallow more than one response from the same computer and choose whether to identify respondents or not, depending on what would work best for your survey.
Once you’ve written your online survey, you can preview and test it. When you’re ready, change the status from “Draft” to “Live,” and prepare to send it.
You can distribute your survey to your existing permission-based contacts through a personalized e-mail invitation. The wizard will take you through the steps of identifying which contacts you want to receive the invitation. You also have the option of posting the survey link on your Web site for online visitors to take your survey.
If you don’t yet have a list of contacts, you can place the visitor sign-up box on your Web site to collect permission-based e-mail addresses, and then follow-up with an online survey e-mail invitation.
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| Data Delivery: Filtering responses lets you create targeted marketed campaigns and contact lists. (Click for larger image.) |
Reading the Results
Of course, once the results come in, they won’t benefit you much if you can’t glean any insight from them. ListenUp wisely shows results in both raw and graphical displays, and the data is refreshed and updated as the survey is conducted. Results can be exported to Excel, too.
Here are the options for viewing results:
- Overall Results — Evaluate survey results at-a-glance with graphs. You can hide or view the details and review text answers. You can also drill down to view respondents by answer choice, and save them to a list.
- Individual Results — You can also view by respondent-leading to valuable insight for one-on-one follow-up communication. You can search for, and analyze, a single respondent. You can view their contact details, including name and address, and learn how they answered all questions.
- Invitation Results — Instantly measure the performance of your survey e-mail invitations. You can use the at-a-glance view of all invitations sent for each survey. You can also see the date sent, number sent, opens, clicks and more.
You determine which question and answer choices you want to filter, and Survey displays the results in graphs. You can drill down to identify who fits your selected criteria, then, save them to a new list or an existing list for targeted follow-up.
Pricing begins at $15 a month, and there is a 50-percent discount for those who want to use both of Constant Contact’s offerings. For example, if you pay $15 month for Survey, you can add E-mail Marketing for $7.50, or half price. There is also a free ListenUp Survey 60-day trial.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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