When’s the Last Time You 
Surveyed Your Customers?
Customers are like roaches…for every one you find, there are potentially hundreds of unseen ones crawling in places you don’t often check. Your list of ‘high priority stuff to do’, should contain finding out how you drew your current customer base. I realize that for a small business owner, that list can get pretty long…and sometimes you never do get to all the things on it. But this is one of the more important ones.
“Because your customer base is the most valuable research tool available!”
I was recently working on a project that involved web sales. The offline portion of the project did really well. The online portion did ‘just ok’. After a few months, my client had only about 100 online customers. And as time went on, the ROI (Return On Investment) for the online side was quickly shrinking. The amount of money my client was making from the website just couldn’t justify the high expenses of online advertising.
Before calling it quits, I asked my client to try one more thing. We surveyed the customers to find out what they liked and didn’t like about the website.
Now anyone who has tried to conduct a survey before knows that it’s not easy getting someone to take three to five minutes out of their lives just to help you run a better business. We had to offer the customer something to get them to bite.
We started by offering a ten percent discount on their next order…something my client wanted to do, but I knew that it wouldn’t get very good results. We sent out 100 people and didn’t get a single result. I convinced my client to give away an actual product for free…like one of the supplies that the website was selling.
We hit the jackpot. Yes, my client had to shell out some money for the supplies, and he had to pay shipping costs, but we got our hands on some really valuable information.
We found our weak spots and strong points. We eliminated (or at least minimized) the parts of our site that were keeping people from submitting their orders. We stressed our strong points, and sculpted our copy to really push our Unique Selling Point. (By the way, one of the questions revealed a USP that we hadn’t even considered…by asking your customers what they DON’T like about the competition, you can uncover strategies that can save your business.)
The online section of my client’s business is now flourishing. As a matter of fact, his sales per week have tripled, and his first 100 clients are now more active than they were in the beginning.
The next time business slows, take that time to find out where your business stands among your competitors. Spending the money on a survey will justify itself in a VERY short time.
Surveying Customers |
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