For a while now, I’ve been a heavy user of surveys… From product development to market segmentation to pre-selling offers. We’ve used them for clients too – from health and fitness to survival and photography.
Here’s the thing with surveys and quizzes… They’re hard to create. Sure, there are software solutions out there that make them easy, but conversion sucks. In most cases, a potential respondent would rather chop off their arm than waste a few minutes taking a quiz! That’s why it’s so important to make sure we ask only questions the questions that are important to you and your business!
Now, in order to understand what questions to ask, you need to first understand who your target market, your customers, are.
- What do they like to do?
- Where do they live?
- How much money do they make?
- What kind of car do they drive?
- What are their fears? Ambitions?
- What are their challenges?
Now, some of this is pretty self-explanatory…
If your customers are Fortune 5000 executives, you’ve got a pretty good idea for a few of those questions… But what are their challenges? What are their ambitions? To TRULY speak to them in your marketing, you need to TRULY understand them…
And that’s where surveys come in.
Question 1: Getting Buy-in
In terms of importance, the first question you ask is the most important when it comes to getting someone to finish the survey, but not for the reason you’re thinking…
Sure, the first question sets the tone of the survey. It gives the respondent and idea of what the rest of the questions will be about. More important than that though, it get’s a user clicking…
The very first question you should ask is something that’s simple. It can be a yes or no question… Something that’s very familiar (and not very personal). Something they don’t need to think about much.
After they answer that first question, they’re MUCH more likely to finish…
Question 2: Positioning
The second question in your quiz needs to do some positioning. You want your respondent to give you some information that’s specific to them and their situation.
For example:
- What are you looking to power with solar energy?
- What do you want your email list to do?
- Which type of photography is your specialty?
- What health conditions are you currently afflicted with?
This question is usually quite important in terms of the overall survey and knowing our customers better, but the next two are far more important…
Question 3: Challenge
Depending on the type of survey, Questions 3 and 4 are sometimes combined, but let’s talk about them separately… When it comes to getting visitors to take action, we need to understand WHY they are taking action.
The quickest way to figure that out is to ask them what their biggest challenge is…
So, if we know that our users are looking to lose weight, challenges they could be experiencing are:
- They have trouble eating the right foods
- They don't have enough time to work out regularly
- They eat too many snacks at night before going to bed
- They aren't active enough throughout the day
Each of those answers could lead to a whole host of different product offers or services…
Question 4: Urgency
The thing we want to know is how urgent the challenge is… If someone is having trouble losing weight, and their answer was that they don’t have time to work out regularly…
We need to figure out how urgent (or willing) they are to take action…
Are they just ‘researching’ or are they ready to drive to the gym to meet with a health coach?
Some of it will be motivated by how uncomfortable they are… How much pain they’re in. By knowing how urgent they’re looking for a solution, we can help them more effectively.
The Right Questions
There isn’t any magic formula to asking the right questions. You have to get people to click through, of course… But you also need to know how to frame your questions in a way that segments your visitors into different buckets.
Those buckets can be used for marketing, sales and product development. Or, you can simply interpret the data and figure out what your customers want more of!
Get started building an Askly Survey today, for free! Or, if you’d like to speak to a Response Expert, click here to set up a call. We’re happy to build out an Enterprise Level survey solution, complete with all the marketing bells and whistles for you today!