Niche or industry aside, online surveys will help you uncover a treasure trove of invaluable data for making better business decisions.
Whether you’re searching for actionable insights based on market research or to understand your customers on a deeper level, surveys will deliver the data-driven results you need – if you know what you’re doing.
To help you get ahead of the competition, we’re going to explain exactly how you can gather – and use – survey data for better business insights.
We’re also going to explain how ScoreApp can help you streamline as well as optimise key aspects of the process.
Why survey data is essential for business growth
Around 99% of businesses with at least 10 employees regularly work with digital data to make better decisions.
While the lion’s share of businesses use data to improve their business strategy (and rightly so), many fall short of the mark by:
- Working with misleading, vague, or poor-quality data
- Failing to transform their data into actionable commercial strategies that get results
Survey data is a powerful force, because by defining your audience and asking the right questions, you’ll connect with insights that offer direct value to your business.
Working with quality survey data will also streamline key aspects of your business by making consistently informed decisions and distributing your resources more efficiently. Relevant survey insights can also help you:
- Uncover and take advantage of emerging market trends
- Connect with results-worthy marketing content and campaign ideas
- Improve your products, service, and customer experience (CX)
- Level up customer retention, trust, and loyalty
- Enhance operational efficiency and boost productivity
- Gather invaluable customer thoughts, feelings, and insights
- Gauge customer or employee satisfaction (depending on your survey goals or purpose)
How to collect meaningful survey data: essential tips
Now you know just how valuable online surveys are when it comes to data-driven success, let’s look at how to collect meaningful survey insights that will benefit your business.
1. Define your survey goals
Before you do anything else, it’s essential to define your survey goals. There really are no compromises here.
Setting clearcut survey goals and objectives will form solid foundations for your data-gathering efforts. Taking time to work through this process will ensure you ask the right audience the right questions.
First of all, you should decide on your general survey aim. Do you, for example, want to:
- Uncover specific market or industry insights and trends?
- Know how your existing customers feel about your products, services, or brand?
- Get a clearer understanding of your current employee satisfaction rates?
Once you’ve established your core (or macro) goal, you should dig a little deeper. For instance, do you want to:
- Connect with insights on a very specific industry trend?
- Gain a deeper understanding of your competitors’ current strategies?
- Know exactly what your customers think about your most recent range of products?
- Find out whether your employees are feeling motivated on a daily or a weekly basis?
FYI: Your survey goals will be specific to your business needs and aspirations. But you can use these examples for inspiration.
2. Target the right audience
You’ve also got to know precisely who you’re targeting. If you don’t, you’re shooting in the dark and hoping for the best.
Once you’ve carved out your main survey objectives, you should think about who you’re targeting. Choosing the right ‘audience segment’ will ensure you connect with data you can transform into actionable data.
To get this phase of the operation right, it’s important to pick an audience segment that aligns with your survey goals.
For example, if you want to gather feedback about your most recent product launch, you should reach out to the segment of your audience that has bought it in the last three months.
If you’re looking for insights into how young digital natives feel about your brand image and messaging, for instance, you’ll want to target customers in the 14 to 25 age bracket.
The bottom line here? Target the right people and you’ll connect with data that will boost your business growth. Do the opposite and you’ll waste your time (completely).
3. Use a mix of question types
Asking a balanced mix of questions will return well-rounded insights that give you the information you need to improve your business strategy in a number of ways. Oh, and there are different question types that you can use to your advantage.
Here are some of the most common (and effective) survey question types you can use to create surveys that deliver positive results:
Open-ended questions: This style of survey question doesn’t command a set answer. In these instances, the respondent is free to offer up a response of their choice. Open-ended questions are brilliant for collecting detailed feedback, thoughts, or opinions.
Multiple choice questions: This style of survey question gives your respondents a mix of pre-written answers to choose from. Multiple choice questions are great for gathering data that’s a little more objective and for making effective comparisons.
Likert scale questions: Likert scale questions set a scale (one to 10, for instance) based on how much a person agrees or disagrees with an idea or statement. Likert scale questions are perfect for measuring beliefs, values, attitudes, preferences, opinions, and satisfaction levels.
ScoreApp’s extensive library of templates are designed with pre-set questions you can tailor based on your specific goals or audience with ease.
How to transform raw data into actionable insights
Once you’ve collected your raw survey data, you’ll need to arrange it so you can uncover trends or patterns to use to your business-boosting advantage. Here’s how.
Segment your responses
Arranging or segmenting your survey responses according to criteria will quickly help you filter out any insights that are redundant or irrelevant.
Segmenting your survey responses effectively will also help you uncover any useful trends, information, or patterns quickly and efficiently.
There are several ways you can segment your survey data based on your specific survey goals. Here are some ideas:
- User demographics such as age, geographic location, gender, or occupation
- Interests, attitudes, or values
- Whether they’re a new or a repeat customer
- Browsing or buying behaviours
Once you’ve arranged your survey responses, you’ll be able to dig deeper into relevant pockets of your insights to make better decisions targeted at segments of your audience.
Comparing survey results over time
Another practical way of transforming your raw survey data into actionable insights is to run results comparisons over time.
If you have surveys that cross over in their themes or goals, you can segment your responses based on the same criteria and analyse any trends or changes.
For example, if you’ve created a number of surveys that measure customer satisfaction levels based on their shopping checkout experience, you could compare your Likert scale questions while analysing significant shifts in your customers’ opinions to uncover any issues.
This style of survey data analysis is effective, as it will give you a steady flow of actionable insights for improving or evolving your efforts.
Highlight standout responses
In addition to identifying emerging trends or patterns with your data, you can also collect any responses that stand out from the crowd.
This will give you super-specific information to work with to understand any pressing consumer issues or pain points.
You can use these stand-out responses to shape your future campaigns, marketing communications, service enhancements, or product improvements.
Did you know? ScoreApp’s highly visual data analytics features make it easy to understand, arrange, and drill down into your survey insights from one central location.
Examples of using your data to improve your business strategies for the better
As you may have gathered by now, you can use the insights from your survey data analysis efforts to transform several key areas of your business. Let’s look at some practical examples.
Product development
If you want to keep improving your product to meet ever-evolving market demands or solve your audience’s pain points head on, you can use your survey feedback to gain the insights you need.
Asking product development feedback questions can help you:
- Improve on existing product functions or features
- Develop new and improved functions or features
- Discover the demand for certain products or services in your niche
- Put together new product launches that earn maximum engagement
Marketing and communications
Conducting survey data analysis based on your audience’s feelings, preferences, or opinions will help you connect with a wealth of actionable insights that will level up your marketing strategy.
You can use this kind of online survey data to:
- Create multichannel marketing campaigns that resonate with specific segments of your customers
- Make your marketing communications and copy more personal to build trust and earn more conversions
- Tap into emerging trends that will boost your brand visibility or give you the tools to create thought leadership content that will boost your authority
Customer service
Customer-facing surveys are also an effective way of improving every aspect of your customer service strategy.
Armed with insights based on customer feedback, satisfaction, opinion, and sentiment, you can provide a seamless customer experience (CX) as well as flawless consumer support that will give you an edge on the competition.
With a well-rounded mix of high-quality customer service data at your disposal, you can:
- Track customer satisfaction scores and uncover any potential problem areas
- Improve areas of your customer journey that cause issues or frustration
- Enhance your customer service communications across your touchpoints
- Optimise your customer service response levels across your channels
- Respond to customer issues swiftly and with confidence
How ScoreApp can support effective survey data analysis
With ScoreApp, you can optimise every phase of your survey marketing strategy to collect priceless data that aligns with your goals and transform it into actionable insights. Here’s how:
- Choose a creation from ScoreApp’s ever-expanding library of survey templates and customise it to your needs.
- Add your company logo or branding to your template of choice to improve engagement.
- Work with ScoreApp’s accessible in-built analytics tools to simplify as well as segment your data to uncover valuable trends or patterns.
- Use ScoreApp’s segmentation and follow-up features to reach out to specific groups with personalised marketing communications based on their responses.
FYI: As one of the best online survey tools around, it’s possible to integrate ScoreApp with your existing CMS or email tool to send automated communications to your prospect without breaking a sweat.
Top tips for maximising the impact of your online survey data
To squeeze every last drop of value from your surveys, there are certain methods or approaches you should try. Let’s explore.
Regularly update and review your surveys
Rather than creating a few survey templates and sending them out to your prospects periodically, you should check in with them regularly to make sure they’re still relevant.
The needs of your business, your customers, and the industry around you are constantly evolving – so you need to tweak or update the questions you’re asking your respondents accordingly.
Keep analysing your survey data, keep up with emerging industry trends, and consider whether you need to change your survey goals according to your current commercial objectives.
This will help you update your surveys in a way that inspires consistently relevant responses and yields the best possible results.
Share insights across teams
It doesn’t matter if it’s a market research survey or a customer satisfaction survey – you should share the results across every team in your business.
Making your online survey data communal will not only encourage cross-departmental collaboration, but it will give everyone access to insights that will help them improve what they do and how they do it.
The take home here? Silos are bad and lead to data-driven dead ends. On the flip side, when everyone has access to valuable insights, the entire business wins.
Act on your feedback
There’s little point in asking for feedback if you’re not going to act on it. Once you’ve gathered your survey data and arranged it, you should use your best insights to shape or develop your strategies.
Acting on specific feedback will prove that you value your customers’ input and are meeting their needs or pain points head on.
The result? Faster commercial growth, better customer retention rates, and more profit. Perfect.
Follow up with your respondents
Taking a personal stance to your survey marketing efforts will help you nurture your customer relationships and increase engagement over time.
Sending a tailored ‘thank you’ email with a personalised gift (a deal, a discount code, or access to an exclusive piece of content for instance) will build rapport, increase trust, and help you earn more conversions.
Remember, you want to make your respondents feel valued – and personalised follow-up messaging is one of the best ways to do that.
Common pitfalls to avoid when using survey data
Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do when it comes to online surveys. Here are the common survey pitfalls to avoid.
Leaning on positive feedback a little too much
Getting positive feedback from your customers is lovely. Understanding what you do well will validate your efforts, let you know what your customers want more of, and make you feel good.
But, it’s the negative responses or feedback that will give you the insights for improving, evolving, and building upon your existing efforts.
So, rather than shutting out any negative feedback, embrace it. Segment your negative feedback and use it to boost your satisfaction rates, tackle any weaknesses in your business strategy, and better meet your customers’ needs. That’s the way to win.
Ignoring data patterns
When you start to segment your survey feedback and use online survey tools to visualise it, you’ll start to notice trends or patterns that tell you a lot about your business. Don’t ignore them.
If you, for instance, notice a dip in customer satisfaction rates towards the end of each month, you can use this trend or pattern to identify the main reason behind it – and create marketing initiatives (competitions, email communications, or incentives) to tackle the issue head on.
You might also uncover a trend based on the demand for a particular product in your niche. Using this data, you can update your existing inventory or launch a new product that offers a healthy return on investment (ROI).
Ignoring data patterns or trends will result in missed opportunities that your competitors are likely to jump on. So, keep your eyes peeled.
Failing to act on insights
We touched on this earlier, but it’s important, so we’ll say it again: you must act on your survey feedback consistently.
Requesting and collecting feedback from customers without any followthrough can seriously damage your brand reputation.
On the other hand, by using the tips in this guide to your advantage, you can act on your customers’ feedback and turn your survey data into actionable insights.
Showing your appreciation and using your survey analysis data as a vessel for meeting your audience’s needs will ensure you keep evolving and improving your business in a landscape that never stops shifting.
Transform your survey data into meaningful business insights with ScoreApp
With the right approach, you can use online surveys to improve your processes, understand your customers, and drive continual growth.
By using ScoreApp’s customisable templates and slick features, you will earn consistently solid response rates, gain access to in-depth analytics, and strengthen your customer relationships in a way that accelerates your business growth.
Are you ready to level up your survey marketing efforts? Try ScoreApp for FREE.
