Market Research Tool

After writing survey questions, creating an online survey using one of the many online survey software tools available (I recommend you try Cvent's survey system - of course!) and finally posting survey questions to the web, you need to get your survey sample in order. Posting the survey online can be an easy task with survey hosting software that does all the coding and back end work for you. But selecting your survey sample can sometimes be an added headache in the online survey questionnaire process.

Chances are you're going to look to email marketing to invite survey respondents, probably even using the email survey tool that's part of the system you've chosen. But how are you going to select the sample and get your consumer market research, credit union survey or any other type of questionnaire into their inboxes?

Hopefully when you were shopping for satisfaction survey software or a market research tool you made sure the system had a robust contact database you could segment based on various criteria to fit your survey needs. Using our tool, you can segment your database and easily send email survey invites to the resulting survey sample. There's no need to export contacts between systems to select the group of contacts for this survey.

Cvent's online data collection tool makes it easy to collect customer insights when conducting consumer surveys. Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about how Cvent Web Surveys software can help with your next survey project.

I read a great post by Paul Dunay over at Marketing Prof's Daily Fix blog last week: Is Real Time Marketing in your future? Paul made a great point, a few years ago marketing was allowed some ramp up time for strategic shifts, today that's not the case. We've moved into the era of Real Time Marketing where we are expected to plan and react quickly - not in 45 days.

So where do survey questionnaires fit into this new age of marketing? I think it's clear paper surveys and paper survey software is not the way to go anymore. Paper surveys take entirely too long to send out, collect survey responses and do the required data entry before you can even begin to analyze survey responses. On the bright side, there is great online survey creation software to help you get a web survey project of the ground quickly. Online marketing survey software cuts down the time to create online survey questionniares with the right survey questions, send email invitations, collect feedback and analyze survey data.

But wait, creating business surveys isn't instant, neither is collecting responses or presenting survey findings. This is true, but your marketing team also can't fly blind when making instant decisions. Even though we need to react instantly, we also need to have the data on hand to make informed decisions.

Paul shares one of his boss' sayings with us, if you had a leak in your basement would you wait 45 days for a consultant to put on a webinar on How to fix your leaky basement? The answer is of course not, you're going to start getting quotes to fix the leak immediately. Same thing with marketing surveys, you need to collect data to be able to make decisions. I would recommend not waiting until you have a leak to begin collecting customer feedback or conducting client satisfaction surveys.

I've been asked a lot recently what's the difference is between Cvent Web Surveys branch logic and our advanced survey logic features. I can definitely see where various types of survey question logic can get confusing. Hopefully this post will eliminate the confusion! When you're creating an online survey, it's important to include question logic so survey respondents only see questions that make sense for them.

BRANCH LOGIC:

Take the following example business survey questions:


I hope you can see it doesn't make sense to ask people who saw a TV ad about how they found you on search, and vice versa is also true. But you do want to know more about how they found you through a search and have a series of questions you want to ask. Branch logic allows you do do this. You can add "branches" to your survey so only those survey respondents who saw the TV ad see questions about the ad and those who used search see quesitons about search. I think this graphic does a pretty good job of explaining how branch logic works:


ADVANCED LOGIC:

Advanced logic has the same principle, you only want people to see questions that are relevant to them. However, using advanced logic gives you more freedom to narrow down who sees a question based on up to four criteria. You can pull criteria from a survey respondent's contact information (assuming you're not conducting an anonymous survey) and how they responded to previous questions.


What this means is only people who have Marketing in their title, work in California, heard about the organization from word of mouth and did not select option A in question 8 will see this question. Unlike Branch Logic where you control a set of questions by direction a survey respondent down a path, Advanced Logic allows you to only show questions to "qualified" respondents.

Adding in logic, whether it's branch, skip, advanced or pipe improves the respondent experience and keeps them engaged. More engaged respondents mean higher response rates and lower abandonment rates. If you're in the market for kiosk survey software, market research tools, or just an online survey system that will allow you to collect customer feedback or conduct employee surveys, make sure you ask what types of question logic are supported by their enterprise feedback management solution.

It keeps coming up in the social media space when talking about market research data:


It depends on the target market you need for your marketing analysis. Twitter, and other social networks, are only going to represent part of your target market. For example, your early adopters may be on Twitter but the rest of your customers are not. If early adopters are the people you want to collect feedback from using an online market research survey software, Twitter is a good place to start asking product research survey questions. On the other side, Twitter may not be the ideal place for conducting an online survey targeting customers who use a wheelchair.

The danger with using social media for data collection is adding bias into you market research process. Online survey tools can certainly help you avoid various types of survey biases, but you do still need to think through your survey methods and process no matter what marketing survey software you choose to create marketing surveys.