Online Marketing Research

Don't Forget To Introduce Your Online Survey

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

When you're creating an online survey and working on the questionnaire design, don't forget to include an introduction to your survey. This applies to all survey types: product surveys, customer feedback forms, employee questionnaires, customer service surveys, quantitative market research studies, etc.

The purpose is just that, to introduce your survey. An introduction should include some basic parts:

1. Who? Quickly tell the respondent who you are. While they will probably figure it out based on your graphical template, it doesn't hurt to tell them a little bit about what you do.

2. What? Give a brief explanation of what topics you'll be asking about. You don't have to give away everything here, a very high level explanation will do. Here's an example:

This survey aims to better understand how people in your community use community parks.

3. Why? Explain how the respondent will ultimately benefit from the survey and how you plan to use the results. To continue with the example from above:

The information gathered in this survey will help us determine what improvements are made to our local parks.

Depending on the survey method you chose, the introduction may go on the welcome page of your survey or in your email marketing invitation. If you're using email, read these other tips for survey invitations.

Smartphone Users Willing To Switch To iPhone, Survey says

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

An online survey conducted by market researcher Crowd Science between May 19th and June 8 found 40% of smartphone users, who don't currently use have an iPhone, said they would switch to Apple with their next purchase. This is in stark contrast to the 14% of survey respondents not using Blackberry devices who said they wanted to switch to Blackberry.

With RIM recently tooting that 80% of recent customers are consumer or small business users, Blackberry might have a tough time beating out Apple. Blackberry has had such a hold on the enterprise market, there are few people who don't have a Blackberry who wants one. On the flip side, Apple's iPhone is getting new customers from the consumer and business side - particularly with the release of the iPhone 3GS. Blackberry also has to battle the customer retention and loyalty Apple has built, 80% of survey respondents who own an iPhone said they would buy an Apple handset again.

Average Time Line For Online Survey Projects

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

How long does an online survey project take? While it really depends on the project, Diane Hagglund at the Dimensional Research Blog says the typical web survey project takes three weeks. Here's a time line guide:

Week 1: Get project approval, set goals, identify participants, utilize an online survey tool to create the online survey. Basically, week one is the bulk of the market research process.

Week 2: Collect survey responses. This includes sending out your survey invitation with your email survey tool.

Week 3: Close the survey and complete your data analysis. You should have determined what analysis you wanted to do already (in week one) so it should just be execution. Depending on the project, you'll probably need to write some kind of survey report to share the findings with other key stakeholders.

Depending on the purpose of the survey, you may need to add another week or two if you want to create collateral to support marketing and sales efforts.

Diane also gives a rough time line for qualitative market research. If you're interested in reading her blog post, head on over to the Dimensional Research Blog.

81% Of Surveyors Share Results - Who Do You Share Survey Results With?

Friday, June 19, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

The most important part of any research project is sharing the findings, it doesn't matter whether it's a research report, qualitative research or survey questionnaires. Even in high school and college, a lot of research projects ended with some kind of presentation so each person or group could share what they learned from the assignment. While I don't want to reduce the importance of doing business surveys and market research, the idea is very much the same. If you don't share the results, why did you conduct the research?

At the end of all our webinars and events, we conduct post event surveys. I know this comes a surprise considering we're an online event management and web surveys software provider. Recently, looking at the results of our attendee feedback survey for our Web Survey Best Practices Webinar, I found some interesting results surrounding who survey results are shared with in an organization.

Which of the following groups does your organization
share survey results with? (Please select all that apply)

Over 1,800 attendees have completed our follow up survey since the beginning of the year, but only 130 (approximately 7%) do not share survey results with any of those groups. I'm going to go back later and do a cross tab survey report to see if that 7% currently does surveys. But that's a later post...

For now, I'd like to explore the options a surveyor has to share their research findings with various groups. The answer obviously depends on the online survey software tool you're using. Cvent users have a few options at their disposal:

• Manually pull a report each time someone asks to see the data
• Share your log in so individuals can pull the reports themselves
• Park reports so approved individuals can access the reports when they need them

There are other options, but these are the "best" three. Among them, there's a clear leader. Parking reports is the easiest, fastest and most secure way to share your online survey data. In the past, we've given you an idea of the power of parked reports. But in light of our survey finding, I thought it was appropriate to remind you how easy sharing real time survey reports can be. Did I forget to mention that parking reports does not just give a snap shot of the moment in time you set up the report? Each time someone accesses the report, it generates the most up to date information. This means if I launched my survey, created a parked report and emailed the weblink to my senior management yesterday, when they go to see the results today not only will they see the results from before I created the parked report, they will also see all results that have come in since then. I'm happy and management is happy, and I never had to log back in to pull a report.

How do you currently share your survey data and with whom?

Survey In Real Life: Setting Up Home Networks Is Difficult

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

30% of respondents in ABI Research's survey said setting up home networks is difficult. As someone who has set up a home network several times, I groan each time I need to do it - or when something goes wrong. I would agree with these results, I can do it but it's not as simple as plugging in and going. ABI Research also found 11% of respondents actually return products because they are "too hard."

If your organization sells hardware, software, services for personal computer networks, a survey report like this one should catch your eye. ABI found over half the respondents indicate troubleshooting software would be extremely or very helpful. Could that be an new offering for your organization?

This is a great example of why secondary data is useful. Without having to spend the time of conducting your own market research, you can get the findings you need to make business decisions.

ABI Research's survey report, Feedback on Home Networking Setup and Connection Issues, is available on their website.

Progress Bars in Online Surveys: The Good.. The Bad.. The Ugly

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

People argue for and against using progress bars in online surveys all the time. Personally, I think the length of the survey determines whether a progress bar is a good idea. I should point out here, length of the survey means total questions, not just the longest possible path a respondent may take. Sometimes when people use skip, branch and other advanced logic they forget the total number of questions matters when it comes to the progress bar.

Think about these three scenarios:

Scenario 1: Your cable provider sends you an email survey invitation to complete their customer satisfaction survey. You click through to the survey. At this point, you have no idea how many questions you're in for (unless the email invitation told you), but most likely you were given an estimate of how long the survey should take. You begin answering the survey, because of your responses, you're taken down a specific question path. You begin to wonder how much is left in the survey and notice there's a progress bar! This survey is rather complex on the backend and has several paths and over 120 questions, but any given respondent can only travel down a path of 20-30 questions. If your path was the first path, it will look like you have a lot more pages to go through before the end. At this point you're close to done, but unfortunately, the progress bar makes you think you have many, many more questions left. You bail. You don't have time to complete their long feedback form and will think twice about participating in one of their "short" surveys in the future.

Scenario 2: Your cable provider sends you an email asking you to complete their customer service questionnaire. You click through to the survey, answer several questions and notice the progress bar at the top has hardly moved at all. You begin to think, "uuuuuugh this was a mistake!" Then suddenly the progress bar shows you're almost done. Because you're curious, you go back and change your answers to see what other questions the cable provider is asking customers (after all you may want to add your two cents). Suddenly, without meaning to you've messed up their data by not respondent honestly.

Scenario 3: Your cable provider sends you an email invitation to complete their market research survey. You click through to the survey. You answer several questions begin to wonder if the survey will be over soon, but you keep going. A few questions later, you've finished the survey in the amount of time the cable provider's email marketing said you would. Even though it was a little annoying to complete the survey, it was a good experience, and hopefully it will improve your service! Furthermore, they kept their promise on the time and haven't lost your trust.

If you're conducting a business survey, whether it's an employee feedback questionnaire, course evaluation or client survey, which of the above scenarios would you like your respondents to experience? I'm hoping you're thinking to yourself "Scenario 3, of course!" I certainly want my respondents to finish (not abandon) my survey and give me honest feedback (not change their answers to see what else I'm asking).

That said, progress bars wont discourage people from finishing a short survey with honest answers. As part of your survey design, you should consider whether a progress bar will add to the respondent experience or take away from it (and your results).

3 Traps To Catch Bogus Survey And Questionnaire Responses

Friday, June 5, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

People often worry about the integrity of their survey data and how to protect it. While there's no magic solution, here are a few tips to help you identify those respondents who are not thoughtfully answering your survey questionnaire. Chances are you spent a lot of time creating a questionnaire to meet your survey project goals, ensuring the result is quality responses should be at the top of your list. Here are a few things you can do during the survey creation to ensure the integrity of your survey results:

1. Question respondents' qualifications. Some people refer to this as a knowledge trap. The idea is to verify the respondent is the type of professional they claim to be (and you need for your survey). Typically these questions belong towards the top with other qualifying questions. For example, if you're conducting a market research survey targeting educators you may ask a question specific to their field. But you can also use this tactic for product evaluation surveys or customer questionnaires by asking questions related to your product or service that only a client will be able to answer. Here's a sample question for a Cvent user:

Example Customer Survey Question: Knowledge Trap for Client Survey

2. Test respondents' logic. These types of questions are intended to catch Christmas Tree-ers and straight liners (those who give the same response to every question to speed things along). For this type of trap, you ask the same question multiple ways. Here are a example survey questions utilizing a logic trap:

Example Survey Questions: Logic Test for Product Evaluation Survey

Depending on how you use logic traps, it may be necessary to space them out. You wouldn't want to have my sample survey questions appear one right after another. It will irritate respondents because you're asking them the same thing twice and wasting their time. Don't be overly obvious, like I was, about it. When you're looking at your results, if someone said it was very likely they would buy the product in the first question but said it was very unlikely they would buy the product in the second, you probably have a problem.

3. Bring respondent attention back. Sometimes when you're completing a survey or questionnaire online you begin to go on auto-pilot only reading the part of the question or just skipping to the responses - particularly if the survey is long. A way to combat this tendency is to add some attention traps to your questionnaire design. An easy way to do this is to throw an unrelated attribute into a ranking scale. It forces the respondent to stop think for a second about what the question is asking and refocus. Here's an example:

Example Survey Question: Attention Logic In Ranking Questions

Instead of throwing out a respondent because they fail one of these tests, I would suggest simply throwing out that specific answer. In other words, purge data at the question level not the respondent level. If they fail every test and their completion time is way off, perhaps their response is impacting the integrity of your results. After all, the goal of every survey, questionnaire or feedback form should be to answer a question and use the survey report to make decisions.

Focus Groups - Online and Offline - Are Not Enough

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

You know when you're sitting in a room, how the feeling in the room can quickly shift one way or another based on people's body language, comments or tone of voice? The same thing can happen in your focus group or forum (even if it's being held over the phone or online). I'm sure you've felt it before, in fact, sitting in a meeting today I experienced several severe swings - and no one was even talking. Silence can have the same impact.

This can have big impacts on your research - whether it's market research, a customer advisory panel or a town hall meeting. I don't want to launch into some long drawn out thing about why you should conduct surveys instead of these other methods, because I believe both research methods have a place in an organization (and even within a project). I do want to stress that because of various factors impacting discussions, it's important to have a surveying aspect as part of the project. Qualitative research methods can give skewed data very quickly just because of what one person says or does, and that's small point compared to how unrepresentative most research can be or the added social desirability bias.

A good example of this is pretty much any PR fiasco happening in social media or any FAIL hashtag. A couple months ago I posted about how conversations in social media isn't necessarily representative of your target population after Lightspeed Research found most moms were not negatively impacted by the Motrin Mom commercial. A few mommy bloggers took offense to the ad and blogged about it. It spread quickly and before you knew what everyone was pointing and saying FAIL about the entire conversation had changed.

Lots of people think of focus groups as conversations that happen in person or over the phone. But in today's new world, that's not always the case. You have the opportunity to monitor conversations surrounding your market, competitors, your product, etc., but that doesn't mean you should act just based on what you hear. One person can quickly swing the conversation in an entirely new direction just because they disagree with something. The only unfortunate part about the quick spread of information online is before you have a chance to stop it everyone has formed an opinion about something they have never even heard of. For this reason, I think its important to keep surveys in your back pocket when you need data to make business decisions.

Where have you see instances of results being skewed because of a shift in the room's atmosphere or an online discussion?

URLs Matter With Online Surveys

Thursday, May 28, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

MR Heretic recently posted about Phishy Survey URLs. The main point is how having a weird looking URL for your online survey could lower your response rate and destroy the customer trust your organization has worked so hard to gain. Why? If your organization is including IP addresses in your web survey link, consumers will think it looks like phishing and decide against clicking the link. By not clicking the link in your email marketing survey invitation, customers are opting out of your online market research or customer survey.

My recommendation: use a customer survey software or email survey tool that allows you to brand your own survey URL without any IT staff or programming knowledge. Cvent's Web Survey Software gives each survey it's own unique URL automatically, but you can take that a step forward and include your organization's name in the URL as well.

Getting clients to respond to your survey is critical for any survey project's success. There are enough obstacles standing between you and the desired completed online survey submission - don't ruin it by using a phishy looking URL.

Choose Customer Survey Software With Robust Customer Databases

Friday, May 22, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Have you ever been asked to take a customer survey and a few questions in told you don't match the survey criteria? It's pretty frustrating. I've told the organization, "sure, I'll spend a few minutes giving you feedback for your customer research project." Then, I'm rejected and kicked out of the online survey. Usually, I'm kicked out after answering questions they should already have on file. Seems silly they even wasted any email marketing on me. These organizations need to step up their game and invest in quality customer survey software (I would recommend Cvent, obviously).

If your online survey tool is a good one, you have the ability to import critical information into the contact database. We've mentioned before how important having a robust contact database is for segmenting purposes, but the value definitely goes beyond that. I could argue this is a matter of poor email survey segmentation, but sometimes it's important to turn the problem a few degrees and see it from a new side.

Perhaps you don't have some information on a customer you'll need later, you can quickly survey customers to gauge product satisfaction and gather other customer information. You can create any number of custom contact fields in the Cvent contact database, beyond the basic address, phone, email information.

It may be important to your survey projects to be able to run cross-tabulation survey reports based on which tier customer someone is. If all tier 1's feel a certain way, and all tier 2's feel differently, maybe there's a problem that needs to be addressed. While my opening example was a matter of poor segmentation, this one isn't. It's a matter of needing quality data for strong customer analysis - without having to ask the extra questions. You should only ever ask a customer a basic question once. Remember: the likelihood of abandonment increases with each additional question asked. I would argue it skyrockets when additional questions are questions the organization should have (somewhere).

This is another basic case of respecting your customers' time. If you constantly tell them they aren't qualified to complete your customer feedback survey, they're going to stop volunteering to take it - then how will you conduct market research and customer analysis?

What's In A Name? Get Customer Feedback With Online Feedback Forms

Thursday, May 21, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

If you're a beer fan, you may have noticed Magic Hat has begun giving their mystery beers a more "traditional" name. In the past, they've named their one-off mystery beers with numbers, by the batch number. The mystery beer now is called Odd Notions and includes the year and season. Some of these mystery beers are released to be a regularly offered beer. When that happens how do they name their new beers? An avid beer enthusiast and I got to talking about this recent change. He suggested that they must do market research to come up with the names, and I thought maybe they ran contests. After visiting their website and some heavy investigation, we found how they do it. Feedback forms! With a description of the beer (including color, body, bitterness, malts, hops, etc.), they give website visitors the opportunity to give feedback on the beer - including suggesting a name! I can only assume the customer feedback is used when deciding whether to release the beer full time.

Depending on your organization, products and services, the name could be a critical aspect of your strategy. Market research has shown customers hate when organizations change the names of their products. But when you get customer feedback on new product names, you may find you increase customer loyalty by engaging them in your process. Customers love to give feedback, despite common beliefs, particularly when it's a easy and comes with a good experience.

If you're interested in naming the next Magic Hat mystery batch, wander over to their website and offer your feedback.

Step One In Survey Research: Set Goals

Monday, May 18, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Surveys Without Goals Are Like Loose Puzzle Pieces

Before you start writing any survey you need to define clear project goals. I mean it. Before you place pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard to design a questionnaire, clearly defined project goals is a must. With out goals, your survey project is going to be worthless. Well, not quite worthless, you'll get some facts out of it, but they wont mean anything. They'll be single pieces in a 1,000 piece puzzle. To make sense, puzzle pieces need to fit together to form the whole picture, and survey data is like that as well. Each piece fits together to give you the whole picture.

Defining your goals for the project will help guide you when creating the survey, whether it's a customer satisfaction or client survey, staff opinion questionnaire, market research, or course evaluation. Once you begin writing questions and designing the questionnaire, if cannot answer the question "what will I do with this data?" then the question does not belong in your project. By defining a goal at the beginning, the survey writer is forced to eliminate unnecessary questions - hence keeping the survey short.

This rule applies for both qualitative and quantitative research. Read my past post to learn more about the six steps in the market research process.

Warning: Responses Collected Through Social Media May Skew Your Survey Reports

Friday, May 15, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

Social media seems to be taking over the world of marketing. A lot of discussion has focused on how to set up a Twitter account, and how to use it to listen and engage with customers. Many people are beginning to call social media the new medium for market research and surveys. But I would have to disagree. While it's an excellent idea to listen to what people are saying about their needs, your industry or your products, other qualitative and quantitative research methods are still essential. Social media shouldn't replace online communities, focus groups, etc. They still have their place in the rapidly changing world of online market research.

What really keeps me up at night is the idea of people distributing their surveys through social media. For some surveys, this could be an okay approach. The problem with it is the data. If you just get responses through these channels, there's no way your survey results will be representative of your target market, unless your target market is your Twitter followers. If your target population happens to be your Twitter followers, then your survey will be representative because you're inviting everyone (a.k.a. conducting a census survey), but how likely is it that you only want the opinions from that small group?

If you do decide that a non-probability sample is a requirement for your online survey project, try to find additional channels to solicit feedback responses through in addition to social media.

What is Statistical Significance?

Friday, May 8, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

I've always considered myself pretty good at math, even if I am a bit rust now, but statistics have always been a challenge for me. So when I first started hearing the term "statistical significance" in conjunction with market research results, I would be really impressed.

Most people make this mistake.

Just because a survey finding is considered statistically significant, it does not mean the finding is important or that it should be used for making decisions. When a survey findings are statistically significant it means the surveyor is very sure the statistic is reliable. Survey sample size has a lot to do with whether or not your survey research will be significant. Hopefully this example will help clarify what I mean:

Orange Corp. is conducting a market research study. As part of the study, they want to identify if there is a difference in how well male and female spell. Orange Corp.'s sample size 1,000 people for their survey research. Males scored an average of 98 on the test, and women scored an average of 100. This is a very small difference, but it is considered statistically significant. Just because the findings are statistically significant does not mean the findings are important. The results are only significant because of the large sample size. If the sample size was reduced to only 25 people, the findings would not be significant.

Small differences in results can easily be defined as being statistically significant if the sample size is large enough. Statistical significance only tells you if there is a relationship, not how strong the relationship is or the decision making value.

Five Steps to Begin Interpreting Online Survey Results

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

The hardest part of any survey project is creating a solid questionnaire. If you create a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Here are five easy steps for analyzing survey data:

1. Take a birds-eye-view. A good first step of interpreting survey data is to take an overall look at the data and responses. Consider these questions:

How many people completed the survey?
What was the response rate?
What was the average amount of time respondents spend completing the questionnaire?
How well do the respondents represent the survey target group?

Answering these questions at the beginning should help you understand how reliable your data is and evaluate how potential biases could be skewing survey results.

2. Look at the responses to your key survey questions. If the goal of the survey was to evaluate customer satisfaction and identify possible product enhancements, a key survey question may be what percentage of respondents said they were unsatisfied and what percentage were extremely satisfied. What kinds of enhancements could improve the customer experience and increase the satisfaction with the product?

3. Cross-tabulate demographic characteristics with responses to key questions. By cross-tabulating the responses by demographic characteristics such as age, gender, experience levels will help you which features may be more important to key groups. Cross-tabulating helps marketing executives further identify target markets.

4. Look at the open ended questions. We've given you tips to help analyze open ended questions in the past. Using open ended questions in any type of market research or customer survey should help you identify the language your target market is using. Sometimes marketers think customers understand the messaging they choose, while the customers are describing the problem and the ideal solution in a completely different way. Open ended questions can help identify some of these disparities so the marketing department can create messaging to speak your customer's language.

5. Create a "to do" list and take action. We've mentioned before that conducting surveys, whether they're online questionnaires or paper feedback forms, create expectations. Be sure to act on the survey results.

Giving the survey analysis as much thought as the survey creation is critical if you want to be able to really improve your organizations value adds. Some people believe that the analysis process beings only after the web based survey has been launched and responses have been collected. Unfortunately, this approach will hurt your survey results. You should consider the types of customer analysis you want to do while developing a questionnaire. The question type you chose when creating an online survey will limit the analysis. So while the above steps have to do with interpreting the data, you need to think about the process in the beginning as well.

Survey Methods: Non-Probabily Sampling

Thursday, April 23, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

In the past we've explained the different types of probability survey sampling methods, but only mentioned non-probability samples in passing. There are two main advantages to using a non-probability survey method, convenience and cost. Sounds great, but there's a pretty big drawback. Non-probability survey research methods don't allow estimates to how likely survey results represent the actual target population.

Here are two main types of non-probability samples:

Voluntary sample. A voluntary sample is exactly like it sounds, respondents volunteer to complete a survey. As you can imagine, people opting-in to a survey usually have a strong interest in the topic. Their strong interest, of course, could be negative or positive.

Convenience sample. Convenience samples are made up of individuals who are easy to contact. For example, an interviewer needs respondents for a market research study and goes to a local mall because it's close to the interviewer's house. This would be a convenience sample.

Using one of the four types of probably sampling (simple random, systematic, stratified, or cluster) will give you more confidence in the representativeness and accuracy of your survey data, but sometimes there are constraints that limit surveyors to non-probability survey methods.

Tips To Improve The Telephone Survey Experience

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

I cannot begin to explain how frustrating I find telephone surveys. They drive me crazy. I'm always happy to share my opinions with organizations but don't waste an hour of my day on a bad telephone survey. A bad survey experience reflects on the brand. Respondent's experiences converge into the customer experience, they don't keep the buying and the surveying experiences separate in their minds.

It's easy to create a questionnaire online with web survey software and finding online survey tools that fits your needs is easy. So why are there not more online market research studies being done? Why does my phone ring every night, while I'm eating dinner, with another request to complete a telephone survey? Technology improves the respondent experience tenfold. As I hinted at above, respondent experience impacts customer experience, which influences customer loyalty and retention. If you think you need additional channels for your data collection other than online, here are a few telephone survey tips to help the respondent experience:

1. Training is essential. Make sure your interviewer is well trained and understands their job. For open ended questions, have the interviewer read back the response, ask for more details, and clarify the response they have recorded is exactly what the respondent said. Interviewer bias has a tendency to creep into open ended questions and training is the best way to combat bias.

2. Vary the question type. Asking more than a few of the same question type in a row becomes tedious for the respondent. Respondents also lose interest and you begin to lose their focus. Alter your question types to keep respondents engaged and giving honest feedback.

3. Speak English. With more and more organizations and market research agencies offshoring their telephone surveys, it's really important to ensure your interviewers speak clear English. It should not, at any point, become the respondent's responsibility to try to figure out what the interviewer is asking. Remember, you called them and asked them to help you. In most cases, the respondent isn't getting anything out of it.

4. Only ask important questions. This is a best practice for all survey types whether its a web based survey or a paper feedback form. If you don't need the answer to the question, take it out. If the question does not directly relate back to the survey project objectives, take it out. Do not ask the same question three different ways, one way is good enough. Respondents completing an online questionnaire may be more forgiving of extra questions than in a telephone survey, don't waste their time with extra questions.

The only time I recommend using telephone surveys is when you're trying to build a relationship. Asking for customer service feedback or conducting customer satisfaction surveys are excellent opportunities to take the time to call your clients. The personal touch can go a long way to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Market Research: You Need More Than Qualitative Data

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

When any organization comes up with an idea for a new product or service, they test the concept, right? Well, I certainly hope they do before investing in the development and taking the new offering to market. Gathering product feedback when considering international expansion should be a no-brainer, it's the same for a new product or service.

Qualitative Research Method: Focus Group

If you're like a lot of organizations, you might start out with qualitative research. Depending on your target market and budget, you might use online communities, focus groups, customer interviews, etc to gauge your new product ideas. But after the qualitative research, don't make the mistake of thinking you're done with your market research. Organizations that don't include quantitative research in their product development process often see product failure. While there are plenty of benefits to conducting qualitative research, it's not always the best method to get a representative look at the thoughts and opinions of your target market.

It's important to always include some quantitative research method, and by all means incorporate insights and lessons learned from focus groups. My first suggestion would be to ensure that no matter your quantitative research method, make sure there's a high priority placed in selecting a representative sample. Second suggestion, use web survey software to conduct a product survey online.

Whether you're deciding to expand internationally or create a new product, let research help you gather the data you need to make your next business move a success.

Sometimes You Need Survey Question Clarification

Friday, April 17, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

At the beginning of the week, I received a phone call soliciting responses for a telephone market research study. Because I'm a curious individual, or maybe because I like to criticize what people are doing wrong, I always participate in surveys.

We're cruising right through the survey, and I'm answering the woman's questions when suddenly, she asked a question I wasn't sure I understood. I wanted to be able to give the interviewer the best answer I could. I asked if she could clarify and define the term in respect to the parameters of the survey research. It might have been because I recently wrote a post on defining terms and jargon in market research, customer service or client surveys, but I instantly had several scenarios of what the questionnaire designer had in mind in creating the question. Her reply:

I'm sorry, but we do not want to influence your response. Just answer based on whatever you think it means.

Influence my response? Whatever I think it means? Aren't they concerned with having valid data?

My point: What you're asking may seem obvious to you and others within your organization, but it may not be obvious to survey respondents. While shorter surveys are always better, don't shorten them at the expense of including necessary information so respondents can answer your questions in a meaningful way.

Conduct Online Surveys in French and Spanish

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf

We've mentioned how conducting surveys can help organizations expand into international markets and how it's important to localize your survey campaigns to gather the most accurate survey results. Cvent's Web Survey tool can now support surveys in foreign languages! Our online survey software now offers French and Spanish surveying options.

Conduct Surveys in English, French or Spanish

While you are still responsible for translating your survey into French or Spanish, organizations have the ability to perform market research or customer surveys globally in respondent's local language (as long as globally means to French, English or Spanish speaking countries).

Example Survey Question: Allez-vous visiter Paris cette annee?

If this year's goals include evaluating new international markets, consider Cvent. Contact us today to learn more about how our web based survey software can help you achieve your organizational goals.