Have you ever wondered what your customers think about your service or product? Are you sure which products your followers might see in your shop? Are you looking for ways to engage with your subscribers?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you will love to learn these eight advantages of surveys and polls, which are actually included for free in your email marketing account.   

What is a survey?

A survey consists of a series of questions asked to an audience (the larger the better) in order to gather data or to detect statistical tendencies in their opinions about a specific issue.

A survey can help to get an idea about how happy your customers are with your service or to understand who they are and what exactly they are looking for.

What is a poll?

A poll is a mini survey of one or two (at most) questions that may be published on a website to quickly measure public opinion about a topic at a specific moment.

Both options are the perfect tools for inviting your audience to speak their minds.

The answers may help you to make the necessary adjustments to your products and services or to prepare the right content for your segments that you can create with the information provided.

What are the 8 advantages of surveys and polls?

1. Starting a conversation: Sending a survey with open questions is the ideal way to engage with your audience and to open a channel of communication with them. People like it when somebody cares about their opinion.
2. Easy and fast: Create your survey in no time and start receiving feedback from the very moment you sent it to your subscribers. Outsourcing this service would require time and money.
3. Innovative ideas: Seeing your service through your clients’ eyes can help you to improve it. They may be experiencing issues that you are not aware of, or give you new ideas you wouldn’t have thought of.
4. No pressure: People will respond to your poll or survey at the time they consider appropriate, without a time limit and without anyone who can distort their response.
5. Satisfaction: Knowing the level of satisfaction of your customers is essential to growing your business and moving in the right direction. A survey will help you to double check if your perception actually matches the opinion of your customers about you. It’s like getting a performance review on your service offerings and support just by sending a poll or survey!
   
6. All-in-one solution: We tend to use more and more different tools with separate logins and functionalities, but surveys and polls are actually included for free in your email marketing account, at least with Benchmark Email, and can be sent to your whole database by email with just one click.
7. No extra costs: Polls and surveys are free: they are included in your Benchmark account at no additional cost.
8. Statistical results: The analysis of results will be quick for all but the open questions. Results will be displayed in percentages that will help you to know the preferences of the majority at just one glimpse.

Keys to create a good survey

Decide for each question if it is mandatory or not.

Some question need to be answered by all respondents and some just make sense for a few of them.

Surveys should be easy and quick to answer. According to your audience and the aim of  the survey, we recommend not asking more than five questions.

Give a benefit in return for the collaboration to respond. People will dedicate some time on answering your questions. They will do this more happily if they receive a little gift (download, discount, etc.) in exchange.

Ask closed questions if you want to get specific, quantifiable answers. However, if you need to explore your respondents opinions and feelings a bit more deeply, leave them some space with open questions.

For closed questions, make sure you offer all possible answers or include an “others” field if you are not sure.

Use the different types of answers strategically:

• “One line” are open but short answers, which allow up to 255 characters. They are ideal to allow the respondent to give a free answer will still be easy to analyze since it’s brief.
  
• “Radio” responses allow the respondent to select only one of the given options. It is a closed question used for specific and mutually excluding answers.

• “Check” responses look the same as the “Radio” ones but allow several answers. This is useful when more than one option might apply.
• “Dropdown” responses fulfill the same function as the “radio” responses, as the respondent will be only able to pick one, but won’t be able to view all answers at once. Dropdowns are mainly used for long lists of choices like “Countries” or “Months”.
• “Descriptive text” responses are similar to “One line” responses but will have no limitation of characters. You can get high quality feedback with these questions, but analyzing the results might take you longer.

• “Multiple choice” answers allow the respondent to select several options. It is used when the response options are not mutually exclusive.

Benchmark Surveys

Benchmark surveys are easy and quick to create. You just have to be clear about the goal of the survey and begin to think about the questions. Also if you need a bit of inspiration to get started, at Benchmark we offer you 6 templates for your surveys.

Survey Templates

Blank Survey: This template is entirely blank. You create all the questions for this survey from scratch.

Services Provided: This survey measures customer satisfaction with goods or services and gives participants a chance to suggest improvement.

Event Participation: This template gathers opinion on a special event, from prior expectations to whether the event lived up to those expectations.

Company Satisfaction: This template measures if customers are pleased with a company or organization, and gathers demographic data from participants.

Website Survey: This survey tracks customer opinion on your Website’s appearance, content and more.

In-store purchase: This template not only measures customer opinion on past product purchases, but sets a gauge for future purchases

Go ahead and start creating your own polls and surveys and use the information we have shared with you in this post.

And… would you allow us to make a small survey with you?

How successful was your first survey?

It is an open question and you can leave us your experience in the comments section below :-).