“I was totally surprised when I got the results of my recent customer survey. We thought our buyers are much younger then they actually are. And many of them are buying our product for a different reason than we made it for …”

Only three weeks ago Michael had emailed a customer survey to his about 6000 subscribers and got 550 completely filled out forms back. That's quite a lot. Michael achieved this good return rate by combining the survey with a random draw for a US$ 700 prize, some additional smaller prizes, and due to the fact that his email subscriber list is quite targeted.

Since than Michael could increase his sales by 15% just by using this kind of information. What did he do? Not much just the following.

• Modified the copywriting of two of his sales pages and created new experiments in Google's Web Site Optimizer to integrated it smoothly.
  
• Added a few new pages to the info section of his Web site
  
• Created additional AdWords Ads for his campaigns and split tested them.
  
• Sent an "answer" newsletter to his customers.

The total input of labor for the survey, the analysis, and the implementation of the recommendations of the results was 4 person-work-days, altogether. Next time Michael will conduct a customer survey, it won't be even as much work anymore.

A customer survey via email is one choice to get more customer feedback. What are you planning to do or what have you done already?

• Email Survey?
• Feedback Form on your Web site?
• Question Time on your Blog
• Squeeze Page with attached questionnaire
• Exit Question
• Entry Question
• Give-Away upon questionnaire
• …

Are you listening carefully to your customers? As explained above, listening might not be enough, when you ask them, your listening will be more worthwhile. Otherwise you might not hear much of a feedback.

Yours
John

P.S.: Watch out for my next blog post, because I want to listen to you.