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6 Creative Ways to Use a Survey to Engage Your Audience

When you think of online surveys and polls you probably think of the customer satisfaction survey you send out from time to time. But surveys are also an easy way to make the communications you’re already doing—email newsletters, content on your Facebook page, etc—more engaging. Engaged and interested customers and members are more likely to stick around longer and spread the word about you. Surveys help you make your marketing more relevant: when your customer and members get the chance to share their perspectives, you get the kind of insightful feedback you need to create engaging offers, content, and more.

Here are 6 ideas for creative ways that you can use surveys to engage with your audience. 

1. Get blog topics

Create a poll asking which blog topics your audience is most interested in. Be sure to put it in an email, on your Facebook Page, or link to it on your Twitter account. After all, you’re trying to create the content your audience wants to read—they know best what that is!

2. Use polls and surveys as social media content

You know you’re supposed to regularly update your Twitter account and Facebook Page, but once in a while everyone gets “social media block.” A short survey or poll makes fast, easy content. Use your poll to find out what kind of information your audience wants to see on your social pages in the future!

3. Let your list segment itself

Segmenting your list helps you reach the right audience with the right message. The right message is the one that fits that particular audience’s needs, and who better knows their needs than the audience itself? Add a poll to your email newsletter asking your list to segment themselves, whether by product, industry, program, etc, so you can better target your communications.

4. Get website feedback

Your organization’s website is one of the first places your customers or supporters are going to go to learn more about you, and if you’re selling your product or raising money through your site, it’s an even bigger deal. Add a link to a short survey and find out if your visitors like your site’s layout, can find the information they’re looking for, or if they like a recent improvement.
5. Evaluate your purchase process

If you’re selling or accepting donations on your site, you probably send a follow-up email to confirm, right? Add a link to a survey or poll in that email and find out if your customers are satisfied with the purchase process, and what you can do to make it better.

6. Learn what events they’re looking for

Planning an event is a big deal, especially when you’re a nonprofit that relies on events to help raise the funds you need to do your work. Before you invest time and money into planning an event you hope your supporters will like, create a poll asking what kind of event they’d like to attend, and give them some options.

Go ahead, try out one of these ideas and grab your audience’s attention with content that’s gotten a boost from surveys and polls, and give your customers, members, and prospects a chance to tell you what’s on their minds.

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Gina Watkins is a leading expert on e-marketing for small business – and has a real passion for helping businesses to succeed. Her ongoing series of dynamic lectures are filled with real-world examples, humor and results-driven wisdom garnered from more than two decades of sales, business development and marketing experience. In addition to owning her own business, she is an award-winning direct marketer, has been featured on WUSA Channel 9’s Mind Over Money show, Dr. Gayle Carson’s Women In Business radio show, Morgan State’s Briefcase Radio program, and in numerous other media. In her role as Constant Contact Regional Development Director, she’s presented to more than ten thousand seminar attendees about the keys to success with easy, affordable, highly effective technology tools that grow trusted business relationships.

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