Mobile Market Reseearch Resources

Maintaining a Market Research Budget with a Platform of Relentless Quality

While many businesses rely on a set marketing budget, few allocate funds specifically towards a market research budget. This is troubling, as it shows that budgeting for market research is secondary if not completely swept under the rug.

When businesses aren’t heedful to a market research budget, they either fall behind on their market research needs or wind up over-spending — and it shows in the numbers, as businesses spend up to $50,000 on market research alone.

But does high marketing spend yield considerable profits for businesses? Are they obtaining a steady ROI on their investments? And most importantly, are their market research investments bringing them any value?

This article delves into the market research budget and how a market research platform that offers relentless quality can support it to its maximum potential.

Understanding the Market Research Budget

Despite the importance of market research, many businesses forgo budgeting towards it, which can carry several consequences, including the aforesaid risks of over-spending or ignoring market research in its entirety.

First off, it is crucial to fully understand the market research budget along with its associations.

A market research budget is a portion of designated funds set aside for market research specifically. In regards to its portion aspect, this budget itself is a portion of a marketing budget, which includes all the subsets of marketing, specifically the kinds that are used by a business, as not all businesses will use the same marketing functions.

The following lists several key components of a marketing budget:

Market research
Advertising
Branding
1. Brand tracking, brand equity
Public relations (PR)
Website development and redesign
Website management
SEO and SEM
Content marketing

Market research requires its own budget, given its importance to a business’s success and the various market research techniques, components, tools and methods. Much like with a marketing budget, not all businesses will require all using all the items in this budget.

The following enumerates the key considerations in a market research budget:

Qualitative market research
Quantitative market research
Syndicated research
Field Research
Focus groups
Interviews
Survey panels
An online survey platform

Market Research Budget Recommendations Vs. Actual Market Research Expenditures

The overall expenditure in a market research budget is chiefly dependent on the business that intends to conduct market research. However, there are still some recommendations and guidelines for setting up a solid market research budget.

Firstly, businesses should design a marketing budget, as this is the encompassing budget that will include all market research plans. As such, businesses should settle on a specific amount to cover all of their marketing-related activities.

Beginning at the broader marketing budget level, the U.S. Small Business Administration recommends a marketing spend of 7-8% for businesses, that is, if a company has a net profit margin of 10-12% after all expenses.

This recommended range, however, is not the reality for businesses across various verticals. Businesses are allocating between 8-12% of their funds towards marketing, according to a study by the marketing insights firm CMO Survey.

High-growth technology companies and SaaS businesses in particular, run the highest expenditures, with a whopping 80-120% of their revenue being funneled towards marketing.

As far as market research spending in particular, there are specific spending guidelines for different market research assets. According to marketreseach.com, researchers should divide expenditures for projects based on these assets in the following categories:

Full-Market Reports $1,500 – $8,000, most commonly $3,500 – $4,000)

Product Detail Market Reports $15,000 – $35,000

However, both syndicated research and custom research providers can offer subscription-based services that can run businesses into plans in the tens of thousands. In fact, some market research projects cost up to $100 thousand, with average costs existing in the $35-55,000 range.

Evidently, businesses spend too much on their market research efforts, exceeding many of the recommendations of a marketing and more specifically, a market research budget.

Unused and Underused Data

Given that the recommendations for a market research budget and the reality of business expenditures do not line up, businesses have to rethink their market research budget. But most importantly, businesses must reconsider their entire market research efforts.

Why is that? Because while many businesses claim to be data-driven and even go so far as to assert that they use agile data, their data provides very little use. This is because, in an attempt to prove these claims, businesses amass large quantities of data that is left unused.

Also known as dark data, most of the data that businesses collect, be it via market research, web analytics or other means, goes unused. 68% of data is not used by businesses who invest in it — that’s over two-thirds of data gone to waste.

But there’s much more to data than the data itself, which is often the result of a market research project. That’s because dark data is a manifestation of wasted efforts. When businesses have two-thirds of underused or unused data, the following has essentially been squandered:

Planning
Meetings across teams and within departments
Finding a market research method
Finding a market research tool
Money allotted towards the research
Time spent conducting the research
Survey data analysis (if the data was slightly used, but not to its full potential)

There is a major disconnect between the data that a business thinks it needs and the data it uses when over two-thirds of data is never looked at or underused. But the chief concern, in this case, is what the point was in actively planning, amassing and retrieving data when most of it goes unused.

Only a market research platform that is heavily focused on the quality of the research can resolve these issues. Therefore, such a platform optimizes all aspects of its market research techniques.

Relentless Quality to Fortify a Market Research Budget & Remedy Unused Data

A market research provider, such as an online survey platform can avoid poor market research budgeting, gaps in data usage and even the accuracy of the extracted data. But it must provide relentless quality.

Unfortunately, swaths of online survey tools account for the 68% of dark data (percentage of unused data) that they provide for businesses. These platforms are not all designed to suit a market research budget, especially their enterprise plans, which can run for thousands of dollars a month.

Effectively, the patrons of these market research providers are spending thousands on their data a month and exceeding maximum expenditures on research budget guidelines — all while abandoning 68% of their data.

In turn, dark data goes beyond exhausting the funds in a market research budget, as it creates damage in an overall market research campaign. This damage to market research includes:

Inaccurate and bias-riddled data
1. This is because researchers must analyze all of their data, certainly not just 32% of it.
An enlarged margin of error
Being a poor representation of a target market with no basis for statistical significance
An incapability of making informed predictions and perform prospective research
Difficulty to take action or make changes

When a survey platform or other market research provider offers an approach with relentless quality, it can avoid and overcome all of these obstacles. Thus, such a platform can avoid unused data and a waste of time, money, resources, et. al.

A platform that offers relentless quality brings first-rate quality to all aspects of the research process — from a massive network of publisher sites and apps to the dashboard of the platform, to the way the data is collected and presented.

When all points of the research provide optimal quality, researchers and the businesses they work for are not left wondering what went wrong, which answers are faulty, why it takes a long time to aggregate the data and more.

Thus, researchers can set up a market research budget properly and actually be able to adhere to it without compromising the quality of their research.

Deciding on a Market Research Platform that Provides Relentless Quality

When opting for a market research provider, businesses ought to turn to a provider that offers relentless quality through a number of ways. The Pollfish platform delivers on the promise of relentless quality.

First off, businesses can maintain a market research budget while performing various campaigns, as the Pollfish platform is one of the most affordable ones in the online survey platform niche.

The platform deploys surveys in a vast network of top online sites and apps and does so with a mobile-first agile data approach. Businesses, therefore, gain quick results even when distributing surveys to a large sample size, such as one with thousands of respondents.

The data is processed with artificial intelligence and machine learning to avoid survey fraud, biases, low-quality answers, the margin of error and other issues that mar the quality of the data. Thus, the data itself is of a high quality.

It is presented on a user-friendly dashboard that makes it easy to interpret the data. Thus, this is going to be seen as less of a chore that market researchers put off… and off, indefinitely. Researchers can also integrate Pollfish with other SaaS providers should researchers prefer to consolidate their data analysis.

When the data is quickly extracted, avoids faulty respondents and is easy to deploy and use, businesses are naturally more likely to use it. Thus the Pollfish platform offers an augmented survey experience, one that suits many market research budgets and campaigns at large.

Frequently asked questions

Why is having a market research budget important for businesses?

A market research budget should be derived from an overall marketing budget because a lack of research may lead to overspending or inefficient allocation of resources.

What are some key considerations in a market research budget?

The key characteristics of a market research budget include expenditures in qualitative research, quantitative research, field research, focus groups, interviews, survey panels, and online survey platforms.

How should businesses set up a market research budget?

First, determine the overall marketing budget because research would go under this banner. Next, identify your objectives. Know what kind of information you need, if it's proactive or reactive, and who gets to use this info. After that, study available market research and reports to see if they fulfill your informational needs. And finally, report these findings to the decision-makers to prioritize market research as one of their financial goals for the upcoming year.

What are the consequences of unused data in market research?

Unused data may lead to inefficient planning, money wasted on market research, and unnecessary meetings. It may even skew research results causing further damage. Therefore, businesses should know the difference between knowing how much data they need and how much data will be left unused once they've used it.

What should businesses consider when deciding on a market research platform?

A robust online survey platform should offer a myriad of features and draw out quality data. Moreover, it should be fully customized for the questionnaire and screener, deploy the survey to intended individuals, seamlessly filter the data once the survey is completed, and leverage artificial intelligence to carry out quality checks that eradicate poor quality data. The platform should also provide valuable customer data and insights with several easy-to-use question formats, advanced skip logic, RDE, mobile-first design, etc., enabling a business to make data-driven decisions.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving Into the Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey

The Customer Effort Score survey, or CES survey, is one of the foremost customer satisfaction surveys. As a business owner or marketer, you ought to know that customer satisfaction holds colossal importance for your business.

It can help drive customer loyalty, the key force behind retention, which ensures your customers return to your business instead of making one-time only purchases. Additionally, when brands produce high levels of customer satisfaction, they are increasing their customers’ Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which incites higher value from customers.

Furthermore, customers want to know that their input is collected and valued, as 52% of worldwide customers believe that businesses need to take action on their feedback.

The CES survey is a potent survey tool to assess customer satisfaction — but it takes a very specific angle — that of measuring customer effort.

This article delves into the CES survey, explaining customer effort, why it’s important to measure it and all other key information so that your business makes the most out of this survey type.

Defining the CES Survey

Like its name implies, the Customer Effort Score survey measures customer effort, which is the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a company.

Specifically, the CES survey is a survey that calculates the eponymous Customer Effort Score, a key customer experience metric that gauges customer effort.

Understanding Customer Effort

Customer effort refers to the degree of difficulty a customer has undergone to try to get an issue resolved. Additionally, it also generally refers to the ease (or difficulty) that a customer experienced with a certain service or experience with a company.

Understanding the Customer Effort Score

The Customer Effort Score is the heart of the CES survey. A customer experience (CX) score, it asks customers to rate the ease of completing an action — the customer effort in question; this is usually expressed on a scale of either “very difficult” to “very easy.”

The Customer Effort Score has a flexible setup: it can be derived from a scale of 1-5 and 1-7; it can be numeric and text-based.

There are 2 versions of the CES scale:

In the older version, a 5-point scaled question asks: “How much effort did you use to complete this task?”
1. In this scenario, 1 represents a very low effort, while 5 represents a very high effort.
2. Thus the lower the number, the better the CES score, while a higher CES score meant more difficulty, therefore a bad score.
In the newer version, a 5 (or 7, or 10-point) scaled question asks: “How much do you agree with the following?: The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”
1. This version presents a disagreement/ agreement rating scale.
2. 1 represents “strongly disagree” while 5 or 7 represents “strongly agree”, so the scale is from negative to positive, (a higher number represents a better CES score), unlike the first version.

Calculating the Customer Effort Score

As you can gather, there are various ways to crunch customer effort, that is to derive a rating on customer effort. Once you’ve gotten a number from the scale (based on what your respondents answered with), you can take this further to determine the CES score.

There are several ways to calculate the Customer Effort Score. You can use whichever method you prefer for your CES survey. Either way, you’ll be a step closer to working out your customer satisfaction, most notably the degree of your customer effort.

Here are the three calculations to determine your CES:

Average score: Used with the 1-10 scale. Get the complete sum of all the CES scores and divide it by the number of responses.
1. Ex: total CES scores= 600, total respondents = 100
2. 600/100= 6, CES= 6, i.e., 6 out of 10
Via the Agree/Disagree scale or emojis (happy faces): Can be used with 1-5 or 1-7 scales. Subtract the percentage of positive responses from the percentage of negative responses. Do NOT use the neutral responses in the calculation.
1. Ex: Total respondents = 300, positive responses =250, negative responses= 50
2. % of positive responses = 83.33%, % of positive responses= 16.666%
3. 83.33%- 16.666% = 66.664%
4. CES score = 66.664%
Via the 1-7 Disagree/Agree scale: Divide the total number of 5-7 responses (Somewhat Agree – Agree – Strongly Agree) by the total number of respondents. Then, multiple the result by 10 or 100 (if you prefer a percentage).
1. Ex: total respondents = 200, 95 = number of positive responses
2. 95/200 = 0.475
3. 0.475 x 10 = 4.75, CES = 4.75 or
4. 0.475 x 100 = 47.5%, CES = 47.5%

Remember, the higher the CES number is on the scale, the greater the Customer Effort Score. So which numbers are positive and which are negative?

On a 1-7 scale, 5-7 are the positive answers, as they represent somewhat agree – agree – strongly agree.
- 1-4 are the negative responses; 5 is neutral.
On a 1-5 scale, 4 and 5 are the positive responses.
- 1-2 are the negative responses; 3 is neutral.
On a scale of 1-10, numbers 8-10 are the positive responses.
- 1-5 are the negative responses; 6 and 7 are neutral.

Why Your Business Needs a CES Survey

A high Customer Effort Score, to put it plainly, is good for business. As such, businesses need to measure their CES score periodically, to track how their customer effort is faring with customers.

A high score signifies that your company is making things easy for your customers.

A low score denotes that interacting with your business — even if it only concerns one aspect of it — is difficult for customers, as it requires too much effort from them.

Exceeding customer expectations is of the essence when it comes to retaining them. In order to create customer loyalists, you need to maintain a high Customer Effort Score, as it is the primary factor of customer satisfaction, along with loyalty and disloyalty.

According to Gartner Research, customers are 4 times more likely to be disloyal after they’ve had a service interaction. These unsatisfied customers negatively affect a company, as they spread their dissatisfaction via social media, forums, online reviews and word of mouth.

What’s more, is that a whopping 96% of customers with low CES scores become more disloyal to a business, as opposed to the meager 9% with high CES scores.

Brands need to make their CX as seamless as possible, so that customers require little to no effort when navigating through brands’ services and experiences.

A CES survey is the aptest instrument for measuring the Customer Effort Score, as it allows businesses to ask the CES question plainly in various parts of a customer journey.

Additionally, this survey is not limited to merely one question, as brands can allow respondents to expound on their score with follow-up questions particular to the interaction customers had just rated.

When to Use a CES Survey

Businesses ought to use a Customer Effort Score survey at various points in their customer experience. Here are a few of the most critical moments to send a CES survey to your customers and customer base:

After a customer service interaction: whether it’s via phone, email, in-store or via chat, these are critical interactions that must be kept effort-free.
Following a browsing session: after a customer visited several product pages, send the CES survey to understand whether it was easy for them to find what they were looking for.
After an on-site search or navigation: Piggybacking off of point 2, gathering customer effort feedback is crucial after customers searched for pages within your site, via a search tab or navigation, as this shows you whether they can easily find what they need.
After a purchase: This can be used to evaluate the ease of use of the checkout, including all of its steps, or about the steps (pages visited in the customer journey) that led to the purchase.
Site revisit after no purchase: While it’s disappointing that customers left your site without purchasing if they’ve returned to your site, that’s good news. The CES survey allows you to gain insight into what about the checkout or other aspects of their CX led them to leave without purchasing.

The Pros and Cons of the CES Survey

The CES survey offers businesses a variety of benefits. There are also some setbacks to bear in mind before you launch a CES survey campaign. The following lists the advantages and disadvantages of the Customer Effort Score survey:

The Pros:

Measures specific actions and events in a customer journey, allowing brands to zero in on what needs improvement the most.
Allows companies to understand how to improve their CX at an overall level.
Shows customers that your brand cares about their ease of use with your experiences.
Boosts customer retention, as customers with high CES scores tend to make repeat purchases (as aforesaid).
Low-effort interactions create lower costs — 37% less than a high-effort experience (Gartner, see above link) for a business.
Increases customer loyalty, as fewer customers abandon a business that they are loyal to.
Helps improve other customer satisfaction metric surveys, such as the NPS.

The Cons:

Less adoption than the CSAT and NPS surveys.
Less usage also means fewer benchmark data available to understand which scores are ideal, which are natural, etc.
Limited to specific experiences.
Not every customer will want to take a survey at every touchpoint.

Using Customer Effort to Scale Business

Customer satisfaction is the core of a business’s success, as happy customers will return, while dissatisfied ones will not only abandon a company, but leave their mark of discontent on the internet and elsewhere.

Businesses, therefore, need to monitor their customer satisfaction. There are several surveys that help businesses determine the state of their customer satisfaction. The CES survey, however, is unique in that it is the only survey dedicated to measuring customer effort.

Customer effort is a key hurdle (or non-hurdle when it’s low) to satisfaction. A high effort (meaning a low CES score) damages customers’ CX, thereby causing a dent in their customer satisfaction.

Your CX must be as seamless as possible so that the effort required to take any action from customers is hardly noticeable. This may seem like a tall order, but it isn’t, largely due to the CES survey. This survey helps brands study their customer effort at virtually any part of their CX.

The key is to find a strong online survey platform that can facilitate the Customer Effort Score survey process.

Frequently asked questions

What is a CES Survey?

Customer Effort Score (CES) survey determines the amount or extent of effort a specific customer puts into a particular interaction with a business.

What is customer effort?

Customer effort refers to the level of difficulty a particular customer has experienced to resolve a problem. In addition, it also typically refers to the difficulty or ease that a customer experiences with a specific service of a company.

How can you determine the CES score from a CES survey?

Businesses can deduce their CES score in 3 ways:

Average Score: Surveys using a 1-10 scale point can get a sum of all the CES scores and divide it by the number of responses

Agree/Disagree Scale: These surveys have a 1-5 or a 1-7 scale. Subtract positive responses from negative responses to get a CES score

1-7 Agree/Disagree Scale: These are responses that vary between the options of Somewhat Agree – Agree – Strongly Agree – Disagree – Somewhat Disagree, and so on

Why does your business need a CES survey?

CES (Customer Effort Score) is essentially used by businesses to track how effective their customer care is at dealing with customer's complaints and issues. To maintain a steady influx of buyers, companies should strive to maintain a higher CES score.

When should businesses use a CES survey?

Essentially, a business should use a CES survey to assess how easy or difficult a particular touchpoint has been for their customers. It is conducted to gauge the customer experience.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Identify Your Target Market with an Online Survey Platform

To achieve business success, you need to be able to identify your target market, the most important segment of the population, business-wise. Even more important is being able to properly market your products and services to the members of your target market.

In order to do so, you need to understand your target market comprehensively. While this may sound like a feat, the proper online survey tool can make this task effortless — in the literal sense, as you won’t need to do any outreach efforts yourself.

A target market is not simply a target audience, it is a specific segment of the population that’s most vital to your business. This article explains this population, how to identify it and how to engage with it using an online survey platform.

Defining the Target Market

To identify your target market, you need to be well-acquainted with what it is composed of and what it entails.

A target market is a group of customers to whom a business targets its marketing efforts so as to prompt them to make purchases or continue patronizing a business. This group shares certain characteristics that make it unique and differentiable from a larger geographic or psychographic population.

At the broadest level, this group represents all the consumers in a particular market (for example, solar energy). While this group is a good starting point for conducting market segmentation, it is too wide-ranging to target, let alone assure its members will become your customers.

This is due in large part to the fact that when a business develops a plan, whether it is a content marketing strategy, an advertising plan or even a general business plan, it needs to have a precise target market to aim all of its efforts towards. Otherwise, they will be wasted efforts.

Why the Target Market is of Utmost Importance

Regardless of whether your business is aiming to acquire new customers or retain existing customers, neither of these objectives will transpire if you’re appealing to the wrong people.

Therefore, a target market is not merely a group to whom a business aims its marketing and sales efforts.

Instead, a target market is marked by its greatest utility: a group of people that are most willing and most likely to buy from you and engage in customer loyalty.

As such, it should not be considered the other way around, that of being a group of consumers a business wants to sell to, as this group represents the people most likely to buy from your business.

When you sell to a concrete group of people, those most inclined to be your customers, your business is more likely to receive a higher ROI. Additionally, you’ll save time and money by avoiding resource expenditure on people who are less likely to buy from you.

Therefore, it is essential to identify your target market, keep track of it and market to it based on its desires and needs. You can do so with a highly targeted campaign via the aforementioned market segmentation.

The Characteristics of a Target Market

Before you conduct market segmentation, you ought to understand the exact makeup of a target market. There are various qualities among buyers and knowing about all of them will propel you towards correctly identifying your target market and marketing to it successfully.

An awareness of target market characteristics will allow you to know which ones to seek and group together when performing market segmentation and market research at large. Many times, these characteristics may dictate your target market’s behaviors, attitudes and inclinations.

The following lists the characteristics that identify your target market, with which you should perform market segmentation and finally, targeting.

Demographics: age, gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, marital status
Geographic location: continent, country, US census region, state, city, zip code, etc.
Buying power: salary, income, job position, company, buying habits, buying pains
Behaviors: Store visits, online browsing, lifestyle, hobbies, device preferences, tendencies to buy (seasonal, vs regular)
Needs: Typical problems that your product/service solves, gaps in the industry in relation to needs, interests, desires
Psychographics: values, beliefs, aversions, opinions, personalities and inclinations
Firmographics: (for B2B surveys) niche, company size, company type, employee count, business goals

How to Identify Your Target Market with an Online Survey Platform

Now that we laid out the makeup of a target market, it’s time to move on to identifying your target market, using the above characteristics in tow.

You can identify all of the above characteristics of your target market by performing market segmentation, the process of further subdividing your target market.

But, if you do not have a solid picture of your target market, you can start from scratch. Here is how to identify your target market from the beginning.

Step 1: Placing Your Business into Context

Consider the type of business you operate or plan on starting up. Which industry does it belong to? Moreover, find the niche within that industry that your business most closely falls under. Once you do this, consider the pain points customers in this niche face and who they may be. This will give you a contextual starting point.

Step 2: Mapping Out Your Broader Target Market

When mapping out your broader target market, do so from a high level with the following questions:

Is there a market for my business? What are its niches?
Where does my business fit within any of those niches?
Who would most likely need my business offerings?
Who can afford my offerings?
Who would mostly buy from my business?
Where is my business primarily located?
Am I going to target other locations, if so, which ones?

Try to answer these questions to the best of your ability. If not, move onto the next step.

Step 3: Conduct Secondary Market Research

Next, conduct secondary market research for your startup or established business. This involves looking at research that has already been conducted and made available. While not all of the resources you may come upon will be free, they provide an invaluable starting point into your target market.

Pay attention to publications, blogs, trade magazines, statistics websites, etc., that discuss the target market, customer base and customers in general. Consider this: Does any of the target market information that you discover appear relevant to your business?

If so, use it to answer the questions in Step 2.

Step 4: Put Together Your Questions & Answers, Having Assembled at Least 10

As you derive the answers to the above basic questions, add more questions as extensions of available questions for a deeper read of the makeup of your particular target market.

Assure that you have identified at least 10 target market characteristics. (If you still feel as though you don’t have all the information about your target market, don’t fret, you can perform more market segmentation later).

After you’ve conducted a viable amount of secondary market research, put together a list of the characteristics you have identified about your target market. Include the areas in which you are lacking information.

Step 5: Creating a Survey

Create a survey in a few steps to identify your target market in greater depth. This is a key step, as surveys can help you discover many aspects of your target market that secondary research does not have the capacity to do.

It’s virtually impossible to have all your questions answered and available in secondary sources. On the other hand, surveys allow you to ask virtually any question about your target market directly to its members.

First off, surveys allow you to target any group of customers via the screener. The first stage of the survey process for respondents, the screener asks them to fill out key demographic information. Additionally, it includes a question portion, which can include psychographic, behavioral, needs-based or any other kinds of screening questions.

This dual approach in the screener ensures that only the respondents that make up your target market are allowed to participate in the survey.

Once they enter the survey, you can further segment them by asking questions that pertain to the aforesaid characteristics of a target market (such as behaviors, psychographics, etc.). By asking questions about these characteristics, you can also tie the survey to another campaign, such, such as an ad campaign or one that measures brand awareness.

The Need to Study Your Target Market Continuously

Catering to your target market goes far beyond being able to identify your target market alone. Once you have a sense of who makes it up, you have to assure that your products, services and experiences live up to their needs and expectations.

There is no other way to understand all of this, aside from deploying online surveys. Surveys allow you to keep track of your target market, which, to reiterate, is the most important portion of the population for your business.

With needs and standards that evolve alongside changes in technology, rising trends and industry updates, it is critical to be able to anticipate your target market’s changing needs along with them.

Additionally, some market segments have a tendency to change their minds and even their spending habits. Consider for example, a market of recent college graduates who have landed their first job. They may soon change their spending habits and develop an interest in more products, due to their increased spending power.

As such, it is essential to keep track of your target market. Online surveys help you do just that along with gaining key insights to various other campaigns.

Frequently asked questions

What does the term "target market" mean?

A target market is a customer group that businesses target to compel them to purchase their products or services. This group of customers shares specific characteristics that make them different from a broader psychographic or geographic population.

Why is it important for businesses to know their target market?

Businesses need to know their target market because it allows them to identify those most likely to make a purchase, get a consultation, register for a demo, etc. It also helps businesses save time and money by limiting funnel research and ensuring that budgets are spent on leads with the highest potential for profitability.

What are some characteristics of a target market?

When sampling a target market, consider their geographic location (continent, state, city, zip code), demographics (age, race, gender, occupation, marital status), psychological patterns and behaviors (store visits vs. online visits, past purchase history, tendencies to buy (seasonal or regular customer), and income (salary, occupation, buying habits, elasticity to price change, etc.).

How can you conduct secondary market research on your target market?

Businesses can conduct secondary market research by looking at publications, trade magazines, websites, and data analytics and statistics. This provides them with a starting point to learn more about their target market.

How can you identify your target market via an online survey platform?

A strong online survey platform is a reliable tool for accurately identifying your target market's behaviors, opinions, lifestyles, wants, needs and aversions, because they allow you to target any group of customers. The first stage (the screener) usually asks customers to fill in their information like demographics and location, as they filter survey participation qualifications.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

River Sampling Versus RDE Sampling: Which is Superior for Market Research

River sampling versus RDE (Random Device Engagement) sampling: it’s a showdown for the ages. As two of the foremost players in survey sampling methods, these two always appear to compete head-to-head for the attention and execution of market researchers.

As prominent players in the survey research sector, both the RDE and river sampling methods are considered superior to using survey panels for market research.

As the two dominant means of obtaining a survey sample, which forms the core of any market research campaign, it is crucial to be diligent when deliberating over which method to use for your survey sampling.

This article posits river sampling and RDE sampling in a showdown, so that market researchers and general researchers comprehend which is more fitting for their market research needs.

Defining River Sampling

River sampling is an online survey sampling method — the earliest and simplest of its kind. This non-probability sampling method obtains survey respondents by requesting online visitors to take a survey via clicking on a link that routes them to the survey.

The link is placed somewhere in a webpage, email or another area in the digital space. Typically, respondents are scouted through web elements such as banners, ads, promotions and offers.

When site or app users click on the link used in river sampling, they are first routed to the screener portion of the survey and if they fit the requirements set in the screener, they are then routed to the questionnaire portion.

River sampling derives its name from the metaphorical idea that researchers net their study subjects by catching them in the river that is the internet, specifically the flow of traffic in a website.

Also called intercept sampling and real‐time sampling, this method extracts respondents by engaging them while they take part in some other digital activity.

The Two Types of River Sampling

River sampling exists in two forms. While they may appear to be vaguely interchangeable, each form includes a unique method for procuring respondents. In the showdown of river sampling versus RDE sampling, it’s important to understand the workings of each.

Stratified River Sampling

This kind of river sampling involves drawing samples in real-time from online promotions, those that are disseminated through banners, ads, pop-ups and hyperlinks. Market researchers would choose the websites for survey deployment based on statistics on such websites’ traffic.

Convenience River Sampling

This submethod of river sampling involves the placement of promotions and hyperlinks across websites without previously analyzing the websites’ traffic numbers and types of visitors. As such, market researchers deploy surveys in a completely blind manner. The point of this form of sampling is to derive maximum data at a minimum cost.

The Pros and Cons of River Sampling

A commonly used method of sampling respondents, river sampling has several advantages and disadvantages. Understanding them is important for researchers, should they consider using this method, or learning how it differs from other sampling methods, such as RDE sampling.

The Advantages

Serves as a powerful replacement for survey panels by providing new respondents, those that have not been influenced or conditioned to take part in a survey.
Engages users in their natural digital environments.
Its survey callouts/ links exist in easily noticeable digital properties.
Creates a faster alternative to the focus group, which involves a group discussion where dominant participants can take charge and make it difficult for more demure participants.
Ensures complete anonymity of respondents.
Exists as a simple method of data gathering, since all researchers need to do is wait for the data to be aggregated.
An inexpensive source of sampling.
A flexible method that collects respondents in the moment, rather than being profiled prior to the survey and recruited manually.

The Disadvantages

The devices used by potential and opted-in respondents are completely unknown.
There is no access to an advertisement’s ID.
Fraudsters can therefore take the same survey twice or more to increase their incentives or the chance to win a prize.
No degree of demographic, geographic or individual targeting is possible.
Banner ads generally have insufficient response rates.
Banners are pushed through ad networks, diminishing the user experience.
Ad-networks optimize their delivery by fighting against random sampling.
1. As such, users are picked due to a higher likelihood of responding, from unobserved variables (to the researcher) correlated with how they will respond. At any rate, none of the data is shared, so it is impossible to correct.
It is difficult to reach an acceptable level of representation, as respondents are not tracked.
Surveyors have no inkling of who will participate in the surveys due to the lack of tracking and profiling.
This method is prone to receive straight-lining from the respondents.

Defining RDE Sampling

RDE sampling, also known as Random Device Engagement is an advanced method of non-probability sampling, one that falls in diametrical opposition with survey panels. It is completely random and organic, with no pre-recruitment and no website monitoring.

RDE sampling refers to the sampling practice of engaging online users on all the devices they are already using, be it within advertising networks, mobile apps and other portals on various devices.

This involves the careful placement of surveys in gaming interfaces and virtual reality, allowing market researchers to offer non-monetary incentives to respondents. These include coins or points in a game, or the ability to win a major virtual in-game prize.

RDE sampling can be disseminated through digital elements similar to the ones used in river sampling, such as banners, ads and other positions on a webpages, such as buttons. These survey callouts e.t. al., must be placed strategically, so that respondents can easily spot them. They must also be created in a way that sparks the curiosity or interest of the webpage’s visitors to click on them in the first place.

RDE engages potential respondents in their natural digital environments and respondents enter the survey voluntarily. This method also ensures complete randomization, as no pre-recruiting efforts are involved.

Respondents are also completely anonymous, in terms of their identities, thus, there is no pressure to answer questions in a particular way, such as one that adheres to societal norms and expectations.

The Key Differences Between River Sampling and RDE Sampling

Many of the traits in RDE sampling render this method to seemingly mimic river sampling, with no apparent distinguishing features. But this is false — there are several ways in which RDE sampling diverges from the river sampling method.

Unlike river sampling, RDE sampling offers a monitoring functionality, which tracks the unique identifier of respondents’ devices. The survey software that carries out RDE sampling works natively with the device when it is optimized correctly. For example, a strong example of this would be a mobile-first survey platform.

Furthermore, unlike river sampling, in which respondents are not tracked or identified by demographics, etc., RDE tracks respondents through a unique ID, one that notifies the researchers when the same respondents are changing devices.

RDE also relies on artificial intelligence to weed out poor quality responses, such as gibberish answers and users who are on a VPN.

The Pros and Cons of RDE Sampling

Random Device Engagement sampling carries various benefits and drawbacks that all market researchers should be aware of, even if they do not choose this sampling method. That is because it is critical to weigh these advantages and disadvantages against those of river sampling for a true comparison.

The Advantages

A higher quality of data due to AI functionality and automatic quality checks.
Respondents are not conditioned through pre recruiting tactics or pressured to answer questions in a certain way due to being in their natural digital environments.
Offers various telemetry data prone to bias correction, involving location history and application usage.
Has a high coverage due to the heavy usage of mobile phones; phones carry a high penetration of about 70% and decent response rates.
Avoids fraud from SUMAs (single users on multiple accounts); respondents can only answer once and therefore VPN respondents are disqualified.
Tracks different devices that respondents use, important given the uncertainty of the future use of phones.
RDE is fast and cost-effective.
Able to supplement attitudinal data with a vast array of para or telemetry data.
1. For example, those who partake in surveys are rather different than those who don’t. As such, it is necessary to get roughly 30 more demographic, attitudinal, and lifestyle questions to understand social trust and how survey respondents are unusual.

The Disadvantages

Given that this method involves tracking location and application usage, it is not as anonymous.
In reference to Point 1, the researchers will have to add the necessary disclaimers to their surveys.
Surveys on RDE networks may not exist in as diverse a set as they do in river sampling.
Is still prone to several kinds of survey bias.
Does not offer perfect coverage or known probabilities for every respondent.
Respondents may be subject to survey fatigue if the survey is too long and not built with best practices.

The Verdict of the River Sampling Vs. RDE Sampling Showdown

In conclusion, who comes up victorious in the showdown between river sampling and Random Device Engagement sampling? In the spirit of remaining unbiased, the true victor is up to the market researcher, the business owner, or the marketing department of a business.

This is because each business and operation will envision their market research campaigns differently and thus will have different requirements and standards for their campaigns. This includes how they will execute survey sampling.

Both methods secure the privacy of respondents, as respondents are never matched with their identities. However, the major point of difference between these two methods is that river sampling does not capture the devices and app usage of the respondents, while RDE does, given that it tracks respondents through unique IDs.

Thus, when using either of these sampling methods, they will have to be dealt with differently.

In regards to this, market researchers can make the judgment of which sampling method is best. We believe that based on the better data quality and representativeness of the sample, RDE is the superior survey sampling method.

With river sampling, researchers must assess the stability, span and relevance of the promotions used in tandem with the surveys. Additionally, market researchers will need to check security and quota controls during the sampling process. SIngle users participating multiple times must be thwarted with specialized software.

With RDE sampling, the online survey platform must cooperate with the publishers and their networks, so that market researchers can design a native experience with surveys on their platforms. (In river sampling, banner ads are pushed through the ad network instead). Thus, RDE sampling is objectively the stronger sampling method, given that it seamlessly prevents fraud and poor data from its capabilities of tracking down device usage and fending off VPNs, users take part more than once and other nefarious behaviors that mar the data and sample collection process.

Frequently asked questions

What is river sampling?

River sampling is an online survey sampling method that obtains survey respondents by requesting online visitors to take a survey via clicking on a link that routes them to the survey. It is entirely random and organic, with no website monitoring. RDE sampling, on the other hand, refers to the sampling practice of engaging online users on all the devices they are already using, be it within advertising networks, mobile apps, and other portals on various devices.

What is RDE sampling?

Objectively speaking, RDE sampling is better as it provides a more robust sampling method given that it integrates well with AI to prevent instances of fraud and insufficient data. It also tracks device usage and can notify researchers and marketers if a respondent changed the device, unlike river sampling, where there is no such device tracking.

What are the two types of River Sampling?

The two types of river sampling are stratified and convenience river sampling. Stratified river sampling means drawing samples in real-time from online promotions, such as website banners, ads, pop-ups, and hyperlinks. In contrast, convenience river sampling involves placing advertisements and hyperlinks across websites without analyzing the websites' traffic. This enables marketers to gain maximum data at minimum cost.

What are some pros and cons of river sampling?

The most significant advantage of river sampling is that it makes the surveys accessible to everyone, even respondents who were not conditioned to take part in a survey. It also ensures the complete anonymity of respondents and is a relatively inexpensive way of conducting surveys. However, since these surveys ensure anonymity and there is no link to a respondent's ID, people can take the same survey repeatedly and distort any chance of accurate results.

What are some pros and cons of RDE sampling?

RDE sampling can detect different devices that respondents use, decreasing the chance of any fraud. It also provides high-quality data due to AI functionality and automated checks. However, the drawback is that RDE surveys may not exist in as diverse a set as they do in river sampling.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How Surveys Improve Content Marketing Strategy

To survive in the modern age, your business needs a solid content marketing strategy. Content speaks volumes about a business — and not solely about business offerings. Rather, it gives marketers the chance to posit their business as a thought leader in their space.

Surveys help businesses on a variety of matters, one of which is enhancing content strategy, proving the vast extent of the aptitude of survey research. This is largely due to the ability to extract unique and concrete insights from your target market.

This article explains how surveys improve a business’s content marketing strategy and the various times most apt for using surveys.

Defining Content Marketing Strategy

Many marketers believe that content marketing strategy involves posting a blog every week — and that is where they are regrettably mistaken.

While blogs are key content components, they are far from the requirements of a content marketing strategy.

As its name indicates, content marketing strategy is a strategy designed for the subdiscipline known as content marketing.

Content marketing must always be strategic in its approach in order to yield any results. As such, the basis of its strategy includes creating and delivering valuable content. Moreover, the content must be relevant, timely, consistent and interesting to attract and maintain an audience.

After all, when your content allures your target market, its members are more likely to view your content, i.e., give you impressions. The more impressions you gain, the more likely you are to produce conversions.

But businesses shouldn’t focus on one-time conversions, as customer retention is more valuable than customer acquisition. For example, there is a 60-70% greater success rate in selling to existing customers than new ones.

A strong content marketing strategy allows brands to increase customer retention and surveys contribute to this. This is because it is favorable to use surveys for customer loyalty.

How Surveys Improve Content Marketing Strategy

As aforementioned, putting surveys to use can help businesses develop the highly sought-after objective of customer loyalty. But before you create enough campaigns and measure customer satisfaction with surveys, you need to build customer loyalty from the ground up (or enhance it if you are a seasoned business).

Surveys can help you do just that.

There are several ways surveys help aid your content marketing strategy. The foremost benefit of surveys is granting your business with customer data, the kind that comes directly from them, rather than being based on trends and other data you would extract from secondary research.

While the latter is useful and can help you form aspects of your content strategy, it is only a small aspect of building effective survey studies for valuable market research.

Surveys, on the other hand, empower your market research and by extension, your content marketing strategy, as they provide insight at virtually any stage in your overall market research campaign.

Although survey research is conducted following secondary research, it can be the starting point of your research campaign as well. For example, exploratory and descriptive research are conducted to lay out a problem and situation along with its hypotheses and details, before studying correlations, causes and solutions.

These early research surveys are useful in setting up your content marketing campaigns, as they provide you with the key problems and settings of your target market and niche.

Let’s pore over the specifics of survey benefits for content marketing strategy.

What Surveys Measure for a Content Marketing Strategy

Surveys are NOT the end all be all when it comes to market research for your content marketing strategy. They do, however, offer several benefits. These manifest in the kind of data you can extract for your content marketing needs.

The following lists the things that surveys help businesses measure:

Key demographic, behavioral and geographic information of respondents. These help you perform market segmentation to understand the precise makeup of your target market and its individual segments.
Opinions about your business. This is an encompassing topic that covers everything from their customer experience (CX), to perceptions about your ads and communications, to feelings about your customer support.
Thoughts on your industry and niche. This helps you form content ideas. For example, let’s say you sell apartments in a particular area. A community survey can reveal the biggest qualms and desires your target market has about a particular neighborhood or real estate business (in relation to apartments) in general.
Impact of your content: You can create surveys about particular content assets and content elements. This helps you learn which assets are resonating, which are lackluster and what kind your target market is most interested in reading/consuming.
Reactions to competitor content: You can be discrete in these surveys, i.e., not mention competitors by name. Instead, you can create surveys that ask about specific content aspects, including comparisons with your own.
Insights into customer pain points: Understanding the pain points of your target market is ideal for all business practices, especially for products/services, as you can market your offerings as anecdotes to customers’ problems. Additionally, you can use customer pain points as the foundation for various content assets.
1. Ex: blogs, case studies, reports, etc. can all address pain points but their value lies in positing your business/product/service as the solution to those pain points.
Social media reactions: Surveys allow you to inquire into the sentiment around your social media experience. You can be upfront in your questionnaire by asking respondents which posts are boring, which provide the least amount of value and which they enjoyed reading or viewing.
Customer expectations: These can waver, especially as customers come and go. Surveys grant you direct insights into what customers desire, which you can later use in your content marketing efforts. Content that speaks to customer needs and feedback generally reaps positive results.

What Surveys Help You Discover for Content Marketing

Aside from the above section, which delineates the customer insights surveys can provide from your content marketing strategy, surveys can do so much more. Surveys animate your content, as they can provide you with original content, the kind your competitors won’t be able to reproduce.

Here are several ways surveys enliven your content marketing efforts:

Building brand awareness: As aforementioned, when more people view your content, i.e, when you generate more impressions, the likelihood of netting converting customers rises. Additionally, the more content you create, the more you have to update your social accounts with.
Branding: Branding is all about your reputation, brand image and presentation. As such, it is almost always present in content (think logos, company colors, taglines, etc.). Surveys provide market research for branding, so you can make any necessary tweaks to your branding based on customer feedback. These will thus naturally bleed into your content.
Data-driven content: Surveys don’t necessarily have to be about customer feedback in relation to your business. Survey campaigns foster exploring a variety of topics within your niche. The best part is that no one can copy the data you extract for this content and claim it as theirs — they’ll have to give you credit and link to your content.
SEO Benefits: Piggybacking off of point 2, when other companies, blogs and websites link their content back to yours as their reference, it is fruitful for your SEO. Gaining backlinks is difficult, but when you release original, data-driven content, others will reference your work and link back to your website or webpage that contains the insights.
1. Additionally, search engines like Google admire long, insightful content pieces.
Establishing thought leadership: Posting content with original insights is invaluable for establishing thought leadership and credibility for your company. Brands with thought leadership are fostering a strong sense of trust with their target market. It also keeps a company fresh in the minds of its target market.

When and Where to Use Surveys in Your Content

In order to master a content marketing strategy, businesses need to deploy them, well… strategically. You don’t want to bombard your respondents with surveys left and right; that will damage your digital CX. In order to sustain high survey response rates, you need to release surveys at appropriate times and places.

The following lists when and where to use surveys in your content to boost your strategy:

Blogs, webzines, evergreen posts
1. When: On a weekly basis
On the homepage or first page a special user lands on
1. When a user returns to your website after several visits OR
2. When a user bounces but returns some other time or day.
Landing pages
1. When: On a weekly basis, so long as the landing page is live OR
2. Once, if a user converts, i.e., signs up for a service, or joins a content list.
Reports, whitepapers and other gated and downloadable content
1. Just once for authorized respondents, those that leave their real names and emails.
Publisher sites
1. Daily
2. This helps expose random users to your brand who may have otherwise not known about it.

Positioning Your Brand in the Way You Intend With Surveys

Your content marketing strategy is an opportune way to not only nurture your leads further down the sales funnel and grow brand awareness. Instead, it sets the tone and style of your brand, allowing you to position it in the way you seek.

Surveys are an apt means to support this end, as surveys allow your content to posit you in a desirable light, one that differentiates you from your competitors.

They show your customer base that you care and value their feedback, not just about delivering good products/ services, but for a productive content experience, one that offers value instead of thinly valued brand propaganda.

A strong content marketing strategy will ensure your brand is considered a trusted resource, the kind that draws continual interest and impressions from your target market. Surveys are auspicious tools to help you reach this end. The key to using surveys as a content marketing strategy conduit is to use the most robust online survey platform.

Frequently asked questions

Why is a content marketing strategy important?

The point of having a content marketing strategy is to create targeted, valuable content for the audience. This approach ensures that content is relevant, timely, consistent, and engaging enough to attract and retain an audience. Moreover, the more traffic your content attracts, the more likely it is to gain impressions.

How can surveys improve your content marketing strategy?

The primary benefit of surveys is that they provide marketers with accurate customer data that comes directly from them instead of relying on customer trends and secondary research. This collected data helps make a targeted content strategy that marketers know will interest their customers instead of adopting the trial-and-error method.

What information do surveys measure for a content marketing campaign?

Survey questions help measure respondents' behavioral, demographic and geographic information that enable marketers to segment their strategies and create targeted content. In addition, survey questions can be tailored according to what marketers want to know, such as their opinion on competitor's content, their sentiments regarding the launch of a new product, etc.

How can surveys help to bring your content marketing efforts to life?

Surveys can make your content unique, as all the information you collect is unique to your business, which your competitors won't reproduce. It can revitalize your content marketing efforts by building brand awareness, establishing your brand as an authority. It also enables marketers to gain data-driven content and create SEO-optimized survey questions that can expand your business's reach further.

Where should you use your surveys?

Surveys can be displayed everywhere, from blogs and magazines to your website's landing pages and newsletter. However, make sure you have different times for publishing your surveys on other mediums. For example, put up surveys on landing pages weekly, on evergreen blog posts almost daily, and on white papers and downloadable PDFs just once. This helps expose random users to your brand who may have otherwise not known about it.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Using Artificial Intelligence Software to Build Relentless Quality

Artificial intelligence software is on the rise, both in terms of usage, availability and amount of products — and for good reason, as AI can increase business efficiency by 40%.

Productivity is especially important in the realm of market research, as it makes up but one chamber of marketing to maintain a business. With so many funds being allocated to marketing — from hiring freelancers, to SEO tools, to marketing automation and so on — it is especially important for market research to be of high quality.

Machine learning, one of the four main subsets of artificial intelligence, can be used to provide above-par data quality — with the correct capabilities and when consolidated with the proper software.

This article explains how artificial intelligence software forms high-quality data, the kind that market researchers can objectively label as being of relentless quality in the Pollfish online survey platform.

Understanding Artificial Intelligence Software in Market Research

As market research projects demand hard and fast data available at speed and at scale, there is a need to access top-tier quality — that is, data that is not merely accurate, but exists in a system that provides human levels of accuracy, with machine levels of delivery.

Artificial intelligence software is the answer to the necessity of having access to the highest quality of data. This kind of software runs largely on AI, as its name implies, which is a kind of technology that simulates human intelligence and applies it to computer systems.

Artificial intelligence creates intelligent systems so that they perform tasks as a human would. As a technology, it is used to pair human capabilities with the speed of machinery, thus empowering systems with the capacity of both.

AI is used to improve efficiency and productivity and many businesses have been adopting it. However, although nine out of ten leading companies invest in AI, less than 15% use AI in their business. As such, not all businesses, including those who claim to be AI-run are using AI capabilities to their full advantage.

Market research software must fully incorporate its AI system aside from only its key functionalities, otherwise, the artificial intelligence software does not fully tap into its abilities.

The Importance of Artificial Intelligence Software in Market Research

This kind of software has revolutionized the market research industry, allowing market researchers to gain all the benefits of digital innovations, such as agile data creation and much more.

Firstly, it allowed the use of automation to enter the field of market research, liberating researchers from labor-intensive hours applied to each project just to garner respondents.

Instead, the artificial intelligence software would assume various roles which would otherwise make the process laborious and difficult to fulfill. These roles include the following:

Screener creation
Questionnaire creation
Deployment
Reaching the correct respondents
Fulfilling a set amount of quotas

Not only has artificial intelligence software assured that these tasks would be completed from the platform itself, but done so in a fast and relatively inexpensive manner. Additionally, apart from carrying out these applications, AI has instilled a system of quality checks in market research software.

But not within each market research platform. These platforms are not all built with the same levels of AI prowess. As aforementioned in the previous section, market research software must fully implement its AI capabilities, that is, apply them to as many aspects of the data aggregation aspects as possible.

In turn, it augments the quality of the data, thus boosting the veracity of the market research campaign.

The Importance of Applying Machine Learning in Artificial Intelligence Software

The value of artificial intelligence software in market research goes far beyond the utility of automated surveys. The proper market research platform will use machine learning as part of its AI capabilities.

As one of the main four types of AI software, machine learning allows the software to learn just as a human would, that is without assistance or programming. This is because this subfield of AI allows the software to learn from past experiences dealing with data.

Thus, machine learning permits a computer system to make decisions and predictions by way of extracting historical data, rather than being programmed to take such actions.

This frees up a lot of time for software developers and those on the tech support team, as the AI software itself learns how to deal with different issues so that it can produce better output as time progresses.

The learning process in machine learning occurs through a massive sweep of structured and semi-structured data, which the AI software uses to create accurate results and make predictions based on that data. Thus, artificial intelligence software itself can be taught to perform a particular task and yield an accurate result.

This is of the essence for maintaining quality data, in that many respondents may provide faulty answers such as flatlining, gibberish answers and the like, in order to quickly finish a survey and gain survey incentives.

The Pollfish platform uses machine learning to avoid this kind of low-quality data. Instead of merely automating the survey distribution and collection process, it works in real-time to filter out inaccurate information, so that only the highest quality of data is delivered to the researchers.

How the Pollfish Artificial Intelligence Software Provides Relentless Quality

The Pollfish online survey platform uses artificial intelligence software to its fullest potential, which in turn allows it to deliver relentless quality in all of its functions.

As aforesaid, it employs machine learning during the data aggregation process, so that low-quality data never makes it to the results of the survey. Thus, rather than having to comb through hundreds or even thousands of responses as a means of spot-checking for issues, the Pollfish artificial intelligence software performs quality checks, as it is deploying surveys and collecting responses.

Thus, it does not merely automate the process of retrieving the correct survey respondents based on the criteria entered in the screening section. Instead, it also automates the process of quality checks and the elimination of low-quality data.

This means that the Pollfish software does not stop iterating until it reaches the preset amount of survey completes, concurrently filtering out the low quality and inaccurate responses. Therefore, market researchers do not have to wait until after all the completed surveys are received to then check for accuracy and quality answers.

As such, they avoid having to run another survey, as they won’t need to remove answers from the results and fill in those missing quotas afterward.

The following explains all the other ways in which the Pollfish artificial intelligence software provides relentless quality to any market research campaign.

Survey Fraud Detection and Prevention

Survey fraud refers to the phenomenon of respondents submitting fraudulent or inaccurate responses. Also called market research fraud, this adverse effect strikes the largest blow on a survey campaign, as it adds another issue, on top of the margin of error, a metric that gauges the magnitude of error in a random sample.

When researchers acquire fraudulent answers, they are in a worse-off position than they were had they not run a survey. The opposite should be true as fraudulent data only tarnishes a research campaign, defeating the purpose of using survey software in the first place.

Pollfish detects a wide variety of survey fraud. It prevents fraudulent responses in the results automatically, i.e., in real-time. Thus, market researchers do not have to be concerned with low-quality answers.

Additionally, this artificial intelligence capability cancels out the need to outsource technical support. Researchers can delight in the fact that once the survey results are ready, they are as close to accuracy as possible.

Bot Removal

Market researchers can rest assured that the survey sample will be bot-free, as our machine learning staves off any respondents suspected of being fake users. This means that respondents on a VPN are strictly prohibited from gaining access to the surveys.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) do not simply forge bot-friendly connections, but they also skew geolocation statistics and quotas. They are thus forbidden from taking part in Pollfish surveys. Additionally, a respondent is disqualified if the same user is detected attempting to sign in from multiple countries at once.

Strict Adherence to Layers of Quality Checks

The Pollfish platform adheres to multiple layers of quality checks. As such, the machine learning function in this artificial intelligence software sorts through various issues concurrently.

It disqualifies respondents on various criteria — virtually any behavior or activity that constitutes poor data quality bars respondents from the final count of the surveys. Only the highest quality of responses are collected and added towards the result of the survey.

These quality checks are fully automated and ongoing; thus market researchers are assured that only accurate and relevant data will land in the results of the survey. Our machine learning approach incorporates several layers of technical quality checks.

These quality check layers include detecting and stamping out:

Hasty answers
Gibberish/ nonsensical answers
- Ex: sdjnf jfgid idjvf
Same respondents attempting to take the same survey
Long survey-taking times
Carrier inconsistencies
VPNs
Flatlining (providing the same multiple-choice answer consecutively)

Respondent Verification

The Pollfish AI software assigns each respondent an ID, a method to track respondents without giving away their identities. This function prevents duplicate IDs, whether they come from IP addresses or MAC addresses.

Additionally, the software tracks and checks Google Advertising and mobile device identifiers to fend off those attempting to take a survey more than once, those who spend too much time on a survey or attempt to take any nefarious action.

In-survey questions are formed as yet another layer of security against survey fraud, by requesting an answer to a simple math problem or including identical questions in a survey with re-ordered response options to verify answer consistency.

Reputation Ranking

An offshoot of respondent verification, reputation ranking is the newest vision in Pollfish, one that our developers are presently striving towards. This will work by filtering out every last one of questionable respondents who attempt to take a Pollfish survey, to ensure that only the highest quality of data is extracted.

This approach will work much like a credit system for market research, as only those deemed reputable will be able to take the survey and have their responses qualified to the final results allotted into the Pollfish dashboard. Based on machine learning, this process will be the final layer of quality checking, assuring researchers that Pollfish delivers data that is truly relentless in quality.

Propelling Market Research with AI Software

The grandest indicator of the success or failure of a market research campaign is the online survey provider market researchers opt for.

A potent system will employ artificial intelligence software to remove the burden of various tasks from the researchers, instead of having the platform perform it just as a human would and in a streamlined manner.

With machine learning, such a platform can create efficiency in processes as it acquires more data. A strong online survey platform can apply machine learning to carry out numerous quality checks, so that the results are of the finest quality, assuaging researchers of this arduous task of spot-checking through massive quantities of data.

The Pollfish platform includes these capabilities, thereby allowing it to provide relentless quality for any market research endeavor.

Frequently asked questions

How can an AI-powered marketing research software help you?

Productivity and efficiency are vital to the success of a business. High productivity means high-quality data. Marketers have to spend a significant portion of their budget on SEO tools and automation. Instead, artificial intelligence in the marketing research software can provide all of that, including a large set of high-quality data at a much faster pace.

What are the major elements of artificial intelligence software?

Artificial intelligence software allows automation to enter the field of market research through various elements that include questionnaire creation, screener creation, reaching a set amount of respondents, and deployment.

How can AI software propel market research?

A robust online survey platform can deliver quick and efficient results by applying machine learning techniques to automate processes and conduct quality checks to ensure high-quality results, lessening the burden of spot-checking on marketers.

How can AI prevent survey fraud detection?

Incorporating AI and machine learning in surveys can automatically prevent dishonest responses and other survey fraud in the results, in real-time. Thus, market researchers do not have to be concerned with inaccurate and low-quality data. Additionally, artificial intelligence cancels out the need to outsource technical support.

How can AI reduce the workload on the tech team?

AI software can be trained to make human decisions without any assistance. It can permit a computer system to make predictions based on observations, extract historical data and maintain quality data by filtering out flat line, gibberish answers. This frees up time and reduces the workload for software developers and those on the tech support team.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Avoid Survey Attrition and Keep Sought-After Respondents

Survey attrition affects many research projects, whether they deal with market research or other varieties. A detriment to survey research, attrition creates a challenge that concerns retaining sought-after survey respondents, the kinds that provide the most value for your study.

As such, researchers ought to understand survey attrition, where and how it occurs, along with heeding best practices to weed it out. This will ensure that they form effective survey studies for valuable research.

This article expounds on survey attrition in its dominant forms, in addition to the methods researchers should adopt to reduce and avoid it altogether.

Defining Survey Attrition

Attrition is a term denoting the weakening or tearing away of something through sustained means. In survey and market research, the latter part of the definition usually occurs inadvertently, as no researcher would purposefully want to debilitate their research campaigns.

In more specific terms, survey attrition involves the decrease of the sample size, number, or strength and can occur intermittently or permanently.

Survey attrition occurs through several adverse phenomena, since in simple terms, it refers to the act of leaving a survey study. As such, there is no single form of survey attrition; however, survey attrition has typically focused on two kinds of attrition.

The Two Main Types of Survey Attrition

Although plenty of factors can fuel attrition, as most researchers have experienced survey respondents leaving a survey study, there are two main categories of survey attrition. As such, survey attrition research is committed to understanding these two predominant forms, along with the methods to increase participation.

Nonresponse Attrition

Also called nonusage attrition, nonresponse attrition refers to when those invited to complete a survey opt out of participating, thus rendering the loss of these respondents. This form of attrition occurs within systems that involve researchers reaching out to respondents and recruiting them, such as in survey panels and focus groups.

Another form of nonresponse attrition is more difficult to tract; it involves those who were reached via automated survey means. Since these users never entered the survey by the nature of nonresponse attrition, they are virtually impossible to monitor.

Dropout Attrition

Dropout attrition refers to respondents who have already begun a survey and dropped out, as the name suggests. This attrition can occur in any kind of survey distribution method, from targeted outreach such as emails and survey panels, along with automated surveys and prompts on landing pages, etc.

This kind of attrition can be tracked through certain online survey platforms, although not all will offer this capability. Often, studying dropout attrition involves studying the completion rate.

How to Avoid Non-Response Attrition

Researchers should bear in mind that there are going to be targeted members of your survey research that won’t even open your survey. There are, however, several practices that can reduce non-response attrition. Here are a few examples:

Create highly targeted surveys. Solicit respondents via a survey that somehow relates to respondents or their market segment. No one likes receiving junk mail or being spammed with survey requests.
Reach those who interacted with a CX you can confirm. Ex: a purchase, a browsing session with no conversions (usually can be tracked with signed-in users), a phone interaction, etc.
1. This will stamp out the feeling of randomness, so that the respondent doesn’t feel they are randomly selected, i.e., being spammed.
Use incentives. Survey incentives grant respondents with a motivation to spend time out of their busy schedules on a survey.
Don’t over-survey. Even if a respondent has taken part in a survey, there is no guarantee they won’t ignore a second request (or others). If you need to follow up, consider using other individuals in your target market.
Be upfront with the purpose and the survey’s importance. Respondents should not feel they are randomly selected — or that they’re selected for something of little importance. Thus, make the purpose of the survey clear, highlighting its need and usefulness, for example, to improve their customer experience.
Display the time required to take the survey. For transparency, make the estimated completion time clear so respondents will know if they are able to take it based on the time they have.
Consider instances most relevant to the target population. Send the surveys around those instances. Certain market segments have key dates that you can base your surveys around. For example, if you are looking to conduct a real estate survey and your target market is college grads, send the survey around graduation time, when the grads move out of their dorms and into their post-college life.

How to Avoid Dropout Attrition

Avoiding dropout attrition involves optimizing the in-survey experience, i.e., the survey itself. Researchers can encourage respondents to complete their survey in a number of ways. Here are a few critical methods to avoid dropout attrition.

1. Keep survey size commensurate with the survey incentive. If you’re not granting any incentives for taking the survey, keep your surveys short, at no more than 5 questions. However, if you provide incentives, then the survey length should be proportional to the incentives. If a survey takes longer than 10 minutes to complete, consider offering a more substantial incentive.
2. Optimize it across devices. We are no longer living in a digital-only, i.e., desktop-only world. Instead, many devices are used on the go like mobile phones and tablets. Assure that your survey can be easily seen, accessed and used across all devices. This includes checking for loading times, for content fits on the screen and no points of friction.
3. Keep questions on-topic. Irrelevant surveys or surveys that seem to veer from the topic they initially presented the respondents with, will easily deter the respondents from completing the surveys. These stir up confusion, boredom and sometimes, even stress.
4. Customize follow-up questions. Each respondent answers differently; as such not all respondents should be taken to the same questions. Instead, route respondents to questions based on the answers they provided via advanced skip logic.
5. Avoid ambiguity in your questions. If they have to overthink a question or feel as though they’re unable to answer it, chances are, the respondents won’t complete the survey. Assure you provide all possible answers in your multiple-choice questions. If this is not practical, include an option for “other,” and allow it to be open-ended.
6. Create engaging experiences with multi-media. These elements include photos, videos, GIFs and the like. Aside from embellishing the questionnaire, they create engaging experiences that stimulate your respondents beyond a text-only survey.
7. Check your completion rates. Check your completion rate regularly. These should be available in the online survey platform you use for your survey campaigns.

Maintaining a Steady Flow of Survey Participation

Since survey attrition cannot be fully avoided, so researchers ought to maintain steady response and completion rates. Additionally, they ought to keep optimizing their surveys, so that they are providing both the respondents and the researchers a smooth, glitch-free experience.

Aside from the technical function of the survey, its success largely hinges on its questionnaire, which should always be kept relevant to the sampling pool. As such, market segmentation comes into play. As a marketer or market researcher, you ought to be in tune with the makeup of your target market — or target population if you are a general researcher.

This requires conducting preliminary market research. A potent online survey tool will help you achieve this with no hassle, allowing you to retain your most sought-after responders.

Frequently asked questions

What is survey attrition?

Survey attrition refers to a decrease in sample size or the survey strength. This happens when respondents can't complete a survey or drop out permanently from participating in a survey.

What are the two types of survey attrition?

These include non-response attrition and dropout attrition. Non-response attrition refers to participants that are unwilling or unable to complete a survey, thus rendering a loss of survey participants. And dropout attrition involves participants who are in the middle of a survey and then leave it halfway.

How can you reduce non-response attrition?

There are several ways to reduce non-response attrition that includes using incentives to encourage customers to complete the survey. Also, creating highly targeted surveys for different respondents can ensure that their time is not wasted.

What causes dropout attrition, and how can you reduce it?

Dropout attrition is when respondents exit the survey in the middle due to an obstacle. These obstacles could be lengthy or ambiguous questions, the lack of survey optimization across various devices, etc. To avoid dropout attrition, ensure your survey is optimized for mobile devices and keep questions concise. Creating an engaging survey with multimedia can also increase their interest, motivating them to complete the survey.

How can you maintain a steady flow of participation?

Survey attrition cannot be avoided entirely; therefore, from their end, you should strive to maintain steady completion and response rates. In addition, keep optimizing your surveys for any technical glitches so the survey experience is smooth for your respondents.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Achieve Agile Market Research by Filtering Data

Achieving agile market research is a feat, even for the most technically savvy market researchers. This is due to the vast pools of data that researchers of companies big and small often confront.

Filtering data is both an effective and efficient means of gaining agile market research. This method helps sort out the chaos that bombards even the most powerful of market research tools.

A tool that leaves out critical data categories is bound to increase the presence of survey sampling errors plaguing a market research campaign. Concurrently, a tool that offers a vast amount of data categories and inputs is inclined to tarnish a survey campaign.

Filtering data is the solution, but it must have all the necessary functionalities in order to buttress agile data — and therefore agile market research.

This article explains agile data, how the correct filtering data interface can help you sustain agile market research and how the Pollfish platform offers advanced and granular filtering data functionalities.

Making Sense out of Agile Data

Primarily used in the IT sector and designed particularly for its professionals, agile data is a concept that can significantly improve the market research process.

This is due to the vast reliance on data in market research — be it through secondary means or through the set up of effective survey studies.

IT professionals have founded different methods to accompany the larger catch-all phrase known as agile data. This refers to all the strategies that IT workers can apply to work more in tandem and more effectively on the data facets of software systems.

By fostering the means to work together more constructively, they reap several benefits, such as speed to insight, less waiting on higher-ups for making forthcoming decisions and smoother collaborations.

Agile market research is also borne out of the concept of agile data, to bring such benefits and more into the sphere of research.

The Importance of Achieving Agile Market Research

Achieving agile market research is a necessity in the current information age, in which various digital elements are jockeying for users’ attention, in spite of short attention spans. This ties in directly with survey attrition, along with site and app users avoiding a survey in the first place.

A major deterrent to the survey process, this issue mars the ability to build up an agile system of data collection, analysis and the yielding of results. Some market researchers may create various survey campaigns on similar subject matters as a way to remedy this.

After all, with more surveys on similar subjects, it appears to be more conducive to creating shorter surveys, a common best practice.

However, this runs contrary to agile market research, as it requires more time to create the correct surveys, launch them, cross-reference them and acquire quick results.

Instead, the online survey platform itself must be built on the premise of agile data, so that market researchers can tackle any topic quickly and without the need to implement many surveys and related survey campaigns.

One such way to form agile data and reap its benefits is through an advanced system of filtering data.

How Filtering Data Attains Agile Market Research

Almost every market research SaaS platform offers the filtering functionality, be it for determining the qualified respondents, forming the questionnaire questions and those of the screener.

While the different filtering data systems you’ll come upon in online survey platforms may appear to be carbon copies of one another, a closer look will reveal that they are not. Thus, they do not offer the same prowess of agile data — if any at all.

This is because agile data is not just about streamlining operations, but doing so while providing all the necessary functions and pieces of information.

A potent system of filtering data ensures that market researchers do not forgo using all the necessary categories of data, be it in screening questions, questionnaire questions or the demographics input.

In addition, a strong presence of data filtering allows researchers to organize parse through a large collection of data. This is especially useful in ambitious surveys, i.e., those that are longer or use more skip logic.

When data is neatly filtered, it is much easier to analyze it, make decisions on the next steps and complete a research project in a well-timed manner, thus forging agile data and maintaining agile market research.

How the Pollfish Platform Offers a Top Tier Filtering Data System

Pollfish clients secure agile data on a daily basis through the use of our advanced filtering data system, which is implemented throughout our dashboard, allowing us to divide it into just two sections: the audience and the questionnaire.

This minimalist approach saves researchers the headache and eyesore of rifling through various pages as part of building a survey from the ground up.

Instead, the platform offers multiple categories in our filtering system, permitting each aspect of the survey to be comprehensive and well-organized.

The following explains just how granularly researchers can define both their audience and set up their questionnaire through our filtering data functionalities.

Data Filtering in the Audience Section

First off, our filtering data function allows researchers to reach the correct respondents, with demographics categories that filter through common categories such as age, gender and geo-location. Each category allows researchers to assign quotas, so you receive the exact number of your selected respondents.

Although geolocation appears to be an ordinary demographic option, our filtering system is granular and manifold, so that researchers can filter the geolocation by 9 categories, such as postal code, US Census Region, city, state and more.

There are also 9 categories of demographic criteria, all of which can also be assigned quotas. These include marital status, education, ethnicity, career type and others. Researchers can even filter respondents based on mobile usage criteria and an advertising ID.

To augment all of these advanced filtering options, the Pollfish platform has recently introduced the Multiple Audiences capability, in which researchers can create one survey, with the audience requirements of multiple surveys.

This is because you can create blocks, that is, groups of specific audience requirements and quotas, with each block representing a different audience.

All this smart filtering forms agile data for researchers, so that they won’t need help at every turn, given how intuitive the filtering data system is — and that is just in the audience section.

Data Filtering in the Questionnaire Section

The questionnaire section includes multi-pronged filtering data capabilities. The filtering options span various categories so that researchers can cover all bases in their studies. This also opens up the opportunity to use just one survey per campaign.

Firstly, researchers can select the kind of question they seek to use, with 8 options of question types available (single selection, multiple selection, ranking, etc). These form the core of the survey type, in that they can take the survey in various stylistic and thematic directions.

For example, there is an option for an NPS question, the heart of the NPS survey. Or, you can use a ranking question to create the CSAT survey. The ratings stars question option allows you to create a visual ratings survey, specifically one that uses stars and so on.

After you choose the question type, there are 7 categories you can use to filter the answers. For example, you can add media to an answer, such as an MOV file, a GIF, an audio file, etc. Or you can apply logic, which routes respondents to appropriate questions based on their answer to a question of origin.

When researchers are at a stumbling block in terms of answer options, they can use the predetermined answers filtering option. This filtering data function is rich in categories, offering 46 scaled answer options. For example, researchers can use answers using a scale of disagree to agree, satisfied to dissatisfied, far exceeding expectations to falling short of expectations, the days of the week and many more.

The magnitude of filtering options will prevent any researcher-based writing block when it comes to crafting answers.

There is also a category of “none of the above,” which can be accompanied with an image. There is an “other option,” in which you can have responders specify their answer. This too can be paired with an image.

Instead of manually changing the order of answers, you can use the “shuffle answers” filtering data option. Or, you can implement “batch answers,” a function that allows you to paste all of your answers into the answer portion at once, should you decide to use them from an external document.

A smart system driven by AI, Pollfish divides the pasted content into separate answers. This allows you to avoid copy/pasting each one manually, as they are all inserted automatically.

All in all, the Pollfish system of filtering data is an advanced system of granular categories and selections, which facilitate the survey creation process, in turn providing agile data that is feasible to interpret.

Filtering Data in the Results Dashboard

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, data filtering is applied in the post-survey results in the Pollfish dashboard. There, researchers have the option of filtering data to their liking for all of their analysis needs.

When filtering data in the results dashboard, researchers have filtering options on the left panel of the page. They can sort their results by selecting their desired filters and deselecting the rest.

They can also filter by question and answer to see how respondents answered a certain question, by clicking on their desired question or answer. They also have the option to export the filtered results by clicking on “exports” and then instead of “all data” selecting “current view.”

There is also a “time range” filter on the left panel, which can also give them a grasp of the survey distribution in real-time.

Additionally, there is a post-stratification filter; this filter weighs the age and gender demographics to match the census data of the targeted region.

The results are adjusted to reflect this change. This is why the filter on each response counts differently (hence the number/ percentage discrepancy when the filter is enabled). This data is a more accurate representation of the targeted audience.

The platform also allows researchers to download various documents for analyzing post-survey data — data that has already been extracted by Pollfish. Researchers can download this data in four different kinds of report types for all kinds of analyses.

The following explains the 4 kinds of data exports available for data filtering:

PDF: A visual document that can easily be shared with stakeholders and saved as reference docs. A Pollfish PDF is laid out similarly to a PowerPoint presentation.
Excel Spreadsheet: Recognizable to most businesses, with a Pollfish spreadsheet export, researchers have full access to all Pollfish survey results. They can add pivot tables, graphs and get deeper insights.
Crosstabs Report: Crosstabs are a matrix-style data visualization format and one of the most useful ways that market researchers analyze data. This kind of report allows researchers to look into individual insights and organize the data in different ways, opening different consumer insights that wouldn’t be readily available from the initial results.
SPSS Report: SPSS is a set of software programs combined in a single package. It allows you to add your Pollfish results to various kinds of complex data analyses. It’s good at combining varied, complex data sets. Researchers use it to make connections, find correlations and graph results from various data exports at once. SPSS has several tools to analyze data for predictions and spotting patterns, increasing its use for brands and marketers looking for buying behavior trends or to vet the viability of a new product.

The Gateway to Nurturing Agile Market Research

Obtaining agile market research is never an easy task — that is, if you’re using a below-par online survey platform. There are several ways such a platform can spur agile data, such as via a mobile-first approach and with powerful SaaS integrations.

Additionally, filtering data is a critical component of nurturing agile data for market research. As one of the main elements of a market research tool, it is not universally equivalent across platforms. This function tends to differ from platform to platform, as such it is not always conducive to agile data.

On the contrary, the Pollfish filtering data system encompasses all aspects of the survey creation process. It is built as a means of providing comprehensive coverage of all categories, whether they pertain to the screening section, aka, the audience section, or the questionnaire.

It is also very intuitive, thus molding agile data by its very structure.

Frequently asked questions

How do you use data filtering in the questionnaire section?

The questionnaire section includes multi-pronged filtering data capabilities. The filtering options span various categories so that researchers can cover all bases in their studies.

How many data exports are available for data filtering?

Four main data exports are available for filtering data: PDF, Excel Spreadsheet, Crosstabs Reports, and SPSS reports.

Why is filtering important in agile data market research?

Researchers often divide their data into different categories for a more comprehensive understanding of it. Filtering this data opens up the opportunity to use one survey per campaign, which can zoom in on each category in a better way. Additionally, filtering data allows for easy organization.

How does the filtering data system work?

Clients can use an advanced filtering system post-survey results to divide it into two sections: the questionnaire and the audience. It also allows clients to divide their data into multiple categories for a complete and elaborate survey result.

How do you filter data in the results dashboard?

There are filtering options on the left panel of the page where researchers can sort the result by choosing their desired filters. For example, they can also use filters to view how respondents have answered certain questions.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving Into the Customer Satisfaction Score Survey (CSAT) Survey

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey is an effective tool to measure customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction has always been the chief performance goal for businesses, as customers are the lifeblood of any business.

The need to satisfy customers is at an all-time high, as a third of customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, proving that companies need satisfaction upkeep of even their loyal customers. Nearly 60% of US consumers will abandon a brand after a few bad experiences.

Businesses, therefore, need a solid strategy that prioritizes customer satisfaction. A customer satisfaction survey, the CSAT survey is one of the foremost methods of gauging this crucial concept. This article delves into the customer satisfaction score survey and all that it entails and provides.

Defining the CSAT Survey

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey evaluates customer satisfaction based on a specific touchpoint in their customer journey, whether that’s in a website’s navigation menu, at checkout or while using a product they’ve already purchased (post-sales).

Another key differentiating factor of the CSAT survey is that this customer satisfaction survey is based on its eponymous score. This score signifies the percentage of satisfaction that customers endure and therefore, rate some point(s) in their customer experience (CX). Higher percentages reflect higher degrees of customer satisfaction.

Understanding this score helps businesses determine how segments of their target market assess their satisfaction in relation to their business. The CSAT survey comprises more than just the question used to calculate the score. Since it is a survey, it uses follow-up questions based on the respondents' answers. These can include open-ended questions so that respondents can elaborate on their CSAT rating.

How to Calculate the CSAT Score

The CSAT score is the heart of this survey. It uses a specific formula for its calculation. Although the CSAT survey measures a specific customer experience, market researchers can use it for general customer satisfaction assessments.

The CSAT score is measured with a Likert scale question type. The scale is between 1 and 5, in which 1 represents “highly unsatisfied” and 5 represents “highly satisfied.” 4 also represents predominantly satisfied customers.

The CSAT score is the most flexible type of customer satisfaction score, as it is not limited to the numbered scale. You can use various in-survey tools to exhibit the same sentiments as the 1-5 scale, such as emoticons, stars and other visual elements.

Here is an example of a general CSAT survey question, which responders answer with the aforesaid scale: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with our company?

Here is how you measure the CSAT score after you receive this critical variable:

CSAT= (Number of satisfied customers (4 and 5) / Number of survey responses) x 100

Round the result to the nearest whole number.

An example of the CSAT Calculation:

Number of satisfied customers (those who answered with a 4 or 5) = 32

Number of survey responses = 84

CSAT= (32/84) X 100

CSAT= 0.38 X 100

CSAT= 38%

As such, only 38% of respondents were satisfied.

How the CSAT Survey Differs from the Customer Effort Score (CES) & Other Surveys

There are several other key customer satisfaction survey types. The two other main surveys are the Customer Effort Score (CES) survey and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Additionally, researchers can experiment with other customer satisfaction surveys, like ratings scale and custom surveys.

While it measures the same business aspect of customer satisfaction, the CSAT survey differs from the other such survey types, in that it studies particular things and thus has a discrete formula.

The Key Differentiators of the CSAT Survey

The following lays out the key facets of the CSAT survey. These distinguish it from other customer satisfaction surveys.

Measures how satisfied or dissatisfied customers are at a particular time, with a particular service, procedure, interaction, product or any single CX moment.
Uses a Likert scale question, with a scale of 1-5.
Has two key outcomes: the score (whether its low (1-3) or high (4-5)) and the percentage of the high scores.
Focuses on the latter, i.e., the percentage of satisfied (high) scores.
Should be launched after a specific occurrence in the CX, such as:
1. A technical support call
2. A product demo
3. A purchase
4. Visiting a store
5. Interaction with a UI element

The Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey DIfferences

The Customer Effort Score (CES) survey studies a completely different aspect of customer satisfaction. This survey measures the ease of service experience customers undergo with a business. Thus, it asks respondents to rate the ease of using a product or service via a Matrix-like question, on a scale ranging between “very difficult” and “very easy.”

Also a Likert scale question, the scale is usually between 1 and 5, in which 1 represents very low effort and 5 represents a very high effort. This can cause some ambiguity since the scale is inverted (1= good, as it’s low-effort/easy, 5= bad, as it’s high effort/difficult). 3 represents a neutral degree of effort in doing business with a company.

The Customer Effort Score formula:
(Very easy + easy answers) — (very difficult + difficult answers) = CES

Another way to calculate the CES: (sum of all individual scores) / all the respondents = CES
Following suit to the first calculation, the lower the score, the easier and thus more satisfying the experience is.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey DIfferences

The NPS survey differs from the CSAT survey in that it measures the likelihood of a customer to recommend a product or business to others. This survey is intended to understand customers’ outlook on a business, particularly their positive CX.

This is because the NPS question doesn’t merely question customer satisfaction — it asks whether customers reached a satisfaction high enough that would spur them into advocating for the business.

Respondents answer the NPS question on a scale of 0-10. The scale is divided into 3 sections of responders based on their scores.

Detractors: Scores 0-6, they represent the low end/ negative sentiment
Passives: 7-8 is the mid-range; their name denotes more of a neutral sentiment
Promoters: 9-10 represents high customer satisfaction

The Net Promoter Score formula:
(Number of Promoter Scores/Total Number of Respondents) - (Number of Detractor Scores/Total Number of Respondents) = NPS score

The Customer Satisfaction Score survey is therefore divergent in its calculation along with the aspect it measures.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of the CSAT Survey

The CSAT survey is a nimble tool for tracking and measuring customer satisfaction. But as any survey tool, it too has a few limitations. It’s key to learn both its benefits and snags when deciding whether this survey type is the right one for your market research needs. The following posits the pros and cons, so that you can weigh them against each other during your deliberation.

The Pros

Versatile measurements: It can be used across a wide range of interactions and experiences.
Extremely flexible formatting: The grading scale is not limited to numbers. For a simple rating, researchers can use emoticons, stars, etc.
Specific: Brands can spot-check different components of their CX, whether it’s digital or in-store and make precise improvements.
Provides regular, up-to-date info: This survey can regularly be deployed as a check-up on your customer satisfaction, thus providing up-to-date customer feedback.
Positive for your brand’s perception: Customers like it when their feedback is considered. When you specifically tie their opinions to your brand, you’re positing it in a good light.
Can build benchmark data: By administering the same type of survey from time to time, you’ll be gaining continued insight that you can compare over time, allowing you to benchmark the data over several years.
Simplicity in design: Although the question can pertain to all kinds of CX components, it is simple and requires few follow-up questions, unless you need a deep read of customer interactions.

The Cons

Limits with specificity: Since it zeroes in a specific touchpoint, the feedback is limited to that experience only. It doesn’t provide a wider view of the overall customer relationship.
Can overwhelm respondents: Although a simple survey, the CSAT warrants constant check-ups for updated info and benchmarking. This can irritate repeat customers or even first-time buyers.
Privacy concerns: Not all interactions are private. A purchase, for example, isn’t private in that customers provide their names, addresses and credit/debit card details. As such, their identities are tied to their CSAT survey responses. This can be concerning for customers that value their privacy and want to maximize it.

When to Use the CSAT Survey

The capability of being used to survey everything can mean nothing for market researchers and business owners who want to narrow down the most expedient opportunities for measuring customer satisfaction.

As such, here are some of the most opportune moments and occurrences in your customers’ CX for you to employ the CSAT survey.

Customer support interactions
1. Chatboxes, emails and all other digital communications
2. On the phone
3. In-store and at a support center
Sales interactions
1. In-store
2. During a meeting whether it’s via Zoom or in-person
3. Over the phone
4. During a marketing event, tradeshow, etc.
Customer onboarding
1. Particular to SaaS companies
2. Includes products/services that require training (mainly for professionals)
Event feedback
1. Digital events like webinars, company introductions, etc.
2. In-person events from grand openings, to sales weeks, etc.
Site Navigation
1. Homepage
2. Landing pages
3. Product pages
4. Banners
5. Ads
6. Checkout
7. Search bar
Product Satisfaction
1. Newly purchased products
2. Products owned for a period of time (from weeks to a year)

There is virtually no limit to testing customer satisfaction with the CSAT survey, as it can be adapted to test all customer experiences.

Taking Your Customer Satisfaction Above and Beyond

The CSAT is but one consumer survey, but it has a major takeaway: the importance of keeping your customers happy. With customer expectations at an all-time high, it is integral to provide them with experiences that raise their customer satisfaction.

In essence, customer satisfaction measures a consolidation of customer perceptions and expectations. While it is impossible to meet every expectation, achieving a good perception is doable. In order to meet this end, you need to constantly study your customers in relation to their satisfaction with your business.

Online surveys are the most effective measures in this regard, in that they catch customers in their natural environments. Regarding the CSAT score, online surveys empower it, as market researchers can place and launch surveys during various customer interactions. The more you study your customer satisfaction, the better you can perfect it.

Frequently asked questions

What is a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) survey?

Customer satisfaction is essential for any business, and therefore, it is important to measure how customers feel about the offerings. Customer satisfaction or CSAT survey is one of the foremost methods of gauging this crucial metric.

How does the customer satisfaction score work?

A Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey evaluates the customer's satisfaction based on a specific touchpoint. For example, it could be a customer's interaction with the brand's website, checkout, or experience during purchase. The score represents the percentage of satisfaction that the customer felt and adds the rating to the overall customer experience (CX).

How is a customer satisfaction score measured?

The CSAT score is evaluated on a Likert scale question. The customer is asked to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 signifies highly unsatisfied customers while 5 represents highly satisfied.

What is the difference between the customer effort score survey and the customer satisfaction score survey?

The Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys show how easy and comfortable customers feel while interacting with a business. On the other hand, a CSAT score is determined based on consumer feedback. It asks customers to rate their experience using a product or a service, whereas a customer satisfaction score evaluates a customer's satisfaction at a given customer touchpoint.

What are some advantages of the CSAT survey?

There are several advantages of using a CSAT survey that include versatile measurements, benchmarking data for continued insights, flexible formatting, and spot-checking different components of a CX application. These things help in deducing customers’ satisfaction at a particular touchpoint that can help boost engagement and understand customer’s preferences better.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

B2B Survey Questions to Turn MQLs into Customers and Scale Your Business

B2B survey questions provide a powerful and versatile opportunity for marketers to optimize their efforts. Yet, the concept of using surveys to better understand prospects is often overlooked by marketers.

If you’re looking for an innovative way to glean additional information about leads in your sales funnels, a B2B survey may be the perfect solution.

Don’t let inexperience with this research methodology stop you from launching your first B2B survey. This guide from Pollfish will provide you with a variety of B2B survey questions that you start using today to enhance your marketing strategy and turn more leads into sales.

How B2B Survey Questions Improve Your Sales Funnel

B2B survey questions can serve as the ideal follow-up to prospects after they have made initial contact with your company.

When a prospect completes a form, i.e., to ask a question or gain access to gated marketing content such as an eBook, your business will be in possession of key demographic information about your prospect and, most importantly, their contact details.

At this point, your marketing campaigns are already yielding B2B engagement, so it is the perfect time to engage with the prospect.

This is an opportunity to learn more about your prospect. B2B survey questions are a viable means to engage with your prospects at several points in their CX. For example, you can survey them prior to their gaining access to a gated content asset or follow up after they’ve seen/downloaded your content.

This will gain you valuable information about their role in their company (to see whether they are responsible for conducting business or report to someone who does), their nurture needs, buyer readiness and other factors that build their business relationship with your company.

Questions to Identify MQLs

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are leads from marketing campaigns that are the most likely to convert; however, it is difficult to identify these leads from basic demographic data alone. B2B survey questions can provide you with the information you need to determine whether to pass the lead along to the sales team, whether they need to be nurtured further or whether they aren’t qualified MQLs. These questions will help you make that decision:

What is your job title?

1. 1. Multiple choice: COO, Director of Operations, Manager, Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Etc.

Who do you report to?

1. 1. Multiple choice: Board of Directors, CTO, Director of Technology, Other.

How large is your company?

1. 1. Multiple choice: 1 - 10, 10 - 100, 100 - 1,000, 1,000+.

What is your purchasing authority?

1. 1. Multiple choice: I have the authority to make purchases, I can make purchases with the authority of my manager, I can influence purchasing decisions but I can’t make them.

On a scale of 1 - 10, how likely are you to download and read a free marketing report on changes in [industry name]?

1. 1. A scaled response, with 10 being “extremely likely.”

Questions that Explore B2B Pain Points

If a lead is familiar with your company (e.g. from spending time on your website or by reading content from your organization), but still hasn’t made a purchase, it is important to understand what stands in their way.

This is the opportune time to gain information about their pain points by asking the following survey questions:

What is the biggest challenge you face in your line of operation?

1. 1. Text entry field

Of the following, what is your business lacking?

1. 1. Multiple-choice answers with multiple selections allowed: lead generation tool, an effective customer communication tool, better user testing capabilities, etc.

What types of assets would help your business grow?

1. 1. Multiple-choice answer with multiple selections allowed: i, benchmark data, content on how [your product name] can improve processes, industry reports, etc.

What are you hoping to accomplish by setting up a [enter your product/solution here]?

1. 1. Multiple-choice answer: Improve internal processes, Save money, Find efficiencies, Scale my organization.
  2. Text entry field

What is holding you back from purchasing today?

1. Multiple-choice answer: Cost, Unsure if features suit our needs, Ease of use, Not sure we need it.

Questions to Nurture MQLs Further Down the Sales Funnel

B2B survey questions can provide invaluable insight to your marketing team as you plan and create content to further nurture MQLs down the sales funnel.

This info can be used to personalize various marketing literature and ancillary marketing functions such as ABM campaigns, marketing events and non-textual video content., These can make the difference between your MQL going cold or moving to the next step in their journey. The following questions provide insight for further MQL nurturing :

Where do you go to learn more about what’s happening in your industry? Check all that apply.

1. 1. Multiple-choice response with the ability to select multiple answers: Industry blogs, benchmark reports, Podcasts, News sites, Competitors’ websites, consultants

What kind of digital assets would most help your organization? Check all that apply.

1. 1. Multiple-choice response with the ability to select multiple answers: benchmark data, verticalized reports, webinars, blog posts, guides, eBooks, etc.

Which terms do you use to search for more information about [product/service name]?

1. 1. Text entry field.

What is your preferred communication method?

1. Multiple-choice answers: phone, email, video conference

Questions about Satisfaction with an Existing B2B Relationship

Customer retention is essential to your organization’s bottom line, as loyal customers engage in prolonged business relationships, bringing a longer customer lifetime value (CLV. Once your B2B customers have chosen you as their supplier, or B2C customers have chosen you as their partner, you can use B2B survey questions to check-in with them to understand and adapt to their needs. Here are some customer satisfaction questions you should plan to ask:

How satisfied are you with our company?
1. Multiple-choice answer: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neither, Dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied.
On a scale of 1 - 10, how would you rate the ease of doing business with us?
1. Scaled response, with 10 being “extremely easy to do business with.”
Please rank the following state: I would purchase products or services from your business again.
1. Likert scale: Strongly agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly disagree.
How likely are you to recommend our organization to a friend or colleague?
1. If Net Promoter Score is used, the response should be provided on a scale of 1- 10, with 10 being “highly likely to recommend.”
2. A multiple-choice response can also be used: I have already or will recommend, I may recommend, I am not sure if I’ll recommend, I would not recommend.
On a scale of 1 - 10, how well do we handle concerns when they arise?
1. Scaled response, with 10 indicating “concerns are handled very well.”
What can our company do better?
1. Open text entry form.

Questions to Spur Cross-Sells and Upsells

You can continue to enhance your relationship with your B2B customers with additional offerings by encouraging cross-sells and upsells. Not only does this increase your company’s sales, but it also ensures they won’t leave you for a competitor who offers more.

Is your organization considering additional technology purchases this year?
1. Multiple-choice answer: yes, yes, but it’s not a top priority, unsure, unlikely, a definite no.
2. Use skip logic to send “yes” answers to additional questions about the technology they may purchase.
How much do you know about the following services/products that our business offers?
1. Use a matrix to list out the services and products you offer. Then offer responses across the top row:, I’m interested in this, I know you offer this, but I am not interested, I did not know you offer this, I don’t need this.
What other services would you like us to provide?
1. Multiple-choice answers, with multiple selections allowed (list out features or services that your competitors offer or that you plan to develop)
2. Text entry field
If we offered X, would you consider purchasing from us?
1. If asking about a single product or service, you can use a binary response.
2. If asking about multiple items, use a matrix to understand the interest level in each.

B2B Success Is in the Details

We have provided you with a number of B2B survey questions that you can leverage to power your sales funnel, increase conversions, elongate contractual relationships, maintain partnerships and improve customer retention.

In order to get the information you need from prospects and existing customers, you will have to pay careful attention to your approach.

Consider the wording of early emails to your customers. Remind them about why you are reaching out: i.e., “You filled out a form on our website. We’d like to know how we can better meet your needs. Do you have 2 minutes to complete a short survey?”.

Alternatively, consider offering an incentive to get prospects to engage (e.g. discount code or free gift. However, you decide to approach this, know that the information you receive will help improve your marketing and sales processes, as well as turn those MQLs into happy customers.

Frequently asked questions

How can B2B survey questions help companies know more about their customers?

B2B Survey questions provide an opportunity for businesses to learn more about their customers. They are an effective way to engage with prospects before they gain access to your content, so you have an idea about what kind of content they're looking for.

What are marketing qualified leads (MQL)?

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are prospects from the marketing funnel with the highest likelihood of converting to sales. However, it might be challenging to identify these leads from the overall demographic data.

How can B2B survey questions help identify MQLs?

B2B survey questions can help identify leads by identifying whether the lead is secure enough to be passed along the funnel to the sales team. Moreover, they determine whether the leads need nurturing or are fit to be qualified as an MQL.

What B2B survey questions are the most important to ask for moving a lead up the sales funnel?

Ask questions that give customers the power to make suggestions for improvements. For example, ask them what the business can do to enhance their services. Offer multiple-choice questions to guide customers who might need to be pointed towards a possible answer.

How can you tailor B2B survey questions to boost customer retention?

Once you've got B2B customers in your sales funnel, understand their journey and check in with them to make sure that they remain satisfied. Ask them questions like how pleased they are with the overall service provided and if they have any suggestions for improving any service.

by Pollfish Marketing Team