Mobile Market Reseearch Resources

How to Get Survey Responses to Complete Your Market Research Needs

When dealing with online surveys, you’ll surely ask yourself how to get survey responses, or at least, how to get more survey responses.

We hear you! Any market research campaign needs a particular amount of surveys for statistical relevance and to lessen the margin of error.

However, survey response rates still tend to be on the lower end of the scale, as the current survey response rates are at about 30%. Thus, there is clearly work that needs to be done to increase this rate so that you can reach a suitable number of survey responses.

However, despite the rather low amount of respondents that take a survey, surveys are still popular — for both researchers and their target audiences.

Online surveys in particular, are a popular route for conducting market research. Both researchers and survey respondents can attest to this.

For example, 71.6% of respondents prefer to answer a survey online. Thus, you should consider updating your market research methods by using online surveys.

This article guides you how to get survey responses so that you get an adequate amount of completed surveys to aid any research campaign.

How to Get Survey Responses Via 2 Survey Distribution Methods

Before we discuss how to increase your survey responses, please note that we are providing this advice for those who use our Distribution link feature.

This feature gives you more freedom when it comes to posting surveys online, as you get to choose where to post the link for people to take your survey, as well as who gets to take your survey, if you’re thinking of sending it to specific people.

This method is one of our major two; the other involves our Random Device Engagement (RDE) method of distributing surveys. With RDE, our platform sends surveys to a massive network of online properties, such as websites and apps.

The surveys target people randomly, given that RDE runs on organic sampling. That means there is no prerecruitment, which you would find in a survey panel. Instead, the platform targets random people who voluntarily exist in a particular digital space.

We target over 250 million people in over 160 countries to gain your respondent pool. Following agile research, this method keeps iterating surveys until the designated amount of respondents have completed their survey.

Thus, you don’t need to worry about getting survey responses via this method. However, if you send surveys your own way, that is, with the Distribution Link feature, you’ll need to have a solid plan on how to get survey responses, especially if you seek a certain number of responses within a certain time.

Fortunately, we provide several tips on how to get more survey responses.

Draw in Responses with a Strong Survey Intro

First responses matter and this applies in survey participation as well. That’s why you’ll need to reel in interest to your survey as soon as you can.

This entails compelling your potential respondents to take your survey as soon as they come upon your survey.

Everyone sets up their survey differently. Yours may exist as a pop-up, while others may position it right below a large image.

Regardless of the form of the call-out you use to grab people’s attention to take your survey, you’ll need to supply it with a strong introduction. This must be interesting, compelling and show respondents why the survey is important and why their participation matters.

As such, use short and snappy survey titles and call-outs.

To ease anyone’s dread, you may want to consider adding the time it takes to complete the survey in your title or introduction.

This is to reassure your respondents from the onset that the survey won’t take much of their time.

It’s also useful to add the purpose of the survey title and introduction, especially when it relates to helping the respondents themselves.

Example text: “Take this quick 3-minute survey to help brands serve you better!”

Create a Survey with Survey Best Practices

You should never just wing it when it comes to producing surveys; instead, apply the best practices for surveys each time you create a survey.

These will ensure you provide a good survey experience for the respondents, as well as receive the key data that you need for your market research campaigns.

While you can’t please everyone, several survey best practices are tried and true. The following provides several best practices you should consider for your surveys:

Keep your questionnaire short.
1. Many are time-poor and no one wants to waste their time.
2. Keeping the questioning short will prevent respondents from leaving your survey before completing it. In this way, you’ll prevent or at the very least minimize survey attrition.
3. Some respondents won’t even begin your survey if it’s too long.
Remove any ambiguity from your questions.
1. Surveys aren’t a knowledge test for school. As such, your questions should be easy to understand and answer.
2. Avoid any confusion and be as direct as possible.
3. When questions are difficult to answer, respondents will be bent on leaving the survey or getting bored quickly.
Mix and match question types to retain interest throughout the survey-taking process.
1. You can ward off respondents from getting bored by using a variety of question types and formats.
2. Use questions such as: Likert scale questions, Matrix questions, stars and emoji scales, bipolar questions, drill-down questions and more.
3. Make sure the survey platform you use allows you to do so.
Find an adequate time to send your survey.
1. This will depend on the lifestyles and habits of your target market.
2. You can determine this by conducting a target market analysis to see when your target audience has more time in their day, when they go online, etc.
3. Also, there are some general times and moments in the customer journey determined to be the best time to send a survey.
Thank the respondents and follow up.
1. Include a thank you page in your survey to give thanks to respondents for their time and consideration.
2. You can also do so in advance by thanking respondents in the intro of the survey.
3. Follow up with respondents whose contact information you have. There are many ways to go about this, including with the results of the survey, to thank them and more.

Strengthen Interest with Survey Incentives

Another strong approach to getting survey responses is to reward the respondents with survey incentives.

These incentives can be either monetary or nonmonetary and you can get creative with your incentives to stand apart from your competitors.

This is especially important when your survey states your brand or displays its logo or any other likeness. That’s because using incentives shows generosity and care, thereby positioning your brand in a good light.

After all, your respondents will know which company they are dealing with. Thus, you should consider using incentives to frame your brand in the best possible way. Survey incentives will do this, as they prove to respondents that you truly care about their participation. Otherwise, why would you reward them with incentives?

On the contrary, if respondents see your business on your survey and it doesn’t offer incentives, this will lead to a negative impression of your brand, even if the respondents are longtime customers.

That’d because no one owes you any feedback, regardless of how critical it may be. Thus, use incentives when possible, especially in instances where respondents know your business is running the survey.

Do a Favor for Your Respondents

This is especially useful if you know your respondents or have their contact information.

Doing favors closely ties in with incentives, but it is different in that favors can be anything aside from small benefits (like extra lives on a mobile game that respondents played upon encountering your survey) or gifts.

Favors can consist of doing anything favorable for your respondents. There are many routes you can take with factors, such as the following:

Promise to give respondents a discount on your products or services.
Offer a discount on top of an already discounted purchase.
Enter them into a sweepstake to win a big prize.
Raise their status if they are in a rewards program.
Give them a preview of one of your new offerings.

As you can see, there are many kinds of favors you can offer your respondents to lure them into taking your survey.

At times, you may want to give some kind of proof of the favor you promised, such as a coupon that only goes into effect after respondents complete their survey.

Remember that what truly differentiates favors from incentives is that favors are grander and are more long-term-oriented gifts and gestures.

Use Your Content to Motivate Respondents

The content your business puts into the world has various benefits, but did you know that you can use it to encourage people to take your survey?

Not all content assets are easily accessible. That’s where you can use them to incite respondents to take your survey. This is especially true with gated content.

Content that’s gated often involves collecting users’ information in order for them to view it. In this scenario, you can require your users to take your survey to gain access to your gated content.

This is fair, given that both parties will get something in return. In addition, your site visitors won’t have to pay anything or get a membership to view the content they need, they’ll just need to take a survey.

Using gated content is especially useful for B2B matters and campaigns and therefore, B2B surveys.

Aside from granting users entry to gated text-based content, you can also gain more survey responses by giving them access to video content. Videos tend to draw in more views and engagement then text, especially in the era of Tik Tok and short attention spans.

Getting the Right Amount of Survey Participation

Getting the right amount of survey responses is never a feat with the right online survey platform. Such a platform will allow you to research all your targeted respondents in various ways, like the aforementioned RDE method and via the Distribution Link.

With the former, you won’t ever have to worry about survey responses, as the platform will keep sending surveys across the internet until your preset number of completed survey responses is fulfilled.

With the latter option, it’s best to follow our advice on how to get more survey responses. However, even in this method, our survey platform will keep iterating until the requisite number of completed surveys is reached.

Thus, your survey is in good hands regardless of the distribution route you take when you use Pollfish.

You should also consider that a strong survey platform will grant you all the functionalities necessary to build a good survey campaign, one that draws in interest and gets respondents to complete the survey.

Pollfish survey software allows you to create a thorough survey data collection, one you can customize to your liking, view however you please and organize to the max.

In addition, with our vast array of question types, you can create virtually any type of survey to aid your research campaigns.

Researchers can leverage a wide breadth of information on their respondents by accessing a wide pool of insights in their survey results dashboard.

In addition, we also offer the advanced skip logic feature, which routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers to a previous question.

Thanks to our advanced market research platform, getting survey responses is highly attainable and easy on Pollfish.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Where Can I Post Surveys Online — and Other Concerns

Where can I post surveys online? We know you’ve got questions — and not just for your survey target audience. You’re probably brimming with questions on how to use an online survey platform with all of its capabilities, features and methods in the survey process.

Fortunately, we’ve got you covered on things survey and market research-related.

If you haven’t used survey research before, we suggest doing so, as online survey software industry in the US has grown 5.0% per year on average between 2017 and 2022.

And for good reason. Surveys provide an easy and quick method to obtain key insights on those who matter most to your business: your customers.

You should therefore opt for an online survey platform to learn the nitty gritty of all members of your target market — the group of people most likely to buy from your business.

While we can’t address every concern you may have in just one article, we can make certain related topics clear. When it comes to posting surveys online, you’ll need to know how this can be done, namely, the two major methods making this possible.

There are a few other related things you ought to know, which this article will cover.

This article lays out answers to key questions about conducting surveys, such as where can I post surveys online and others.

How Can I Post Surveys Online?

When it comes to posting your surveys online, there are two main methods underpinning this endeavor.

The first gives you less leeway on where your survey will appear, but is one of the most powerful ways of reaching a wide audience across the internet — and the world. That’s because it involves organic sampling, which reaches people randomly on the internet.

Depending on the survey platform you use, you may be able to cast a wide net when it comes to reaching a diverse population, across a multitude of online platforms.

The second method involves more specificity; researchers get to choose which platforms their surveys will be on. That’s because it involves posting a link to the survey in various digital channels that you as the researcher select.

Or, you can send the link to specific people via email, social media or some other means.

Not all survey platforms offer both of these capabilities of posting your survey online. We suggest leveraging a platform that powers your research with both methods.

Random Device Engagement (RDE)

Random Device Engagement is Pollfish’s signature approach to the aforementioned random sampling method. With RDE, surveys are sent to a massive network of over 250 million+ websites and apps, prompting users that exist in their natural digital environments to take the surveys.

As such, you survey will exist in different websites, mobile sites and mobile apps, where consumers are engaged and can be easily incentivized non-monetarily.

This eliminates the survey bias that can occur if you were to use a survey panel.

Professional panelists are not taking a survey in their natural environments online; instead, they are pre-recruited, which means they are not fully anonymous. They can easily feel compelled to answer surveys in a certain way, tainting the accuracy of the survey study.

They are also prone to panel fatigue from constantly having to take surveys. They may also be influenced by certain questions, which then affect how they answer future ones. This is known as panel conditioning.

On the contrary, Random Device Engagement reaches and recruits respondents in the places they naturally frequent online. This means that respondents’ participation is completely voluntary, anonymous and randomized.

As such, respondents are more likely to answer truthfully and are less prone to survey fatigue. After all, respondents’ identities are completely anonymous, since they haven’t been pre-recruited and vetted through a panel recruitment process.

Thanks to RDE, you can reach a wider scope of people and segments in your target market. This is because it is conducted across a wide network of sites and app publishers that deploy your surveys.

Specific Online Channels and Respondents

You can also send surveys to specific people and through specific digital channels, like your homepage, landing pages, emails, newsletters, etc. This requires using the Distribution link feature.

Given that it is our second major method of posting surveys online, it will not work on our network of survey publishers, as does the RDE method. That’s because, in this method, you’ll solely use the Distribution Link to connect potential respondents with your survey.

This feature allows you to create a link for respondents to be able to take your survey online. You are fully in charge of where your surveys will appear. In addition, with the Distribution Link feature, you also have the option to send your survey to specific people.

As such, this method is twofold.

Post surveys to specific channels

Send your survey via your channels of choice to reach a large number of random users, much like you would via organic sampling. The only difference is that the places you survey will exist on won’t be random, as you will choose the channels to place your link.

This method applies agile research, in that it is highly iterative; the platform will continue sending surveys across various digital spaces until a certain number of responses (completed surveys) is collected.

You as the researcher have the power to set your own desired number of completed surveys per campaign. You can also set quotas on different respondent qualifications and add multiple audiences to your survey.

Post surveys to specific people

The second method in the dual approach allows you to send your surveys yourself to specific people. As such, your survey won’t sit in a public digital space like your homepage or a downloadable asset. Instead, you can reach specific people, usually via email.

You can also reach out to customers via social media with the link to your survey.

This method is also agile and iterative.

That’s because, you can set up the feature to reach a certain number of completed surveys as well. Or, you can set a survey to be live until you choose to turn it off. As long as the link is active, respondents can enter your survey.

You can also set the link to be live until a specific date.

How Will My Survey Appear?

Wondering what form your survey will take? We’re referring to the way it will look when your respondents come across it online.

Given that our RDE method sends your survey to various digital platforms and spaces, the survey may take different forms.

This, of course, differs from what your survey will look like when sent via the Distribution Link method. Here’s what you can expect your survey to look like from both:

Via Random Device Engagement

In different digital spaces, your survey can exist as the following:

A pop-up
An image
A button with a call to action that solely contains your survey. You can take this route if you want to cut to the chase quickly.
A small, visually appealing circle
1. Respondents can see this while in-app.

Via the Distribution Link

When you send your survey to specific places or people, it can exist within the following:

Your homepage
A static webpage
Landing pages
Blog posts
Downloadable assets
Content marketing assets
Gated content
Social media channels
Emails
Contact pages
FAQ page
External websites (when backlinked or via a partnership)

In these spaces, you can insert your survey into your website content or even external websites. The survey itself can take the form of the items mentioned under the above RDE approach.

Where Can I Post Surveys Online?

Finally, we land at the crux of the matter, where can you actually post your surveys online?

While this list is as exhaustive as possible, note that with the expansion of the internet and things like VR and the Internet of Things( IoT), there may be more digital spaces that will become available for survey research in the future.

The prior section (How Will My Survey Appear) touched upon some of the digital spaces we dive into in the section. However, here we provide a thorough illustration of where you can post surveys online.

Website content
1. Use various available pages and elements on your website to place the link to your survey. These include:
2. Webpages:
  1. Homepage
  2. Landing pages
  3. Static pages
  4. Contact page
  5. FAQ page
  6. Blog
  7. Evergreen content places
  8. Page with gated content
  9. Video content pages
  10. Event sign-up pages
  11. Reports and whitepapers
  12. Other content assets
3. As different web elements
  1. Page openers
  2. CTA buttons
  3. Within the text of long-form content
  4. Sliders
  5. Large images
  6. Below subheadings
  7. Links within content pages
  8. Within subheadings
Social media platforms
1. Leverage all your social channels to post your surveys. These include:
  1. Facebook
  2. Instagram
    1. Mention the survey in your bio, a post and in your stories.
  3. LinkedIn
    1. Make posts with a link to your survey.
  4. Twitter
    1. Make posts showcasing your survey.
    2. Create polls to quantify interest in taking a survey.
  5. Reddit
    1. Create posts, answer questions and create content to motivate people to take your survey.
2. Create a unique hashtag for your survey.
Emails
1. Email your survey to the customers that you have contact info on, along with those you don’t have direct email access to. (There are services that provide email addresses, especially business emails, which are ideal for B2B surveys).
2. You can use a mass emailing tool such as MailChimp or a CRM platform like Hubspot.
3. It’s always useful to add personalization to emails.
External websites
1. Reach out to the editorial departments of popular websites and blogs, especially those relevant to your niche.
2. You should also reach out to your own business partners and business customers for collaboration projects that can involve your survey.
3. Some may provide backlinks to your site and survey, while others may promote it on their websites. This will depend on your project.

If you're using our Distribution Link feature, it is ultimately up to you to decide where to post your surveys online.

Establishing Strong Survey Campaigns

Whether you’re a veteran researcher or a newcomer to research, you can create informative survey campaigns, the kinds that will give you an in-depth understanding of your customers and other research subjects.

You just need the right online survey platform to do so.

A worthy survey platform will grant you all the functionalities necessary to build a good survey campaign, one that draws in interest and gets respondents to complete the survey.

Pollfish survey software allows you to create a thorough survey data collection, one you can customize to your liking, view however you please and organize to the max.

In addition, with our vast array of question types, you can create virtually any type of survey to aid your research campaigns.

Researchers can leverage a wide breadth of information on their respondents by accessing a wide pool of insights in their survey results dashboard.

In addition, we also offer the advanced skip logic feature, which routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answer to a previous question.

With the Pollfish market research platform, you’ll never be left wondering where you can post surveys online, as our RDE method posts surveys everywhere.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Understanding and Using White Label Market Research

You may have heard of white label services available for a variety of industries, including the ecommerce industry and its various SaaS offshoots. But did you know that it can apply to market research as well?

White label market research can power survey studies, as it exists as a kind of survey model, specifically relating to conducting surveys and the way post-survey data is presented externally.

As we’ve frequently mentioned, surveys are useful for all kinds of endeavors, including boosting your website’s credibility and yours as an industry expert within your space.

But when it comes to white label research and its surveys, is it necessary for strengthening your business? And what exactly is it?

This article explores white label market research, its importance and why you may need it, its pros and cons and whether you truly need it or can opt for an alternative.

Understanding White Label Market Research

To properly nail down the concept of white label market research, first we’ll dive into the meaning behind “white label.”

What is White Label?

White label is a business model in which one company (the manufacturer) produces a product for another company (the buyer). The company that purchases from the manufacturer uses the manufacturer’s products by selling and marketing them under their own name and branding.

This way, the purchasing company makes it appear as though the manufacturer’s products are instead their own, with their own logo, names and other branding elements.

A white label product is therefore often generic and sold to various entities who seek to then brand it as their own.

White label products can already come branded as the buying party’s company, should there have been an arrangement to do so. That’s because some white label providers also sell products with branding services tailored to their purchasing companies’ needs.

What is White label market research?

The same concept of white label and white labeling relates to the encompassing field of technology, specifically to research tech and the field of market research.

As such, in market research, “white label” refers to a company that sells products to another company wherein the buying company takes the seller’s product and rebrands it as its own.

To put it plainly, the company that manufactures and sells the product provides the product and all the work to make it functional, while the client (or purchasing company) sells it as if it were their own.

Specifically in market research, when a company uses a manufacturer’s software to conduct survey research, for example, it will present the research campaign and all of its findings as its own endeavor and itself as the owner of the resultant data.

White label market research, like other white label services, is a form of outsourcing, except you are not outsourcing workers, but software.

Why You May Need White Label Market Research

There are several reasons a business may want to buy from a white label research company. There are also plenty of reasons to go a slightly different route.

First, let’s touch upon the importance of white label research.

Up to 80% of consumers research a company online before visiting it or making a purchase. Thus, having a strong online presence is vital for all brands.

With the rise of businesses going digital and internet-only businesses, there is also a growing demand for white label services.

White label market research can help enhance your online footprint and provide much more.

That’s because you can use it as part of your content marketing strategy. When you include original insights and statistics, you’re granting more weight and credibility to any of your online content. You're also positioning yourself as a thought leader in your space.

What’s best is that with primary market research like surveys, the data you provide in your online content, such as your website or social media, is completely yours. At least it is presented as yours with the white label approach.

This shows your digital visitors that your data and content isn’t recycled or secondhand. Instead, it is derived and produced from your brand.

At least, that’s what white label res-tech products will make it appear to look like.

Thus, with white label res-tech products, you can make your business stand out by presenting the research you conduct as your own.

This will make you appear to be knowledgeable, original and a leader in your space. Thus, this will help you both attract and retain your customers at best and attract their attention at the very least.

Meanwhile, the white label company providing you the research platform is doing all the heavy lifting and providing you with its expertise. A strong one, that is.

However, the white label model has both pros and cons, even in the market research space.

The Pros and Cons of White Label Market Research

This form of research has its share of disadvantages and advantages. That’s why it shouldn’t be the sole route you take for market research.

The following lists some of the major drawbacks and positive aspects of using a white label service for your research needs:

The Pros

Have short lead times.
Generally easy to work with.
Often offer a dedicated team of experts to help you.
All the work is done by the manufacturing company.
Great for those who have no other research experience or options.

The Cons

Relinquish all the advantages of associating with another company.
Not all white label companies make it easy to use your own branding.
You give up on bringing more buzz to your business (backlinks, awareness, etc)
Some res-tech companies would have given your research pursuits and business at large a positive reputation. Failing to give them credit deprives you of this benefit.
You give up on the edge of using a more renowned research company than your competitors.

How Pollfish Fits in with White Label Market Research

The market research res-tech company Pollfish doesn’t neatly fit into or outside of the white label model.

That’s because our survey platform sits somewhere in between or “on the fence” of this approach.

Pollfish provides a diverse suite of market research products under one platform. While we’re generally most known for surveys (a wide range of templates, question types and questionnaire capabilities), we also provide other market research methods and functionalities.

We offer the following market research methods on the Pollfish platform:

Monadic A/B testing and sequential A/B testing.
1. A/B tests can be used to compare product concepts, communication ideas, or specific ads using equally structured groups of participants.
Maxdiff Analysis
1. This is also called the Best-Worst Scale; a Maxdiff Analysis is a means for prioritizing new product ideas and tailoring them to consumer preferences.
The Van Westendorp Pricing Model
1. The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter is a pricing model that grants you data to make decisions on product pricing, based on consumer price preferences.
Conjoint Analysis
1. A conjoint analysis allows researchers to measure the value that consumers place on various aspects of a product or service.

With Pollfish, most of our clients generally cite us for their research and findings. After all, we’re a well-established company and have become even more so in 2022, after joining forces with Prodege.

In this way, Pollfish is not a white label market research provider.

However, this is not the only way our customers work with us. With customers across business sectors and beyond them (including education, government and editorial), no company uses our platform in the same way.

As such, not all Pollfish clients present their data from Pollfish in the same way. Some businesses that conduct research through the Pollfish platform do not mention us. In this way, some businesses use Pollfish in a rather white label way.

This is especially true with market research agencies; these companies will use Pollfish in an entirely white label manner. They conduct their research campaigns entirely through the Pollfish survey platform but present their studies as completely their own.

This includes the purpose of the study, the targeting, conducting the research and the resulting data.

By keeping us under wraps and presenting themselves as the sole owners and conductors of their survey research, these companies prove that while it is not a traditional white label company, Pollfish can also be white labeled.

All in all, there is a duality in Pollfish when it comes to white labeling. On one hand, we do not market ourselves as a white label platform. We are first and foremost a market research res-tech business.

On the other hand, some brands don’t cite us and present themselves as the sole party involved in their research. Thus, we too can be seen as a kind of white label approach to market research.

The choice is yours on which approach you take with Pollfish. What’s most important is the quality and outcome of your research campaigns.

Mastering Your Research Projects

White labeling your market research can be an effective way to carry out your campaigns and strengthen your brand image.

But it is not the only research approach you should consider. Luckily, the Pollfish research platform isn’t white or black when it comes to this. It fits into a gray area, where although we don’t market ourselves as white label providers, we can be used as such.

Once again, the choice is yours on how you leverage Pollfish. We would recommend mentioning us, however, as we are a renowned market research company that are now working under the even larger research company, Prodege.

We want to conclude by stating that a valuable market research provider will grant you all the functionalities necessary for your studies, whether it is white label or not. Thus, that is where your focus should lie when choosing a research platform: its functionalities and the quality of the data.

Our survey software allows you to establish a thorough survey data collection, one you can customize as you see fit, view however you please and organize to the maximum.

In addition, with our vast array of question types, you can create any survey type to aid any research campaign.

Researchers can reap a wide breadth of information on their respondents and access a wide pool of insights in their survey results dashboard.

In addition, there’s the advanced skip logic feature, which routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers.

As such, the Pollfish survey platform is optimized for both the respondent and the researcher.

With a research platform offering all of these capabilities, it’s clear that Pollfish is the best market research provider — white label or otherwise.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Get Customer Referrals to Strengthen Your Business

Customer referrals are one of the most powerful marketing and customer acquisition methods. They are especially effective for driving new business and even building consumer trust at the onset of customers’ relationships with companies.

There is plenty of statistical evidence that proves these claims. Firstly, consumers are 400% more likely to become paying customers when they are referred. This alone shows how invaluable it is to foster customer referrals.

In addition, 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know. As such, they are not just more likely to buy from a brand that was referred to them over one that wasn’t, but are more likely to do so when someone close to them makes the referral.

As far as building trust early on goes, when customers are referred by other customers, they have a 37% higher customer retention rate. This points to trusting a brand, in that when customers themselves choose to stay with a company, they raise customer retention rate.

Conducting surveys can help you gain referrals.

This article examines customer referrals, including their importance, when to seek them out and how to obtain them via survey research.

Understanding Customer Referrals

As their name suggests, customer referrals refer to the practice of customers — whether previous or existing — suggest a particular brand and its products and services to others.

This is part of referral marketing, a kind of word-of-mouth marketing in which customers make recommendations to those close to them — this can include their friends, family, colleagues and other contacts (think social media followers) — about patronizing a company.

The purpose of gaining these referrals is so that those who your customers refer become new customers. As such, it is a method of customer acquisition. Although customer acquisition methods tend to be costly, customer referrals are usually done on a free basis, that is, if you’ve built up enough consumer loyalty and brand trust.

This is because when customers are happy with a company, they tend to share their positive experiences. In fact, 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people. These can manifest as reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, along with online referrals.

Online referrals are just as crucial as word-of-mouth referrals, given the high percentage of people in the digital space, whether it is on desktop or mobile devices. Several examples of digital referrals include the following:

Positive reviews
Positive mentions on forums
Recommendations over text messages and chats
Customer testimonials
1. This is especially important to show on your website and for B2B brands.
Positive comments on social media

Loyal and satisfied customers will be inclined to make free referrals. However, not all customer referrals are free of charge. Other kinds of customers may need convincing — that of the incentivized variety.

In these cases, brands use a customer referral program, a kind of system that incentivizes customers to either recommend their products and services, or to actually bring on a new customer. The latter refers to customers having their friend or close one officially become a customer, either by making a purchase or opening up an account with a business.

In either case, it is important to use this marketing tactic, as it grows your customer base.

The Value of Customer Referrals

These referrals bring undeniable value to a business and not just for a fledgling business that lacks brand equity and a pool of customers.

First off, customer referrals lead to an increased sense of trust in a brand. This is because instead of relying on a celebrity who is endorsed to speak positively of a business, the referral comes directly from the people closest to the customers. As such, they’ll have a higher trust of a brand upon their awareness of it.

This means that referred customers won’t be as skeptical about patronizing a company as they would with a company completely unknown to them, or even with the ones they’ve heard about, but have no positive input on from the people close to them.

Next, customer referrals prove to be extremely profitable for companies in the long term. If the statistical figures from the introduction of this article aren’t proof enough, consider the following: referred customers’ lifetime value is 16% more than non-referred customers. This is important, as it points to referred customers contributing to larger profits during their relationship with a business, also known as a customer lifetime value.

In addition, customer referrals relieve brands of the constant hurdle of customer churn, as they help lower your customer churn rate. This is because referred customers have an 18% lower churn than customers acquired by other means. This makes sense, given that their longer customer lifetime value is a marker of greater customer loyalty. Referred customers are between 16-24% more loyal than other kinds of customers, according to a study by the Wharton School of Business.

Customer referrals are also important, as they are the action of brand advocates, which are crucial to sustain for the sake of your business. Brand advocates are not casual shoppers, rather they have high levels of customer loyalty, the kind that makes them advocate on a company’s behalf for free.

Brand advocates spread positive word-of-mouth messages and take part in other essentially free marketing services for a company, such as social media mentions and user-generated content. They also help spread brand awareness and allow your brand to uphold a good reputation.

Most importantly, brand advocates promote a brand organically, which holds far more sway than a paid actor would have. As such, these kinds of customers are highly sought after for all kinds of businesses.

Finally, given the fact that referred customers are more loyal at the outset of their relationship with a business, they are more likely to remain loyal. As such, they are less likely to leave a company.

In this way, customer referrals help brands increase their customer retention, which is even more important than customer acquisition. That’s because, among many other reasons, selling to a customer you already have is 60-70% more profitable.

When to Seek Out Customer Referrals

You should aim to get customer referrals whenever possible, as they signify customer happiness, satisfaction and loyalty to your brand. As such, you should present the referral opportunity wherever customers interact with your brand.

There are several times that are most favorable for obtaining referrals. The following lists some of the best times to seek them:

During an in-store purchase interaction.
1. If you ask your customers how they feel about the service or products and they’ve responded positively, consider asking them for a referral.
During a promotion, whether it is in-store or online.
1. This can pair with an existing promotion, meaning customers would be further incentivized if they refer a friend or family member.
Leading up to a purchase
1. Use an incentive to lure customers into referring a friend or family member at key places leading up to a purchase, such as in the checkout.
Social media posts (but not frequently)
1. To keep this request novel and interesting, consider asking for referrals in your social posts a few times a year.
As part of a survey campaign.
1. This is especially useful for customers you have targeted (rather than random respondents you deployed surveys to).
2. Those who provide positive responses are especially useful to request a referral to.

How to Get Customer Referrals With Surveys

You can increase or jump-start customer referrals for your business thanks to the prowess of online surveys. This is because in order for customers to be loyal enough to refer to your business, you need to satisfy them.

Customer happiness and satisfaction originate beyond merely a good product. Instead, you need to build trust by offering outstanding customer service, support, UX and general customer experience (CX).

In order to keep up with ever-changing customer demands, you’ll need to constantly keep watch of your customers. To do so, you’ll need to run primary market research campaigns regularly. That’s where online surveys come to the rescue.

Surveys offer a quick and convenient way to gain all kinds of customer insights from your target market, along with specific individuals. The latter depends on the kind of online survey platform you use, as not all platforms offer the same capabilities.

By using surveys, you’ll know what to change in your customer experience, along with what is performing well. This helps you optimize a wide range of campaigns and other business undertakings. As such, surveys allow you to make constant improvements. But their utility goes beyond this.

You can also use surveys to gauge the likelihood of your customers to refer you to others. After all, you wouldn’t want to ask unhappy customers to refer your company, as this may prompt them to instead speak ill of your brand.

Use the following surveys to measure how likely your customers would refer you:

The Net Promoter Score survey
The CSAT survey (Customer Satisfaction Score)
The CES survey (Customer Effort Score)
The customer service satisfaction survey

Even if you score low on these kinds of surveys, conducting further survey research can help you gain customer referrals. In addition, simply asking a follow-up question in which customers explain their score can help you improve your CX, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. This helps you build customer loyalty, the key ingredient behind customer referrals, especially voluntary ones.

When you consistently deliver a good product, service and experience, you are then on the correct trajectory to obtaining customer referrals.

Targeting Your Most Valuable Consumers

Referrals provide some of the most valuable leads you’ll ever attract. As such, you should work towards upping your referrals by studying your customers with market research. This way, you’ll have a clear understanding of the consumer preferences, along with all that they find to be adverse.

To do so, you’ll need a strong online survey platform to carry out your market research campaigns. Use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy consumer surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a poor mobile environment.

The survey platform should offer advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. It should also make it easy to form a customer journey survey to survey your respondents across their customer journeys.

Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

When you use a survey platform that offers all of these capabilities, you’ll efficiently increase your customer referrals.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Preventing Cancellation and Attrition with the Customer Exit Survey

The customer exit survey is a convenient tool to use to prevent customers from canceling their subscriptions and other forms of customer attrition. All businesses experience churn and in many cases, it is preventable.

In order to evade customer attrition, you need to tackle its core cause and this survey allows you to dig its root cause up. This way, you’ll understand exactly how your consumers feel so that you can avoid dissatisfying them and optimize your brand experience.

No matter how well a business has mastered consumer loyalty, it is bound to lose some customers. The average American company loses 23% to 30% of its customers each year.

What’s more is that the loss of customers has been on the rise. Since 2016, customer retention loss has risen by 37% due to poor customer service. There are a variety of other factors that cause customers to churn — a lack of consumer loyalty sums them up, as no customer would make repeat purchases with brands they don’t trust.

This article delves into the customer exit survey, its importance, when to implement it, how to create it and more, so that you can avoid cancellations and keep more of your customers.

Understanding the Customer Exit Survey

A customer exit survey is a kind of consumer survey used to study customers who are about to cancel their subscription or already have. Although it is particularly relevant to the SaaS sector, given the prevalence of subscription-based SaaS products, it is also useful for a variety of other types of businesses.

This survey is especially applicable to other forms of subscription services, such as content subscriptions — this includes print and online magazines, newspapers, newsletters, trade magazines, etc.

In addition, you can also deploy it in non-subscription settings, given the weight of the customer attrition rate. However, in these instances, you’ll need to have conducted prior market research to glean an awareness of customers who are dissatisfied to the point of leaving your brand, switching brands or beginning an order cancellation.

There are more instances where applying this kind of survey is relevant and useful. These include the following scenarios:

During periods of high bounce rates across different site pages
When users begin an order and cancel it
When users begin an order but don’t complete it
When users start a sign-up process for notifications or newsletters but don’t complete it
In instances where paying customers churn
During times where customers sign up for a product but don’t use it

The customer exit survey helps reveal all kinds of sentiment surrounding your product and the experience associated with it. After all, there are various stages and components of the customer buying journey that can contribute to customers seeking to exit or already having exited.

The Importance of the Customer Exit Survey

There are so many survey types you can conduct to improve your customer experience. The customer exit survey is important to carry out for a number of reasons.

First off, this kind of survey is product-oriented. It helps you obtain crucial information about how well your products meet the needs and requirements of your customers. In regards to the product specifically, this survey extracts key information such as the following:

Product-market fit
- You can determine if you are targeting the right audience.
- You can also tighten your product-market fit.
Features
- It allows you to learn if your product truly provides the tools your customers need and want.
- In this way, you’ll have key information on how to innovate your product.
Bugs
- You can discover if there are bugs that you may not have been aware of.
- It works as a user research method, capturing insights on design flaws that impact usability.

This survey is more than merely an offshoot of a product satisfaction survey. This is because you can set it up to garner various other insights that you can use to reduce customer churn.

This includes asking about the customer support your customers receive, allowing you to see if you’re lacking on this front, along with how to improve it, so that customers can use your product with ease and trust your support team.

Additionally, it allows you to gauge your customer convenience — or lack thereof. As its name implies, this concept refers to simplifying all customer touchpoints, as well as making them friction-free.

Furthermore, helps you understand how your CX compares with that of your competitors, facilitating part of your competitive analysis.

By studying your consumers in regards to all that pertains to their canceling a subscription or ending their patronage in other ways, you’ll be able to amend all of your points of friction and other mistakes.

In doing so, this survey helps improve customer satisfaction in various aspects of your customer experience, thereby preventing future cancellations. As such, it helps lower customer churn rate, allowing you to retain more of your customers, which hold colossal importance.

After all, it is much more cost-effective and profitable to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. There are many reasons that support this, such as the fact that gaining a new customer can cost five times more than retaining one. Additionally, increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits from 25-95%, to name a few.

Given that this survey allows you to improve your products, support, CX and more, you’ll be stunting attrition and increasing your customer retention rate. As such, the customer exit survey grants invaluable insights into how well your product suits the goals and needs of your target market, shielding your brand against future cancellations.

When to Deploy the Customer Exit Survey

There are various situations where this survey is especially useful. Many of these are explained in the second section of this article. To understand when to deploy this survey comprehensibly, it is crucial to understand which specific parts of the customer journey are most apt for using this survey.

The following lists examples of the best time to send a survey in order to ward off customer exits and improve your customer experience:

If you received a low score on a Net Promoter Score survey.
1. This indicates your customers are unhappy with your subscription/product, as they wouldn’t recommend you to friends or colleagues.
2. A score of 0-6 represents detractors, which you should immediately survey.
3. A score of 7-8 represents passive, who may not want to cancel, but are not very satisfied with your offerings, thus, they can be made into detractors.
If you received a low score on the Customer Effort Score, or CES survey.
1. This shows the amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with your company.
2. This is usually expressed on a scale of either “very difficult” to “very easy.
3. There are two approaches to this scaling system.
Upon discovery of high bounce rates across different site pages.
1. If you notice a high bounce rate on a certain landing page or blog post, you ought to survey customers on what made them bounce.
When users cancel an order.
1. Survey them as soon as possible.
2. Ask questions about the checkout to see if it had any effect on their cancellation.
3. Ask directly what made them cancel their order.
When users are in the midst of an order but don’t complete it after an hour.
1. The page may have become stagnant from disuse.
2. In this case, they may have found a better offer online.
3. As such, ask them if they’ve found another product or about what they would change about yours.
When paying customers barely spend time on a SaaS product.
1. This includes little time spent on a product, or high bounces on one.
2. This also involves weeks where users go days without using the product.
When users start a sign-up process but don’t complete it.
1. Make sure to inquire if they are still interested.
2. Ask about what made them change their minds — if they have.
When customers return a product they haven’t used.
1. Ask for the reason behind their return.
2. Was the product a gift? Do they want to save money?
3. This can signify the customer not knowing about the full extent of the benefits of the product.
In all instances where paying customers churn.
1. Consider asking why they won’t renew a subscription.
2. Consider offering promotions and discounts to retain them.
Upon receiving any negative customer feedback.
1. Whether your customers complained via a voice of the customer (VOC) program, over the phone or in person, consider that the beginning of their dissatisfaction, the kind that may lead to churn.
2. Follow up with a customer exit survey in order to retain the customers.
3. Ask if their complaint has any effect on their subscription or opinions of products.

How to Create the Customer Exit Survey

There are multiple approaches to take when creating this survey, as the above sections explain that there is not solely one or two instances in which to apply this survey. There are several stages in the customer journey where it is apt to use this survey, including pre and post-exit and even before they’ve purchased.

The latter refers to the nurturing stages, where users are in the mid-stages of the sales funnel. These instances often involve customers bouncing — another form of customer attrition — along with others.

The following lays out the steps on how to create a customer exit survey:

Apply consumer analysis on all areas where customers churn or are near churning.
1. This involves consulting your website analytics and the host of your website marketplace.
2. This also pertains to keeping track of in-store and online returns and complaints therein.
3. Pay special attention to cancellations, a lack of renewals, little time spent using a product, returns and bounce rates.
Use the results of previously conducted survey campaigns to discover whether your customers are dissatisfied with your brand.
1. Refer to the aforementioned NPS and CES surveys.
Conduct new surveys on customer satisfaction to catch the presence of unhappy customers or those who feel your brand is mediocre.
1. Use the customer satisfaction survey to gauge levels of satisfaction.
2. Use the customer experience survey to understand various moments in the CX.
3. Use the customer retention survey to discover how to retain your customers.
Analyze and consolidate the findings from your survey research and the presence of customer dissatisfaction and churn in your CX (from Step 1).
1. Jot down all your findings and compare them across channels, purchase methods and the place of churn.
2. Divide your findings into three sections:
  1. The most outstanding places of churn, including cancellations, discontinuation of renewal and returns.
  2. Churn on content and digital assets only.
  3. Considerations of churn (evidenced by poor survey scores, complaints, bad reviews, etc.)
After dividing your findings into three sections, create survey campaigns centered on the topics in each section.
1. This will organize your survey so that you don’t jam all topics into one, which will be irrelevant to all your customers, given they belong to a specific kind of section and therefore a specific customer exit.
Begin your survey by targeting the correct respondents.
1. Send your surveys via email or on a webpage.
2. Also, consider setting up an automatic survey to signed-in users who bounce.
3. Use a viable online survey platform, one that allows you to send surveys to specific individuals.
Begin with a set of preliminary questions.
1. Consider using a mix of open-ended and close-ended questions.
2. You can use open-ended questions as follow-ups to close-ended questions, or as standalone questions.
Optimize your survey for desktop and mobile.
1. Your online survey platform should offer a mobile-first design, since mobile dominates the digital space.
2. Consider adding A/B testing to test different versions of a product or subscription, along with those currently under development.
3. Use multimedia elements to keep respondents engaged and see the product visually.
4. Thank your customers for taking your survey.
Analyze your findings and make necessary changes.
1. Now that you have gathered data on customer exits, you should use all of it to analyze things such as:
  1. What irks your customers the most.
  2. What your customers wish your subscription, platform or product offered.
  3. What in the CX triggered customer dissatisfaction and exits.
2. Make all the necessary changes.
  1. You’ll need to convene with your product designers, marketers, customer success and support teams to inform them of the necessary changes.
  2. You ought to share survey results to forge data democratization, which smooths the process of keeping everyone in the know and involved.
Tell your customers about the new changes you’ve made.
1. This will show them you took their feedback into consideration and acted upon it.
2. It will also directly prove that you’ve improved your product, support and other aspects of their CX.
3. As such, it may revert them from canceling their subscriptions or make them renew.
4. Additionally, it may attract them to buy from your business once again.

Keeping All Your Customers

The customer exit survey provides key insights that help you prevalent product and subscription cancellations, along with other kinds of customer attrition. In order to carry one out, you’ll need a quality online survey platform.

As such, you should use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy all kinds of surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to gain useful insights and avoid customer exits at all costs.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Fully Understanding Your Consumers with a Target Market Analysis

Conducting a target market analysis is central to market research, as it enables you to understand your consumers in-depth and in relation to the viability of your products and services.

A vague or unproven idea of your target market — the group of customers most likely to patronize your business — will have damaging consequences for your business. This is because you can’t be all things to all people; even your competitors’ target market isn’t the exact same as yours.

Analyzing your consumers will help your business reach the right audience, along with a slew of other benefits. In fact, by segmenting your consumers through a target market analysis, you can increase profits by 80%.

This article examines the practice of the target market analysis, its importance, when to use it and how to create it using market research software.

Understanding the Target Market Analysis

A target market analysis is more than simply a study of your potential customers.

A target market analysis is a comprehensive assessment of your target market, the core base of customers most inclined to buy your product or service. One of several market research techniques, this kind of analysis is exhaustive in that it doesn’t merely examine customers.

Instead, this method involves assessing how your offerings will fit with a specific market and how they will achieve the most traction with your target customers. As such, a target market analysis defines where and how your product belongs in the real-life market.

Given that a target market analysis grants a high-level perspective of your market, you can use it to outline the opportunities and restraining factors that exist in your market.

Being able to create a market analysis will enable you to comprehend who to market and sell to along with how to satisfy your consumer preferences. As such, a target market analysis will help you reach your customers and provide them with a solution tailored to their specific needs or concerns.

When you conduct your target market analysis, you’ll need to consolidate your previously conducted demographic analysis with a psychographic analysis. These two kinds of analyses provide detailed information on the makeup of your target market, from their quantitative information, such as their age, gender, location, education and other such categories, to the psychological underpinnings of their buying habits and needs.

As such, this analysis requires merging both analyses, along with analyzing your own offerings and the problems they can solve for your target market.

The Importance of a Target Market Analysis

A target market analysis is critical to your organization for a number of reasons.

First off, businesses don't have the time or resources to serve or reach everyone with a product offering and message. By analyzing a target market, you can focus on the correct audience, the kind most likely to need, want and purchase your product or service.

As such, you can work on campaigns directed at customers with the highest profit potential, or at least those who will purchase from you every now and again.

Furthermore, this analysis also helps you determine the least valuable target markets, so you can know which customers are worth pursuing and which are worth avoiding.

As such, this intelligence permits you to limit the populations you market to and serve. By limiting those populations, you will improve how you allocate funds to your market research budget and other business budgets. Thus, a target market analysis saves you time, money and other resources by informing you of the most beneficial means of funneling them.

Conducting a target market analysis also enables you to develop customer personas. These are highly defined and granular representations of particular individuals in your target market. They offer a hyper-specific form of the groups in your target market, which you would identify via market segmentation.

Understanding your customer personas allows you to understand your ideal customers more accurately and how to forge marketing personalization for them more effectively. Personalization is a crucial marketing strategy, as no one wants to feel marketed to, especially with mundane and generic messaging. In fact, 99% of marketers say personalization advances customer relationships and 80% of consumers are more likely to buy when brands offer personalized experiences.

In addition, a target market analysis helps you understand the viability of your products and services in relation to your target market. As such, you can use it to discover gaps in the market that your organization can fill. In this way, this analysis helps you work on product innovation and augmenting your customer experience.

This is because feedback from your target market helps you evaluate how successful your existing or new products will be, along with other insights on your CX.

This kind of analysis also unearths new target customers that are interested in your offerings, groups you previously may have been unaware of.

Finally, you can leverage your target market analysis to find the best marketing channels to use. This is important as various market segments use and respond differently to social media platforms. Some may forgo using a certain platform entirely, while others may get all their information from one social media platform.

All in all, analyzing your target market brings various benefits for your business, whether you’re a startup or a long-standing business.

When to Use a Target Market Analysis

There are several key times you should conduct and parse through a target market analysis. These will vary depending on the duration of your business, the particular campaign you set to work on, or one that is in the works, along with various other factors unique to your business.

The following lists some of the most opportune times to complete a target market analysis:

When venturing into how to do market research for a business plan.
During the early stages of a business.
During certain stages of the strategic planning process that require more consumer insights.
Before beginning a marketing, advertising, branding or other business campaigns.
1. This is especially important, as money, time and creativity are often spent on these undertakings.
2. During any major campaign, it is critical to be targeting the correct audience.
If you seek to discover other customer segments and personas that may be interested in your product or service.
When you need ideas on how to make product improvements and updates.
1. This involves getting rid of bugs and glitches, along with optimizing the user experience of your products.
If you seek to improve your digital experience or obtain feedback on it from all your market segments.
1. This helps inform your content marketing strategy.
During concept testing and A/B testing, to put customer opinions into perspective by understanding the preferences of all market segments.

How to Create a Target Market Analysis

You’ll need to consolidate several documents to run a comprehensive target market analysis. This will ensure you’re not missing any key insights about your customers and your product or service’s use to them.

The following provides step-by-step instructions for creating a target market analysis:

1. First, decide the purpose of your analysis by using the previous section to guide you.
  1. There are various other instances that may require putting together this analysis, regardless of whether its purpose is mentioned in the prior section or not.
2. Next, consolidate your demographic and psychographic analyses of your target market.
  1. These analyses have critical customer information that you’ll need to use in your target market analysis.
3. Combine your findings by adding the psychographic information to the demographical information.
  1. For example, let’s say one of your segments is men and women in their mid-forties to early fifties. Add their behavioral, lifestyle and psychological factors you’ve uncovered in your psychographic analysis.
4. Should you require more information, conduct secondary market research by observing resources relevant to your industry, such as:
  1. news sites
  2. blogs
  3. trade magazines
  4. Google Trends
  5. public resources, such as the US Census Bureau.
5. Next, conduct primary market research with a market research platform.
  1. Use an online survey platform, ideally one that allows you to conduct quantitative market research and qualitative market research.
  2. Use this step to fill in the gaps from your existing analyses, or to start from scratch if need be.
  3. Come up with preliminary questions relevant to the purpose of your target market analysis.
    1. For example, if you seek to launch a new ad campaign, consider creating questions that relate to it.
6. Then, create questions specific to customers’ problems and needs, especially ones that your product or service is made for.
  1. Consider asking questions about your competitors to gain an understanding of what is missing in your market, along with what your customers find favorable.
  2. Also, consider running a brand tracking survey to gain intelligence about how your brand is perceived and whether or not your potential customers know about it to begin with.
7. Continue creating surveys and iterating as needed.
  1. Don’t stop until your customer profiles are complete.
  2. Also, continue studying your target market until you understand its demand and the reputation of your business and competitors.
8. Put together all your findings and analyze them.
  1. Use the dashboard of the online survey platform to visualize your data in various ways.
9. Share your analysis with your team members.
  1. You’ll need to use a platform that makes it easy for anyone to use the platform; your online survey platform should offer data democratization.
  2. This way, it can easily be shared, reviewed and analyzed across teams.
10. Take action.
  1. Now that you understand your target market, including its members and their customer behavior, habits and more, along with the viability of your products, you can plan on how to move forward.
  2. Use the insights you’ve gained to plan your campaigns.

Targeting Your Most Valuable Consumers

A target market analysis is a deep-dive investigation into your customers’ statistical makeup, problems, needs, behaviors and preferences. By forming this analysis, you’ll have a deep understanding of what makes your customers tick and how your business can appeal to them.

To conduct this analysis, you’ll need a strong online survey platform to carry out your market research and present it in a way that’s most convenient for you.

You should therefore use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy consumer surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.

Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

With an online survey platform that offers all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to carry out a quick and useful target market analysis.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Implementing a Psychographic Analysis to Fully Understand Your Customers

In order to understand your target market, you’ll need to conduct a psychographic analysis, a critical kind of consumer analysis that logically follows a demographic analysis. Consolidating both of these forms of analyses allows you to paint an accurate picture of the customers most likely to buy from you — aka, your target market.

76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs. It is therefore critical to analyze your customers’ psychographics, as psychographics aims to understand the cognitive factors that drive consumer behaviors. As such, this kind of analysis allows you to understand the core of your customers’ psyche, making it easier to serve them and meet their needs.

To further prove the importance of understanding your customers, consider this: customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that aren’t. All businesses should study their customers' psychographics.

This article explains the psychographic analysis in full detail, including its importance, makeup, how to collect psychographic data and how to conduct this kind of analysis.

Understanding the Psychographic Analysis

A psychographic analysis is a kind of customer analysis that involves examining psychological and emotional motivations in order to provide more relevant offers and messaging to the customers.

This kind of analysis is performed to complete a target market analysis, which is a comprehensive analysis of the consumers most likely to buy from you.

A psychographic analysis must follow a demographic analysis, which organizes customers via basic, quantitative information, such as age, gender, occupation, etc. Studying psychographics allows you to understand how demographics relevant to your brand think and behave.

While demographics deal with a specific segment of the population, thereby answering the “who” and “what,” psychographics deal with the motivational factors that influence customer buying behavior. As such, a psychographic analysis provides the “why” behind purchasing behaviors.

The following lists all the factors involved in a psychographic analysis:

Consumer activities
Interests
Goals
Values
Belief systems
Attitudes
Opinions
Aversions
Emotional responses
Morals and ethics
Biases and prejudices
Tendencies and habits
Hopes
Thoughts
Fears
Lifestyles

Given that psychological and behavioral factors tend to intertwine, this kind of analysis includes both. Additionally, they both hold sway on how, what and how many times customers buy.

As such, this kind of analysis also supports the RFM analysis. An abbreviation for recency, frequency and monetary value, this analysis is used to estimate the value of a customer based on the three data points in its abbreviated title.

Finally, a psychographic analysis allows you to create detailed customer profiles. As such, aside from learning the demographic makeup of your customers, you’ll begin to understand why they buy and behave in certain ways.

How to Collect Psychographic Information

There are various means you can use to collect psychographic information. These involve taking part in secondary and primary research.

The following lays out the different ways you can collect psychographic information:

One-on-one interviews
1. The most traditional route.
2. This often involves pre-recruiting participants.
3. It can also consist of random cold calling.
Focus group
1. A small group of people selected based on shared characteristics to take part in a discussion for the purposes of market research.
2. A moderator conducts a discussion where every member participates at their own will.
3. This can be biased, as submissive participants will keep quiet, while extroverted, dominant participants will offer more.
Website analytics
1. This includes internal site analytics.
2. Examples include those involved from a web host, such as WordPress.
3. It can also include Google Analytics, which displays various site activities.
Third-party analytics providers
1. UX analytics providers
2. They often provide capabilities beyond traditional metrics such as traffic and bounce rate.
3. Ex: Adobe Analytics
Psycholinguistic
1. This refers to investigating the psychological processes involved in the use of language.
2. In market research, it involves understanding customer jargon and slang.
3. It deals with the perception, production, and acquisition of language.
Browsing Data
1. This involves examining how customers browse your site.
2. It includes studying the time spent on a page, etc.
3. It often involves using site cookies, which allow you to monitor customers and remember certain information about them.
Social media behavior
1. This includes likes, shares, clicks, tweets, posts.
2. It also involves using social listening to understand when customers mention your brand, niche or competitors.
3. Reviews on social media sites provide insight into customers’ attitudes and opinions.
Syndicated research
1. This research is conducted independently, published and sold by a market research firm.
2. The firm is industry-specific and funded by several companies in a particular industry.
3. It doesn’t allow you to gain full control of your market research study, as the firm dictates the study and owns the data.
Survey panels
1. This research method collects data from a group of pre-recruited and pre-screened respondents.
2. A group of panelists takes part in research sessions over a given period of time.
3. This is ideal for longitudinal studies, as you can work with the same set of panelists continuously.
Online survey tools
1. This involves market research platforms that allow you to create, distribute and analyze surveys online.
2. They put you in full control of your survey study.
3. They eliminate bias via quality checks, such as banning VPN users, removing gibberish answers, etc.

The Importance of a Psychographic Analysis

This kind of analysis is essential for various reasons.

A psychographic analysis allows you to complete the customer profile you’ve begun compiling during a demographic analysis. It scopes out the psychological and behavioral factors behind the demographics.

As such, you won’t merely understand who is in your target market, but their mindsets, what they do and why they act in particular manners, putting their customer behavior into perspective.

Through this analysis, you’ll be able to unearth who would be most receptive to your company’s offering.

By understanding why a consumer might buy your product or service, you’ll be able to efficiently create marketing campaigns that appeal to them specifically. For example, some consumers may find it difficult to make healthier lifestyle choices. Through a psychographic analysis, you can discover the psychological nuances that drive this difficulty.

You can then use those insights to appeal to these consumers, by positioning your brand as one that understands the hardships of living a healthy lifestyle and offers simple solutions, ie, your products and services.

With the correct psychographic information in tow, you can then create marketing campaigns with the most relevant customer testimonials, content and messaging. You can also use the insights you gathered from this kind of analysis to adjust sales campaigns, such as creating the correct promotions and incentives that spur customers into buying from you.

Aside from setting up the proper campaigns and serving your customers in their favor, a psychographic analysis allows you to influence consumer behavior. This involves being able to tap into your consumers’ values and what they hold important, along with using effective emotional marketing.

For example, some customers value green initiatives and sustainability. They are thus most inclined to buy from green, sustainable brands. Other customers may have an emotional connection with a particular charity, and thus will be more willing to buy from a business that supports this charity, a similar one or champions its cause.

All in all, all businesses need to understand what motivates their consumers. A psychographic analysis will humanize the raw and statistical data that brands derive from a demographic analysis.

That’s because psychographics refines dry data by painting a picture of who your shoppers are aside from their quantitative traits, allowing brands to know them on a far more personal and intimate level.

How to Form a Psychographic Analysis

Creating a psychographic analysis requires conducting both primary and secondary market research. Unlike in a demographic analysis, studying customers’ psychographics requires conducting qualitative market research.

You’ll need to apply this approach to every step in the process, including when you contextualize your demographic analysis — this is a major part of forming a psychographic analysis, as the psychographic portion is meant to delve into the psychological factors of a company’s key demographic targets.

The following lays out how to conduct a psychographic analysis:

1. Begin by drawing up your findings from your demographic analysis.
2. Consult the different segments you’ve discovered from the secondary and primary research you conducted in your demographic analysis.
3. Next, perform secondary research; use the current market segment insights you have and dig further by using all kinds of secondary sources. These include:
  1. Government websites
  2. Market research sites with publicly available data.
  3. Trade magazines
  4. Blogs
  5. News sites
  6. Websites dedicated to CX and consumers
  7. Niche sites that discuss consumers in your industry
4. Add the information you’ve discovered in the demographic profiles you’ve created.
  1. For example: do men between the ages of 20-35 tend to make hasty purchases? Or perhaps they’re more likely to buy the latest version of electronics?
5. Run a primary market research campaign.
  1. Use the profiles you created in the previous step to brainstorm your most pressing psychographic questions.
  2. To better understand each demographic segment you highlighted, conduct a survey with multiple audiences. Alternatively, conduct several surveys on each demographic group. (The former is more efficient; you’ll need an online survey platform that provides this).
6. Consider dividing your surveys and question types by the following broad topics, which include corresponding sub-topics. Since it is best to keep surveys short as a best practice, it is ideal to create multiple surveys. First, divide them into the following:
  1. Emotional response
    1. To understand consumer: feelings, aversions, desires, fears, emotional connections and sensitivities
  2. Consumer activities
    1. To understand consumer: habits, spending patterns, purchasing pains, frequency of purchases, lifestyles
  3. Interests
    1. To understand consumer: lifestyles, habits, curiosities, needs, biases, likes, tendencies
  4. Goals
    1. To understand consumer: needs, aspirations, how they seek to remove pain points
  5. Values
    1. To understand consumer: belief systems, moral and ethics, biases and prejudices,
  6. Opinions
    1. To understand consumer: attitudes, hopes, perceptions of your brand and others and lastly, their thought
7. Conduct follow-up surveys and/or questions, if need be.
  1. Use a survey platform that offers advanced skip logic, if you opt for the latter. This is because this functionality routes users to specific follow-up questions, based on how they answered a previous question.
8. Analyze your findings.
  1. Use your market research platform’s dashboard to visualize and make sense of your data.
9. Form concrete customer segments and personas from your psychographic survey findings and analysis.
10. Take action.
  1. Use the findings from your psychographic analysis to take a wide range of actions, such as establishing new marketing campaigns, tweaking existing campaigns, innovating on products, improving customer service and more.
  2. Conduct regular surveys of your target market sample to continuously stay in the know about their feelings, opinions and all else that their psychographics include.

Delving into the Minds of Your Customers

A psychographic profile enables you to know how your ideal customers think, feel, behave, value and much more. This kind of customer intelligence is vital, as it not only paints a clear picture of your target market, but it also allows you to understand your customers’ buying decisions and behaviors.

This could mean the difference between earning, retaining or losing customers. As such, you should conduct a psychogrpahic analysis of your customers to understand what makes them tick, how they respond emotionally, how their values shape their buying behavior and much more.

To do so, you’ll need to use a quality online survey platform. You should use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy all kinds of surveys.

It should extend random device engagement (RDE) sampling so that you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to properly conduct an informative psychographic analysis.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Forming a Demographic Analysis to Complete Your Market Research

Conducting a demographic analysis is a critical component of your market research and consumer analysis efforts.

In today’s hyper-competitive age, you need to understand your market precisely, including its key players, namely your target market — the group of customers most likely to buy from you.

To market successfully, your target market can’t be anyone. Instead, you’ll need to narrow down the targets of all your marketing campaigns by identifying them and running an analysis on them in relation to your products and services.

There are many characteristics making up a target market, with demographics being at the forefront. As such, it is key to begin your target market analysis by running a demographic analysis.

This article expounds on the demographic analysis, including its importance, makeup and how to properly conduct one to complete your market research.

Understanding the Demographic Analysis

Also called a demographic market analysis, a demographic analysis refers to the collection and examination of a specified list of characteristics pertaining to groups of people and populations. These characteristics differ from those used in a psychographic or lifestyle analysis.

A demographic analysis is a kind of technique that identifies and analyzes the demographics of a population. It then uses this data to develop an estimate of the population. This technique allows market researchers to understand key demographic aspects of its target market. Demographic data includes the following factors:

Age
Gender
Race
Ethnicity
Socioeconomic information including:
1. Employment
2. Education
3. Income
4. Marital status rates
Location data including:
1. Country of residence
2. State, territory, county, zip code, etc.
Device usage
1. Which device

A demographic analysis involves learning about the amount of each kind of demographic group present in a target market. This is because a target market is not one set of demographics; rather it is a multitude of demographic groups consolidating into the broad group that comprises all your target customers.

As such, a demographic analysis is used in market segmentation, along with when you construct customer personas. These market research techniques involve classifying and breaking down your target market into smaller, more defined groups that are easier to target than the overall target market.

Aside from studying the composition of a target market, a demographic analysis is also used to develop an understanding of how a population has changed over time. This involves evaluating birth, death, and migration.

In addition, you can further analyze how demographics have changed by conducting longitudinal studies via longitudinal surveys. These allow you to study a population over a period of time.

All in all, a demographic analysis includes all the aspects that allow researchers to measure the dimensions and dynamics of populations.

The Importance of a Demographic Analysis

A demographic analysis is critical to market research for a number of reasons.

First off, it is the chief method of identifying and classifying your target market, which represents those who are most likely to patronize your niche and products and most importantly, your business.

Before you can study your customer behavior, consumer preferences and how to create your marketing campaigns accordingly, you’ll need to know the core aspects of your target market, which is its demographics. This is because you wouldn’t be able to scope out the habits and lifestyles of your customers, if you don’t even know who they are.

Next, this kind of analysis can assist you with two other key objectives. These include the following:

Discovering the sectors and subgroups making up the population
Generating a comprehensive portrait of the traits that a typical member of each of these sectors possesses.

These two methods allow you to get a comprehensive understanding of the statistical information of all those in your target market. With this information in tow, you can move forward by studying your target population more closely, by conducting a psychographic analysis.

This analysis is also useful in that it allows you to form a specific demographic profile. Also called a customer persona, this profile presents information about a typical member of a certain customer segment. It assists in creating a visual representation of a hypothetical target market. For example, a market researcher may focus on the following persona: single men between the ages of 18 and 34, and are college-educated.

A demographic analysis is particularly valuable if it is used to compare demographics residing in different places. This is not just useful for those operating brick-and-mortar shops, as digital businesses must understand all of their customers and how to appeal to them.

And since it is unlikely for all customers to live in one area, it is key to study demographics across geographies. As such, it is also useful for local SEO, in which digital users are targeted by their location.

It is useful to provide two comparison sets of data: comparable communities and the state or United States as a whole.

Demographics are important to analyze, as they allow marketers and market researchers to comprehend how their target market searches for information online, along with how it purchases products.

In this way, demographic data is particularly useful for businesses, as it enables them to understand how to market to their consumers, which helps raise sales and revenue. In addition, understanding your demographics allows you to plan strategically for future campaigns.

All in all, demographics are critical for market research, given that demographics encompass human populations and how they impact the market.

How to Form a Demographic Analysis for Market Research

To create a demographic analysis, particularly for market research, you’ll need to understand who makes up your target market.

As such, you’ll need to gather this info by eliciting information on who buys products and services in your niche. You can also do so by discovering your demographic makeup from customers who have already purchased from you.

This requires conducting both secondary and primary research. The following steps provide a walkthrough on how to create a demographic analysis:

Begin by conducting secondary research. Start at the general level by scouting for articles and other resources on the demographics in your niche.
Use demographic data on particular locations from government websites.
1. For example, the US Census Neighborhood Explorer.
Based on your secondary research, put together your findings into preliminary customer segments.
Then, use market research software to conduct primary research.
1. You can opt for syndicated research, but you won’t control the study, should you take this route, as it will be proprietary to the market research firm you use, along with its partnering companies.
Create surveys with screeners that require the demographics you’ve discovered from your secondary research.
It is optimal to create a single survey with multiple audiences — whether you’ve conducted secondary research or have obtained little to no secondary demographical data.
1. This way, you can ask multiple audiences for their thoughts on your niche and whether they would buy your products or services.
2. You can segment your demographics more accurately this way, as your survey results may not perfectly align with your secondary research.
Be sure to send your surveys to specific people, such as previous customers or those on an email list, aside from only deploying your surveys via your online survey platform.
It is crucial to send follow-up surveys, or at least follow-up questions that ask for more clarification on preceding questions.
1. Your market research platform should offer advanced skip logic to do this, as it routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers to previous questions.
Make sure you iterate your survey research by covering all demographics, as you may have some demographics in your target market that you are completely unaware of.
Analyze your findings.
1. Put together a document with various segments based on their demographics.
2. You may use them to build preliminary customer personas.
3. Start coming up with questions for a psychographic analysis, which covers lifestyles and behaviors.

Understanding the Makeup of All Your Customers

A target market analysis is of the utmost importance before you tackle any marketing campaign. It begins with conducting a demographic analysis, which informs you of the statistical makeup of various characteristics of your consumers.

In order to carry out an accurate and timely demographic analysis, you’ll need a quality online survey platform.

You should use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create, deploy and analyze all kinds of surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to quickly gain insights into your customer demographics and analyze them at speed.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Buy a Survey Audience and Survey Respondents Straight from the Source

As market research professionals, we urge you to buy a survey audience to access a wealth of survey respondents at your fingertips.

While it may be tempting to opt for a market research panel, buying survey respondents straight from the source is a much more effective method for conducting research and having constant access to the correct survey respondents.

You wouldn't want to survey the wrong audience; it should be precise to both your target market segments, along with to the respondent qualifications of a particular research campaign or survey.

Both the former and the latter are going to vary; as such, there is no such thing as a single survey target audience.

Thus, the makeup of your survey audience will differ based on the shifts in your target market and the different subjects and objectives of distinct research campaigns.

As such, you’ll need to reach out to several populations based on your various research campaigns and needs. To do so, you’ll need to identify, target and buy the correct survey audience.

This article explores how to buy a survey audience, the importance of reaching the right survey respondents, how the Pollfish platform does so with random organic sampling and much more.

Table of Contents: Buy a Survey Audience and Survey Respondents Straight from the Source

Target the right survey audience
Removing fraud incentives
Our audience operates differently
Audience size and source matter
Selecting the right consumer
The right audience makeup
Our expansive reach means we can do what no other market research provider can
The Importance of Buying a Survey Audience
1. The Proper Target Survey Audience is Not the Same as Market Segments
2. Identifying and Reaching the Poper Respondents
3. Studying Your Target Audience in Greater Depth
4. Being Able to Detect and Observe a Bad Customer Experience
5. Having Constant Access to the Correct Survey Audience Population
Using Random Device Engagement and Organic Sampling
1. Market research panels are flawed
How to Buy a Survey Audience
1. Buying a Survey Audience as Part of the Survey Process
2. The Two Pollfish Plans
3. Accessing Market Research Data to Buy Survey Audience
4. Two Main Ways to Buy a Survey Audience
How to Buy Survey Respondents
The Pollfish Platform Has Your Back

Target the right survey audience

You ought to target the right survey audience without being bogged down by survey fraud and a host of other issues that non-organic probability sampling methods bring.

We identified data-quality issues - such as panel fatigue and unconsciously biased responses that are unavoidable with career panelists early on. To stamp out low-quality data, our platform is designed to avoid career panelists with narrow targeting and a system of quality checks.

We’ve also created our own distributed audience network to be the first wholly-owned and operated network made up of real consumers around the world.

Whether it’s cracking down on low-quality survey data or accessing real customers, the Pollfish organic sampling method (see the section called Using Random Device Engagement and Organic Sampling) executes a meaningful market research campaign.

Our platform targets the correct survey audience, one that can be exclusively defined and hyper-targeted to ensure that only the most relevant respondents partake in your survey campaigns.

Removing fraud incentives

Most traditional market research panelists are survey respondents who sign up in exchange for cash or airline points.

Because these incentives are static and cumulative, they often become “professional survey-takers” — they understand how, and are motivated to bypass screening questions to ensure they can take as many surveys as possible, without providing quality responses.

Our platform mandates a screening section, which you can customize to be as granular as possible, thereby allowing you to avoid poor-quality respondents. Just use our screener to qualify respondents on a wide range of demographics and psychographic qualities.

We even offer screening questions in addition to inputting survey respondent qualifications in the screener section.

Our audience operates differently

Because we partner directly with app developers, the developer defines appropriate and specific non-cash survey incentives in exchange for completed surveys. These incentives benefit real consumers without motivating them to become career panelists.

Instead, respondents are motivated to complete a survey truthfully and are rewarded with a pleasant survey experience (and an incentive after they complete the survey).

With so many mobile apps in existence, there is a wide breadth of non-monetary survey incentives to reward your respondents, draw them to your survey and provide accurate data.

For example, in the case of a news app, the survey incentive might be a premium article, or in a fitness app, access to a free yoga lesson.

In a mobile game, the incentive can take the form of in-game tokens, lives, access to higher levels and more. You can get creative with how you offer these incentives, and our app partners always are.

Audience size and source matter

Since we operate the largest global audience of survey takers, our vast network enables us to reach very narrow consumer segments, meaning we can reach very specific target audiences, the kinds you wouldn’t be able to target otherwise.

That’s because our survey audiences are hyper-targeted.

The screening questions we mentioned earlier (Removing fraud incentives section), allow you to do just that.

With the screening questions, you can permit or disqualify potential respondents based on how they answer your screening questions. In other words, it allows you to fine-tune your survey audience targeting even more distinctly.

However, what truly makes us stand out against the crowd of other survey sample providers is our relationships with our partner apps that ensure high-quality responses from those targeted segments.

Because of this relationship, our surveys and incentives are never boring or lackluster. Instead, the respondents have an engaging survey environment where they’re prompted to complete entire surveys. Thus, it’s a win-win situation for researchers and survey respondents alike.

Selecting the right consumer

Our more than 120K+ app partners are manually vetted and only get paid when they deliver a response from a qualified individual that fits the targeting criteria request and meets our strict quality controls.

This differs from the traditional approach that requires “impaneling” respondents, making it prohibitively expensive to throw out questionable responses.

But on the Pollfish platform, our AI-powered system automatically disqualifies respondents who don’t fit the entire targeting criteria, along with those who provide faulty answers and low-quality data.

That’s because our wide range of quality checks weed out gibberish answers, respondents who don’t pay attention, VPN users who would otherwise taint geographic targeting and other sources of low-quality data.

The right audience makeup

New respondents are joining our consumer network every day. Our network of app providers and survey respondents is now in over 160+ countries - and growing - as our app-based partnerships give us a fast and efficient way to reach and expand our market research audience.

We use a rolling profiling model to keep our audience information up-to-date and collect a wealth of data upfront including demographic, location, gender, carrier and mobile usage data (a first in the space).

This makes it easy for you to create surveys using already-collected demographic data and spend time seeking answers for your business, not drafting questions to define your audience makeup.

Our expansive reach means we can do what no other market research provider can

We narrowly target consumer populations and send surveys to the exact respondents you want to reach, apply AI fraud detection to remove responses that don’t meet our quality standards and still have plenty of responses to satisfy your targeting quotas — all while they are organically engaged in mobile apps on their devices.

We call this revolutionary methodology organic sampling, specifically Random Device Engagement on the Pollfish platform. We’ve used it to accurately predict some of the most confounding political events of recent decades — where traditional methods fell short.

Learn more about the Pollfish methodology.

The Importance of Buying a Survey Audience

Buying a survey audience is essential to your studies. Many reasons support this claim. Let’s explore some of the major arguments as to why buying a survey audience is an absolute must for your market research campaigns.

The Proper Target Survey Audience is Not the Same as Market Segments

The reason that upholds the importance of buying a survey audience ties in with the need to use the proper survey target audience. You wouldn’t want to reach out to irrelevant population segments, as they are not part of your target market.

In addition, even if you have identified the distinct market segments and customer personas in your target market, they are not equivalent to your target survey audience.

This is because the market segments and customer profiles that you’ll need to survey will vary from study to study and from one survey campaign to the next.

As such, your survey audience is not the same as your market segments and broader target market.

Instead, your survey target audience is a far more narrow and specified group contingent on a particular survey campaign. Sometimes, it’ll be even more limited, as it will be exclusive to a particular survey part of a larger campaign.

Identifying and Reaching the Poper Respondents

To reach this distinct group of respondents, you’ll need to have them in your sampling pool. To do so, you’ll need to identify them first, before you buy them. That’s something you can achieve with a market research platform, particularly an online survey platform.

Such a platform would handle identifying and reaching your correct survey audience. But you would need to buy your survey audience first.

Buying this audience is also important for several other reasons.

Studying Your Target Audience in Greater Depth

Having access to the correct survey audience is essential for market research. As aforementioned, you wouldn't want to study the wrong populations. Having your survey audience within easy reach allows you to study your customers in great depth.

This is important for a variety of reasons, from delighting your customers, to retaining them. Customer retention is more important than customer acquisition, yet studying the proper survey audience allows you to achieve both: retaining your customers and gaining new ones.

To study them, they’ll need to be accessible to you and your market research efforts. As such, it’s crucial to buy your survey respondents.

Being Able to Detect and Observe a Bad Customer Experience

Did you know that almost half of all customers stop doing business with a company due to a bad CX? In fact, 47% of customers stop buying from businesses after a negative experience.

But having a bad experience with a brand doesn’t always compel customers to make light of it. As such, not all of your customers will complain, thereby you won’t have awareness of the poor customer experience your brand provided.

91% of unhappy customers will leave a business without complaining. Thus, while many brands place a lot of effort into forging customer happiness, they can’t avoid all kinds of customer dissatisfaction and frustrations.

Fortunately, with survey research and access to the correct survey audience, you’ll never have to be kept in the dark about poor customer experiences. Instead, you can deploy regular consumer surveys and brand trackers to be in the constant know regarding your customers' wants, needs, sentiments, opinions, aversions, and more.

Once more, this all depends on having access to the correct survey audience, which is why you’ll need to buy your survey audience through a reliable online survey platform.

Having Constant Access to the Correct Survey Audience Population

When you buy a survey audience, you can also rest assured that you always have access to the correct audience. That’s because a strong online survey platform will allow you to hyper-target your target survey audience as narrowly as you’d like.

It will even allow you to use multiple audiences in a single survey. This provides a holistic survey audience access. It’s objectively important to have this option within constant reach in your online survey platform.

But having access to the correct survey audience once or for one survey isn’t enough. As aforementioned, it is key to keep constant tabs on your customers and your brand experience. Avoiding a bad CX is a must, but you won’t be able to do it via a one-and-done approach.

Thus, while using syndicated research may give you access to your target survey audience, it won’t give you continued access to your customers — unless you’re willing to break the bank. This form of research involves using a market research firm to carry out and own all research data.

This approach is therefore not ideal, as it is expensive and won’t allow you to have a constant grasp of your data. Instead, when you buy a survey audience with Pollfish, you are the sole owner of your data and have constant access to our 250+ network of consumers ready to take your surveys.

Using Random Device Engagement and Organic Sampling

Equally important as buying a survey audience is using the proper mechanism for reaching it. Did you know that the way you reach your survey respondents dictates the nature of their responses?

That’s because some respondents will be more inclined to take it than others, while some will be more prone to biases (especially if they are pre-recruited via panels).

As such, the method for reaching an audience goes hand in hand with buying a survey audience; both are critical to your studies, as both factor into its quality.

To avoid as many survey biases as possible, keep respondents engaged in your study and forgo survey fraud, you ought to use a platform that runs on organic probability sampling.

As such, you should use a potent market research platform that leverages this mechanism and allows you to easily access your audience.

Below we’ll delve into what organic probability sampling is, along with the RDE method.

Market research panels are flawed

Research panels are one of the most common techniques used to identify and reach survey panelists and other market research participants. While they are a popular option, they do not provide you with the quality that organic sampling does.

At Pollfish, we avoid using conventional panels for this very reason.

Instead, we’ve developed our very own market research methodology called organic probability sampling. This involves sourcing our audience of real consumers via partnerships with app publishers, which allows us to conduct randomized, yet highly targeted surveys to verified respondents.

Our unique process is known as Random Device Engagement, (RDE), which uses the organic sampling approach for finding and obtaining survey participants.

A kind of organic probability sampling, RDE polling relies on advertising networks and other digital platforms to engage potential respondents wherever they visit voluntarily.

Thus, RDE catches users where they choose to be, as opposed to being in unnatural environments, where they’ll be less likely to pay attention, let alone take part in a survey.

That’s because, in unnatural environments, the thought processes of respondents can deviate from those in more natural environments, which results in artificial considerations that can influence their responses. Thus, RDE is the better approach to reaching respondents and getting honest, attentive responses.

Random Device Engagement / Organic Sampling includes a variety of digital platforms and properties to survey respondents, such as:

Mobile sites
Apps
Websites
Mobile games

This randomized method of reaching respondents ensures you avoid acquiescence bias from your respondents, due to the anonymous nature of this route. This means you’ll avoid respondents who respond with answers that have positive associations.

This is because these surveys are completely anonymized and therefore don’t have the same pressures as a panel.

In addition, RDE allows you to steer clear of the sampling bias, which occurs when the respondent selection process is not conducted at random, which then leads to the under or overrepresentation of a certain market segment.

With over 250 people in our network, we never have to worry about data quality, delivering only the best, most authentic, and most useful insights to our clients.

How to Buy a Survey Audience

Now that you understand why it’s important to buy a survey audience, along with how the Pollfish platform provides the supreme respondent-reaching mechanism and quality survey data, it’s time to learn how you can buy a survey audience yourself.

Fortunately, the Pollfish platform values user-friendliness and ease of use, making it a quick and easy process.

On our platform, buying a survey audience is deeply tied to the entire survey creation process.

Buying a Survey Audience as Part of the Survey Process

So what does it mean when the survey creation process is deeply connected to buying a survey audience?

In Pollfish, it means that as you create your questionnaire, you can also seamlessly switch to the “audience” tab and edit your survey target audience.

This section of your survey project is where you input ALL of your respondent criteria. In market research, this is typically referred to as the screener, or the screening section. This section includes all the demographic, psychographic and geographic criteria you can use to target specific survey target audiences.

You’ll need to register with Pollfish to view the screening section, dashboard, and the rest of the platform. You can do this by signing up for either a Basic Plan or an Elite Plan.

The Two Pollfish Plans

Determine the best Pollfish plan for your business, organization or personal need. When you register for an account, you’ll have access to the platform to understand how to buy a survey audience firsthand.

Our market research SaaS offers two plans. Read through the nuances, offerings and possible limitations of both before you sign up.

The Basic Plan
1. Part of our Freemium model
2. Includes basic features
3. Allows you to pay as you go, meaning there is no minimum or maximum deposit.
4. Each completed survey costs $0.95.
5. Survey prices are uncapped.
6. This is accessible to 10 people in your team.
7. Which features it includes:
  1. A/B testing (Monadic)
  2. Advanced question types
  3. An account budget
  4. Data Exports (SPSS, CSV, PDF, Crosstabs)
  5. Demographic information on results
  6. White-labeled reports
  7. Open-ended grouping
  8. Full survey review and edits
  9. 24/7 support
8. Which features it excludes:
  1. Conjoint analysis
  2. 4-6 Screening Questions
  3. Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter (for pricing studies)
  4. BigQuery Export
  5. Crosstab Reports Designer
  6. Survey Results Translation
  7. Single Sign-On (SSO)
9. At last, this plan offers the Distribution Link feature.
  1. This grants you more options for deploying your survey, those that go beyond using our Random Device Engagement method.
  2. Instead, it grants you full control of how and to whom you send your surveys.
  3. Now available with both plans, learn more about it under Elite Plan, below.
The Elite Plan
1. This plan also prices each completed survey at $0.95.
2. It includes capped pricing.
3. The plan requires an account deposit.
  1. This deposit works in the manner of credits. Each dollar amount is equivalent to 1 credit.
  2. These credits are what you use to pay off each survey complete and other survey costs.
4. This plan is suited for all business types and organizations with larger market research goals and needs.
5. As such, it includes more advanced features, along with all those that the Basic Plan includes.
6. For example, it includes the Distribution Link feature.
  1. This nifty feature allows you to send your survey your way.
  2. That means, you can send your surveys to either:
    1. Specific individuals. This usually includes targeted respondents to whom you have contact information.
      1. This can include their email address or their social media accounts.
      2. This kind of information may come from paying customers, or those who signed up for marketing collateral, such as newsletters, thereby giving you their contact info.
      3. You may also get this information by interacting with your followers on different social media channels.
    2. Through specific online channels, such as social media, the homepage, a static page or landing pages.
      1. This is especially useful if you seek to send your surveys through your own digital channels and properties, as opposed to others, such as those in our RDE network of website and app publishers.
7. Which features it includes: (that the former plan lacks)
  1. Conjoint analysis
  2. 4-6 Screening Questions
  3. Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
  4. BigQuery Export
  5. Crosstab Reports Designer
  6. Survey Results Translation
  7. Single Sign-On (SSO)

If you’re interested in learning more, or are ready to sign up with Pollfish to start cranking out all the market research projects you desire, visit our page: Pollfish Plan Pricing.

Accessing Market Research Data to Buy Survey Audience

Once you register with Pollfish, sign in to your account. Once signed in, you’ll be able to access all of your market research data — including the screener where you select your desired survey audience. The Pollfish platform includes the following interfaces:

The Dashboard
- New project creation
  - Here, you can create new survey campaigns
- List of ongoing surveys; this includes
  - Running surveys
  - Paused surveys
  - You can include each survey under different folders

In your dashboard, you can choose what you want to do with your survey campaigns, such as combing through ongoing surveys, paused surveys or those that have already reached completion. The latter refers to surveys that have received the amount of completes you originally added as part of your quotas.

Two Main Ways to Buy a Survey Audience

You can also choose to create an entirely new project. For this purpose, you’ll find the large blue button on the top right corner of the Dashboard, called “Create Project.”

As such, there are two main ways to buy a survey audience in Pollfish and edit it to your liking.

The first way to buy a survey audience is by creating an entirely new project. This grants you three options, which you can learn about in the next section. Essentially, these options provide the way you build out your survey.

The second way to buy survey respondents is by editing a survey that’s already in progress, AKA, a survey that is already running. In this second method, you can choose respondents by pausing a running survey.

Remember, in both ways, you’ll need to buy your survey audience by accessing the last section (or step) of the survey process, which is the checkout.

For more information on how to make your own survey in just three easy steps, read the article in the hyperlink.

How to Buy Survey Respondents

Now that you understand how buying survey respondents works on Pollfish, including the fact that it is innately tied to forming surveys themselves, let’s delve further. Here, we’ll teach you how to make that knowledge more actionable.

The following provides step-by-step instructions on how to buy a survey audience on Pollfish:

Register or log in to the Polish platform.
Choose how you want to buy your respondents based on the two main ways explained above.
If you seek to edit an ongoing survey (or a lauded survey), go to your dashboard.
1. In your list of surveys, choose from the following surveys:
  1. All
  2. Draft
  3. Under approval
  4. Approved
  5. Running
  6. Paused
  7. Completed
  8. Under Edit
2. In this list, click on the one you wish to edit.
3. Edit your survey audience.
  1. You can change anything on the audience page, such as applying /removing filters, adding/changing quotas, etc.
  2. You cannot edit the screening questions.
4. Go to the Checkout and pay for your new survey audience.
If you seek to create a new project, click on the big blue button labeled: “Create project.”
1. You’ll have three options for creating a new survey project. These include:
  1. From scratch
  2. From template
  3. Link 3rd party
2. Next, you’ll be asked the following: "How would you like to collect responses to your survey?”
3. Choose from the following options:
  1. Buy a survey from the Pollfish audience (The RDE method)
  2. Send a survey to your own audience or another survey panel
4. Next, you’ll be brought to the 3-section survey creation interface.
5. Choose your precise survey audience in the “Audience” section.
  1. Here, you can input as many demographic/ location/ psychographic features.
  2. You can add screening questions if you have the Elite Plan.
6. After you’re done choosing all your respondent criteria, move on to the next section, the Questionnaire and create your survey.
7. Go to the last section, the Checkout. Here you can:
  1. Choose a payment method.
  2. Choose to schedule your survey or launch it immediately.
  3. View your cost analysis.
8. Pay and complete your survey. Congratulations, you’ve bought a survey audience!

The Pollfish Platform Has Your Back

Regardless of the kind of market research project you seek to build out, Pollfish always has your back. Our dedicated team of market research experts is here to help you 24/7. Our platform is second to none when it comes to working on any topic that requires research.

Whether you seek to run a product satisfaction campaign, measure your consumer loyalty, run a brand tracker, understand your brand reputation or improve your customer service, we’ve got you covered.

That’s because you can create any type of survey — and if you’re ever stumped on how to get started creating yours, you can choose from various survey templates and edit them to your liking. We currently offer 19 templates for a distinct range of topics.

Just remember to study the correct survey target audience, as it differs from your broader target market and its various segments and customer personas. Luckily, you can filter your survey audience as granularly as you need to on our platform. Happy researching.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Using Customer Feedback Survey Questions to Draw Quality Data

It is critical to form viable customer feedback survey questions, as it is the questions that power this kind of survey.

The customer feedback survey provides a wealth of commentary from customers on various aspects of your business and their customer buying journey. This kind of data is critical to extract from customers, namely to satisfy them and to also maintain a reputable business.

This is because customers — including unhappy ones — don’t keep quiet; they air their feedback online and to their peers, friends and family. This can have either good or damning consequences for a business, depending on the kind of feedback customers provide.

77% of customers would recommend a company to a friend after having a positive experience with it. However, if they are not happy with a business, 13% of customers will share their experience with 15 people or even more. Compounding the damage is the fact that only 1 in 26 unhappy customers complain to the businesses themselves about their bad experiences.

Dissatisfied customers may skip on sharing their feedback with a company, instead taking their grievances to readily available online reviews. Bad reviews don’t sit well with customers; 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week. 1 in 3 have a shorter time frame of 3 days or less.

As such, businesses should use the customer feedback survey to collect all kinds of feedback, in turn, avoiding negative reviews and unhappy customers in general.

This article lays out various types of customer feedback survey questions — along with their wider context in the sales funnel — so that you can power your questionnaire with the right questions.

Approaching the Customer Feedback Survey

There is no hard and fast rule to surveying customers for their feedback, as there are various instances in which you can collect it. For some businesses, certain instances may be redundant to send this survey, especially if you’ve already used another kind of consumer survey about a particular brand experience.

For other companies, even those that haven’t deployed any surveys about a particular customer experience, it too may not be a priority if they’re conducting other kinds of market research. Ultimately, using this kind of survey depends on the kind of feedback you seek in relation to a certain business campaign. However, it is still useful, especially to those who are in lack of conducting market research techniques.

To determine the kind of customer feedback you seek to create questions for, consider the sales funnel, or the customer journey. While there are different occurrences and experiences in this funnel, they can be classified into 5 distinct stages:

Top of the funnel

1. 1. Early aspects of the customer journey.
  2. This is when brands use brand awareness tactics to draw their target market’s attention to the company.
  3. This involves visual, snackable and engaging content.

Early Middle of the funnel

1. 1. This is the early consideration stage of the customer journey.
  2. Customers contemplate solutions to their problems, considering your product or service as a potential fit.
  3. It involves new leads gained from top-of-the-funnel marketing and current customers you would urge towards making repeat purchases.
  4. It involves using a strong content marketing strategy to nurture leads.

Middle of the funnel nearing conversions

1. 1. This involves educating leads further down the funnel and strengthening their interest and connection to your brand.
  2. At this point, potential customers are weighing your brand against others.
  3. This stage is the heart of the decision-making process.
  4. Aside from content, this stage requires a final push towards conversions, such as a promotion, sale, etc.

End of the funnel

1. 1. This stage represents the beginning of purchases.
  2. Customers make a purchase or are in the process of purchasing, such as filling up an online shopping cart, but not yet buying.
  3. There can be hiccups during checkout, such as a malfunctioning page, difficulties in choosing a shipping method, etc.

Post-sales

1. This can include post-purchase order modification.
  1. Some customers change aspects of their orders, whether it is the products themselves, shipping type, credit card info, etc.
2. This may include order cancellation.
3. For businesses, it often involves nurturing for cross and up-sells.
4. This stage also involves regular check-ins for brand tracking and customer satisfaction.

Common Types of Customer Feedback Survey Questions

There are various kinds of questions you can ask to extract valuable customer feedback.

The following provides question examples to use in the customer feedback survey:

What challenges are you trying to solve?
1. Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel
Have you used a similar [product or service] before?
1. Question Type: Yes or no
2. Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel
Which of the following brands have you [heard of/used]?
1. Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers, a follow-up to the previous question
2. Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel
What is the biggest issue you have [in a niche, with a product or service]?
1. Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: Top and early middle of the funnel
What kind of content would you like to see from us?
1. Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel, early middle- middle of the funnel
How can we make this page [product page, landing page, resource page] better for you?
1. Question Type: Ranking, multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: Top of the funnel, early middle- middle of the funnel
What feature or option could we add to make your experience better?
1. Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers
2. Sales Funnel Position: Middle of the funnel
What, if anything, what is stopping you from buying/subscribing today?
1. Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: Middle and end of the funnel
On a scale of 1 (unhappy) to 10 (very happy), how would you rate your overall satisfaction with us?
1. Question Type: Numeric, scaled
2. Sales Funnel Position: End of the funnel and post-sales
What convinced you to buy the product?
1. Question Type: Multiple-selection of multiple-choice answers and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: End of the funnel and post-sales
What was the most difficult thing in your buying experience with us?
1. Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended question
2. Sales Funnel Position: End of the funnel and post-sales
How satisfied are you with the product or service from a scale of 1 to 10?
1. Question Type: Numeric, scaled
2. Sales Funnel Position: Post-sales

Listening to Your Customers

Market research involves far more than gaining intelligence on your customers’ likes, dislikes and customer behavior. Instead, it involves monitoring their CX and feedback on other matters throughout their journey with your brand.

This way, you’ll be attuned to their needs and perceptions towards their CX and your brand at multiple stages in their relationship with you. In order to collect this data, you’ll need a strong online survey platform. Ideally, it should make it easy to set up, target the correct target market sample and deploy your surveys.

You should use an online survey platform that offers random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

Additionally, your market research platform should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reap invaluable consumer insights to help you power any campaign.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

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