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Marketing Tips You Can Use Right Now ...
Mail Questionnaires ...
Mailing questionnaires about your business to customers and prospects can be an extremely valuable exercise.
For a small business, it can be the cheapest and least time-consuming method of doing your own market research.
Mailed questionnaires would probably work for you if:
- answers can be expressed simply,
- all people being researched are a well defined, homogeneous group, and
- all mailing lists of names and addresses can be easily obtained.
The beauty of a mail questionnaire is that you can do it yourself. You don't have to pay professional surveyors to interview
people, and you can arrange to process the replies at a time most convenient for yourself.
Usually you are the best person to write the questionnaire. Even if you don't feel you are a great writer, if you follow these
points you should produce a reasonably successful questionnaire.
- Before you start, write down exactly the information you are after. Talk to friends and customers to see what information
you want to know.
- Decide which are the most important points you want answered. If you have too many points, drop off the least important.
- Avoid asking for too much information.
- Create simple questions and use short sentences. Don't have any of your questions more than twenty words long. If it's
natural for you to write long sentences, write them long to crystalise your thoughts. Then re-write them shorter.
- Try to make the questionnaire look interesting.
- Try to make it pander to the respondent's ego.
- Make it seem easy to fill in.
- If possible, try to make respondents feel that by helping you they are helping themselves.
- Write as if you are writing to one person.
- Try the questionnaire on several groups of people before going into a mass mailing. Small test runs will help show you what
needs adjusting.
- Use screening questions early on the page to eliminate respondents who have nothing to offer.
- Make sure there is only one possible interpretation to each question. (I well remember writing a questionnaire, which had
an ambiguous question. It completely ruined that section of the questionnaire, yet it would have been simple to correct if I had
noticed in time).
- Unless absolutely necessary, avoid asking personal questions - such as on religion or income. If you must ask such
questions, make the respondent feel that you have a genuine need to know.
- Create a logical flow of questions so that they lead into each other.
- Make sure your words are not unnecessarily offensive. Replace words with bad connotations, with synonyms. For
example "senior citizens" is a softer term than "old people".
- Layout your questionnaire so it looks uncluttered. Two pages with plenty of space is more likely to get a response than
one page that is jam-packed.
- Enclose a cover letter with your questionnaire. Be honest. If you are transparently honest, you are more likely to get
co-operation than if you hold something back.
The main disappointment with mailed questionnaires is the low number of replies. It is not unusual to have only 1% reply.
But if you offer a small prize by drawing a respondent's name for a hat, you can increase the response to 10%.
The usual way to analyse replies is to divide respondents into different categories and find what percentage answered which way.
This is valuable and important. You will always find surprise percentages which you didn't notice from just reading through replies.
However I personally find the best way to analyse the replies is to simply read them, one after another. Try to absorb the feelings.
Try to understand what each one, as an individual, is telling you. When you get to the point where you feel you know in
advance what each type of respondent is going to say, then you know it all. You've got a feeling for what your market wants
in a far better way than you can ever obtain from looking at a statistical analysis of the replies.
Once you have written your questionnaire, you may decide it is better not to mail it, but to use it for interviews. You fill in the
questions while talking to respondents, either face-to-face or on the telephone. Interviews have several extra advantages,
including:
- Good information can be gained by personal rapport.
- You can follow up points raised unexpectedly.
- You can prolong interviews with any particularly helpful respondents.
One warning. If you do make interviews, avoid having them done by sales staff. Salespeople don't make good researchers
because they tend to dominate (a characteristic opposite to that of a good researcher) and because their main concern is
with what is right with you product, service, of business (you want to know what is wrong).
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