You can’t thrive in the business world without knowing what your audience wants. You can spend millions on developing, designing, and marketing a product. But, if the product doesn’t match your consumer preferences, everything goes to waste. So what’s the solution here? How can you figure out what your customers or audiences are thinking? The answer is simple – online surveys! And in this blog, we’ll discuss how online surveys increase ROI.

Online Surveys has become a new trend in the world of digital marketing, as it saves your money and time. And, what’s more rewarding is the fact that online surveys can increase your business ROI like never before. Giant companies like Taco Bell, Microsoft, Apple, Southwest Airlines have achieved massive success because of online surveys. Here we’ve tried to shed light on how you can use online surveys for high return on investment. By the end of the article you’ll learn how to gain lifetime leads with high ROI, that too without investing huge sums of money or time.

Sounds great, isn’t it? So let’s get started without further ado..

6 Types of Online Surveys that Help Your Brands to Grow

High return on investment is often directly proportional to blooming your business. And we, at SurveySparrow, believe that online surveys can help your brand grow and develop in-depth customer relationships. We believe some of the online surveys listed below can help your business receive high return on investment.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Marketing and Product Surveys
NPS (Net Promoter Score) Surveys
Employee and Human Resource Surveys
Event Surveys
Post-Purchase Surveys

Ways You Can Use Online Surveys to Increase ROI

Surveys are a great weapon for brands to understand and to increase ROI(Return on Investment). You can create online surveys to build awareness, measure your customers’ perceptions, and their preferences. Without a huge investment, you can get a better payoff and an increase in ROI with the help of it.

Here are five ways you can use online surveys to increase rate of interest:

1. Understand Your Target Audience and Their Needs

Online surveys will help your business figure out who your target audiences are. Knowing your customer and their pain-points are crucial for high return on investment.

Marketing without a target audience is like eating pizza with a pineapple topping! Yeah, it doesn’t taste good!

Popular brands like BuzzFeed use entertaining online surveys in a quiz format to understand their audience. For instance, personality quizzes can help you to collect their customer data to make marketing decisions. While the knowledge-based quizzes can be used for collecting your audiences’ knowledge about the subject, later you can help your audience to enhance their knowledge with education-based, information-based services.

2. Use Online Surveys to Retain Your Old Customers

Losing customers can be a nightmare for your business. Even a single customer can be negative for your business ROI. Retaining your old customers is the key to increasing profits. Increasing 5% of customer retention rates can boost your profits from 25%- 95%, according to Helpscout.com.

But, how can you retain your customer for the long-run? Well, surveys are one of the most crucial strategies to improve customer loyalty.

You can take Frito-Lay’s example to understand how online surveys can transform into customer loyalty machines. Frito-Lay used a social media survey to decide which flavour of chips their customer would like to have. They allowed their followers to select from various flavours by including an “I’d Eat That” button. The takeaway? Frito-Lay’s social media survey strategy made their customer feel cared for and important. They engaged their customer in decision-making and made them feel valued in the process.

A win-win situation for both, isn’t it?

3. Use Online Surveys to Earn Feedback for Development

No matter how successful your business is, there’s always room for new development. And, to develop your business, you need to listen to the needs and expectations of your customer.

One of the biggest brands in the fashion industry Timberland improves ROI by using online surveys. Around 2014, the brand added a feedback button on their websites that redirect the customers to a feedback page.

The page included several questions like, “How would you rate our site?” “What is your primary reason for visiting Timberland today?” “How likely you are to recommend the website”, etc. This helped Timberland to know their customers more closely and find what they are looking for. It helped the brand increase its profits by 15% from last year.

4. Satisfy Your Customer and Increase ROI with Surveys

Regular feedback from the customer is a perfect marketing method to increase customer satisfaction. The post-purchase survey approach is one of such methods you can use for your business.

For instance, Hotjar analytical tool sends a ‘point-of-conversion’ survey immediately after a user sign up for their paid plans. The survey form includes some open-ended questions, scale questions, etc. Online surveys helps the company to understand its user’s pain-points and expectations. When you value your customer opinion, identify their problems, they feel connected to your brand.

Another big name in the tech world Apple uses NPS surveys to boost their customer’s retail store experience. After purchase, they send an e-mail survey to rate their in-store experience.

Well, now you know why a customer satisfaction survey or feedback surveys are crucial to improve and increase ROI.

5. Gain Future Market Insights from Social Media

Online surveys not only help you to collect customer data but are also used as market-insights collecting tools. Several brands like Bowlcut Garms use regular surveys to gain future market insights. An online survey is the best way to gain productive insights that you can use to boost profits.

Social media is the best platform where you can conduct such surveys to get customer feedback. Approximately 50% of the world’s population uses social media. As more and more people are going online, several businesses can use online surveys for marketing opportunities.

Your business can use these data to gain future marketing insights to generate leads, increase ROI, sales, and prospects.

Some Bonus Advantages of Using Online Surveys

Boost in Response Rate

The average survey response rate is 33%, according to a survey report in 2019. But, with online survey tools you can increase the response rate upto 50% and higher.

Easy-to-use interface, enticing designs, engaging questions are the primary cause of the high response rate in online surveys. Also, the respondents can answer the question at their own pace and time. For this reason, online surveys are super relevant in today’s marketing world.

Super Fast and Affordable

The time you need to complete a survey is a maximum of three minutes! The question and information will be gathered automatically. Your customers don’t have to fill long boring papers to share their feedback.

Another big bonus point of using online surveys is its affordability. You don’t have to invest a huge sum on postage. You can easily ask your audience to fill up the form by using some useful survey tools, such as, SurveySparrow, Typeform, HubSpot, SurveyGizmo, etc. (You’ll get more information on the tools and software later in this post. So, keep reading!).

Perfect Accuracy

In traditional surveys, respondents had to answer manually. So, there was a big chance to get the wrong information from them. While in online surveys, the respondents answer directly into the system. That’s why you don’t have to worry about data accuracy while using online surveys.

Customize the Survey

We all know how it’s important to have a brand voice to market something. With online surveys, you can customize the survey style according to your brand.

You can align your brand’s logo, website font, colours, and images with the survey to increase reach. Matching your brand voice with the survey will ensure engagement to improve ROI for sure!

Zomato’s customer feedback is a great example that shows how you can include your brand’s voice in online surveys. The colour combination and fonts are perfectly reflecting Zomato’s brand voice and personality.

Online Surveys are Flexible

One of the best parts about online surveys is you can change the question just the way you like. Online surveys are flexible, and even your audience can skip the questions based on the previous question.

To sum up, online surveys can be easily customized for every participant. Its flexibility is a perfect feature every company would like to have.

Gather Results with Ease

The power of the internet made it easier to gather information around the world. You can gather a hundred and even thousands of respondent’s information at ease with online surveys.

The easy availability of data in online surveys will save you time. You can transfer data into specialized software or spreadsheets within a minute.

Tips for Successful Online Business Surveys

Send a survey after every transaction from your customer. Let them know, your brand values them, care for them.
Writing a good survey question that suits your needs. Try to avoid asking biased questions to your respondents.
The ‘survey’ word may sound a little boring to your target customer. Try to replace the word with ‘quiz’. It will make the surveys more interesting.
Don’t overdo with survey questions. 10-15 questions are enough to collect the required data.
How many surveys are enough? If you send surveys quite often, it may irritate your customer. You can send out surveys once or twice a year to paying customers. For long term clients, you can send out surveys once in a month.
Always prioritize your customer’s privacy while asking survey questions. Mention privacy disclaimers to ensure honesty. Add a privacy policy link and let your audience know what personal data you are collecting.
Using a progress bar can boost the completion rate in online surveys by 12%. The progress bar will encourage the participants to complete the survey by indicating the survey length.
Don’t forget to follow up repeatedly. Following up boosts the response rate by 58%.
Send out branded surveys; there are several tools available that let you design the surveys with your brand’s logo, tone, colour, and fonts. This way, your respondents will get familiar with your brand. For this you can use tools like SurveySparrow, SurveyGizmo, HubSpot.

Must-have Features to Look for in an Online Survey Tool

Now you know how you can use online surveys to increase ROI and retain customers. But, do you know that picking the right software and tool for an online survey can bring better results?

Choosing an online survey tool or software is the trickiest yet vital process for your business. There are several tools available that offer similar features; selecting the best among them can be a hassle.

Keeping your problems in mind, we’ve made a list of some key features you should look for in a survey tool. This list will definitely make your decision process more comfortable.

Designs to Craft Beautiful Surveys

The perfect survey tool will allow you to design surveys with appealing themes and templates. Your respondents will have fun while answering survey questions with attractive designs.

Skip Logic

With survey logic or skip logic, your respondent can skip an entire section of an online survey. For example, if one survey question is, “Did you ever shop from our e-store?” and the user’s answer is “Yes” then the next question would be related to the previous question. If the user answers with “No”, the next question would be skipped automatically.

Embedded Surveys

When you’re looking for an online survey tool, make sure it has embedded surveys feature. With this feature, you can embed your surveys on web pages without a hassle. Embedded surveys can generate leads and data three times more than traditional surveys.

User Segmentation

User Segmentation is another must-have feature you should look for in online survey tools. It will allow you to display surveys only to a specific audience. For instance, you can show a specific survey only to your new website visitors.

Video Surveys

Humans can retain 95% of the information when they watch it in a video. When you are selecting a survey tool, ensure they have video surveys to improve ROI and survey experience. With this feature, you can add videos as a background for your surveys.

Some other features a survey software or tool should have are:

Real-time reporting
Advance reports filters
Seamless survey share
Recurring surveys
API, Webhooks, Integration
White-label surveys
Secure surveys

Finding online survey software or tools is not an impossible task if they have these listed features. SurveySparrow is such a survey tool that offers these wide ranges of features. With this tool, you can redefine your employee, customer, and business experience impressively.

Examples of a Company that are Killing it with Online Surveys

1. SPB Web Solutions

SPB Web Solutions – Uk’s #1 online sales solution specialist for high return on investment by using online surveys.

They used SurveySparrow to gather data from each potential prospect.
Then they sent well-customized surveys to each of the prospects, using SurveySparrow’s built-in email platform.
They asked their prospect whether they want to have a free consultation call or not.
They included a display logic feature in the survey, for the prospects who weren’t interested in the free call.

The takeaway? With the perfect use of the survey, SPB Web Solutions witnessed a 30% boost in sales-qualified prospects. It further helped them to scale up their revenues.

2. wydr

An open art-trading platform wydr used SurveySparrow to increase their customer engagement.

SurveySparrow’s easy-to-use interface wydr sent survey questionnaires to their audience.
They also used the recurring survey feature to automatically send surveys again to the same audience.

The result? Switching from traditional to online survey helped wydr to save their time and gain 20% higher website visitors.

Let’s Wrap Up All Together

What customer wants more than anything, is some assurance from your brand. They want to know your brand cares about their opinion, care, preference, and expectations.

And the best way to assure them is by using surveys. If you swear by the feedback collection process, no one can stop your business to increase ROI. If you follow the famous brands’ examples, you’ll notice they all had one thing in common. They always encourage their customers to leave feedback. So, learn a lesson from them and start conducting online surveys for your business growth.

If you want to conduct an online survey, try using SurveySparrow’s free online survey tool. Just make sure to give your audience an exciting experience, and don’t make it a boring task.

Comprehensive Guide on How Surveys Increase ROI