I use surveys all the damn time… and they have added unbelievable amounts of dollars to my results. I really don’t know where I would be without them. As internet marketing tools go, surveys are really cool and if used correctly can make a lot of money.
what is a survey
A survey is a way of obtaining information. When used as an internet marketing tool, surveys can be targeted to gain insights from your existing list or to gain insights from prospects and list building.
A good survey is one where you ask questions that you can then immediately act on the answers…not surveys just based on other surveys you’ve seen…don’t ask questions you think you SHOULD ask. That is a waste of time.
Put together a survey in 10 minutes! Send an email and you have data the next day… then act on the data. That’s a poll!
One of the best ways to survey your list is to use this formula: what is your most important question about X? X, of course, whatever your theme. That’s the fastest and easiest way to get data from your market.
Different survey tools
Survey tools can be free, relatively inexpensive, or more expensive. The more expensive tools tend to be easier to analyze the results…that’s important to me. You have to use your judgment about what is most important to you and what fits your budget.
If you’re already using AWeber for your autoresponder system, you can take advantage of that business expense and make the system do double duty by running a survey. Use a web form and add a field to ask a question. Now you have a survey with no extra money! The downside is that responses can be cut off because there is a limited number of characters that can be entered in a given field. There’s no easy way to limit the number of characters a person types, so you could get a bunch of answers that are worthless because they’re cut off.
Survey Monkey is another free option…they have an upgraded option that you pay for which is quite cheap and much better. Check them out at surveymonkey.com. they are not the best searching surveys unless you learn how to modify them… but you can ask all kinds of different questions. The downside is that you can’t automatically put people into an autoresponder… which I like to do whenever possible for follow-up.
In my experience, the simplest and easiest way to set up a survey and analyze the data is through the Ask Database, which is one of Alex Mendozian’s brainchild. They have a stellar program for setting up a simple survey where people can type in their most important question about your topic… they type in their name and email and shabam go straight to the survey and answer your questions.