When you’re planning market research, chances are you tend to think about things like market statistics and general market reports. You may look up demographic data online or research effective marketing strategies. But why not use your most valuable marketing asset: your customers themselves?

Surveying your customers can help your brand grow and thrive. Read on to discover all the great reasons you need to ask your customers what they think about your business.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

One of the biggest benefits of surveying your customers is that you’ll get information about what’s working well for them and what isn’t. You can find out about any problems they may have had and what you can do to make things right. You can also discover what you’ve done that’s made them happy or impressed them.

With this data in hand, you can start working to improve your overall customer satisfaction levels. Without surveys, you’ll be flying blind, trying to guess what your customers like and how they’re feeling about your company. Once you get your survey results back, you’ll know exactly where you stand in your customers’ minds and how to improve their satisfaction levels.

Market More Effectively

When you get ready to start a new marketing campaign, do you work off of what you think your customers will like? Do you use generic data for your target demographic that you found online? Or do you use feedback directly from your customers about the best ways to reach them and earn their business?

Obviously, using the last method will be the most effective way to grow your business and keep your customers coming back for more. After you send out a survey, you can discover exactly which campaigns worked and which ones didn’t. This will empower you to make smarter choices for your future marketing campaigns and invest your money more effectively.

Understand How Your Customers Buy

Even if you have all the proper marketing in place, if your customers can’t easily make a purchase, they won’t come back to your business. Every group of people buys a little differently, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some people may be eager to get back into stores, while others may feel safer sticking with online ordering or curbside pickup.

You can’t know what will work best for your customers until you talk to them about it. Sending out surveys about how they buy will let you know which areas to focus on more and which you can phase out. You’ll also discover when you should send out your marketing campaigns to garner the most attention from your leads and customers.

Give Customers What They Want

When you’re planning new products and services, you can make some decisions based on past experience. You know that one product did well and another didn’t, so you can avoid making similar products to the failed one in the future. But how do you know what your customers are looking for if you don’t ask them?

You don’t have to guess which products will play well with your customers; you can ask. Oftentimes, you may discover that your customers have ideas you’d never even have considered. While not all of these brainstorms may be feasible, you can work to create similar versions of new products based on these suggestions.

Learn What Turns Customers Off

Have you ever lost a lead or a customer and had no idea where you went wrong? Sometimes, customers may leave for personal reasons – their budget changed, they moved cities, or they no longer needed your products or services. But many times, there may be something you can do to prevent these losses before they happen.

Sending out customer surveys can help you discover what’s causing your customers to take their money elsewhere. You can figure out if there are pain points you aren’t addressing and prevent negative experiences for future customers. You might even be able to win some of your old customers back if they see you’re actively working to improve.

Improve Your Customer Segmentation

When you’re planning marketing campaigns, it’s a good idea to segment your customers into different groups. This allows you to target your marketing a little more so each customer receives a more personalized experience. Surveying your customers can help you segment them more accurately and using a variety of factors.

When you send out surveys to your customers, ask for some basic information like age, gender, marital status, and income. You can also segment by customers who buy more often in the mornings, afternoons, or evenings. Get creative with your segmentations, and create marketing campaigns tailored to those customers.

Strengthen Customer Relationships

One of the best reasons to survey your customers is that it helps to strengthen your relationships with them. In today’s world of mass marketing and faceless automation, customers want to know that you care about them. They want to work with brands focused on providing them the best possible experience.

When you send out surveys, you’re actively showing customers you care about what they have to say. You’re asking for their opinion and using their feedback to improve. Not only will you be able to better meet their needs and expectations, but they’ll see that you’re working to engage with them, which will help your brand a ton.

Connect Better

Customer surveys are about more than just collecting data, although that is very important, too. These surveys can help shape your marketing campaigns and even product development efforts. And they show your customers that you care about making sure your company is serving them to the best of your ability.

If you’d like to learn to better connect with your customers, check out the rest of our site at Vertical Response Marketing. We provide easy email marketing to help you communicate with your customers. Start your free trial today and get all the tools you need to run a successful email marketing campaign.

© 2021, Chris Duncan. All rights reserved.