Using surveys on websites helps you, website owners, achieve several different goals. One of the main goals is, of course, increasing the volume of leads coming through your brand’s or business’s website. Besides generating a larger number of leads, surveys allow you to obtain relevant information from your website visitors, essentially gaining honest feedback regarding your audience’s preferences and collecting valuable data that can help you streamline your marketing efforts. In this article, we will go over ways to generate leads using surveys, but first, let’s review the benefits of using surveys:
Benefits of generating leads online using surveys
Online surveys allow you to get to know your potential audience more deeply and gain insights about them during the process of them leaving their contact details in your survey. Here are several advantages of generating leads online using surveys:
- Cost-effective – Surveys can be created on any budget, so any company or brand can use them.
- Flexible – You can update and change the questions in your surveys quickly and easily, and also control the target audience for a specific survey you want to create.
- High-quality information – You can ask potential buyers whatever you want. Therefore, you can get a lot of information regarding your business from visitors.
- Deeper understanding of leads – The answers provided by users answering the survey allow you to quickly assess their level of interest in your product or service, helping you know at which stage of your conversion funnel they should fit in.
- Quick results – A large amount of feedback can be obtained in a short time by placing surveys on a website. Results are processed automatically, so you can receive the required information immediately.
6 steps to generating leads online using surveys:
1. Define your goals
As with everything in digital marketing, the first step is knowing what you want to achieve, and then you can use surveys to reach your goals. Surveys can serve any of the following objectives: getting to know the respondent better to evaluate if he/she is a good fit for conversion, learning more about the habits and preferences of your visitors, introducing visitors to new products and services, measuring customer satisfaction, and more.
2. Choose the appropriate survey type
There are many options for creating surveys for your audience; here are some key examples:
- Consumer preferences survey – This type of survey is designed to elicit information from users regarding product viability, potential market size, target audience, or consumers’ advertising preferences.
- Product launch survey – This type of survey allows you to attract leads interested in a new product while validating your product idea. For example, you can discover which features and characteristics of the product your audience responds to best, what a reasonable and competitive price for the product would be, which elements could help you stand out from competitors, and other relevant information.
- Brand awareness survey – This type of survey is designed to measure how well your target audience knows your brand or the industry you operate in, and whether they are already familiar with your products or those of your competitors.
3. Create the survey questions
When creating surveys on your website, you must remember that the number of questions should be sufficient to understand the leads in depth, but not too many so as to discourage users from starting the survey due to an overwhelming number of questions. You need to make sure that the questions you choose align with the goals you defined and look for a balance between closed-ended questions (which make it easier to generate data) and open-ended questions (which provide more detailed information and deeper insights). Here are a few examples of questions:
- Do you usually buy this type of product?
- How much would you be willing to pay for such a product?
- Which characteristic or feature do you particularly like about this product?
- How many brands that sell such a product do you know?
- Have you seen advertisements from brands selling such a product in recent months?
- What do you think could significantly improve this product?
These types of questions will provide you with the relevant information you need to enter the market with your new product or service and generate relevant leads for the business to purchase the product even before you have started selling it.
4. Decide how the survey will be structured
Before you publish your survey to users, you need to understand how the survey will be structured and what direction it will take. You should define a persona, which is essentially a representation of your customer including information on demographics, lifestyle, and brand-related needs, and you can use a sample size calculator to see if your audience size is large enough to obtain representative data. Your survey should include a few short screening questions at the beginning to ensure that the respondent is part of your target audience and genuinely relevant to your product or service. If they are not, it is advisable to stop the survey midway (automatically, of course) or disregard and not factor in the answers of an irrelevant respondent.
5. Create and share the survey with users
After you have set the goals, defined the questions that matter to you, and built the survey, it’s time to distribute it to the most relevant audience. The first option for displaying the survey is on your website, which guarantees a high percentage of relevant survey participants. Alongside the website, you can also distribute the survey via your newsletter and through targeted paid advertising – using these traffic sources will help you reach the most relevant audience, allowing you to get high-quality survey responses that will improve and refine your product or service. You will achieve this result especially through paid advertising on Facebook or Google, as you can target precisely the relevant traffic. However, this action will cost you part of your advertising budget.
6. Manage leads and analyze performance
Every time a user encounters your survey and chooses to answer it, you should categorize them according to a lead scoring model that you have predefined. This will allow you to discard the lead, save the lead for a later date, or pass the lead to the sales team. Once you have a sufficient number of responses to the survey, you can start analyzing the results and users’ feedback to draw relevant conclusions and insights regarding your brand and the questions you presented in the survey.
In conclusion
There is a variety of advanced options for generating leads through a website. Using surveys is one of the favorite options for website owners because, in addition to the action of generating a new lead itself, surveys can also provide advanced insights from visitors about the brand, products, and general opinion among the audience. Define your survey’s goal, choose the appropriate survey type, create the questions, decide how the survey will be structured, share it with your audience, and perform an in-depth analysis after receiving feedback from customers.
About the author
Dvir Naaman, 27, a graduate of the Digital Marketing course at HackerU College. Experienced in building WordPress websites, paid advertising on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Specializes in organic search (SEO) at Fialkov Digital. Has rich experience in eCommerce and dropshipping, and is the owner of Merchant Center – a website that aggregates information on eCommerce systems and advanced marketing systems to increase business conversions, with an emphasis on sales in eCommerce stores.
