Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

More interaction with our readers is the order of the day today. Yesterday, I added a “skinny” opt-in form to my blog sidebar, and I’ll be tracking how well that does over time. But today, it’s time to get to know our readers a bit.

Tasks for Day 8:

• Create a survey using a free online tool
• Write message 4 to get survey submissions

Let’s go!

Create A Survey Using Survey Monkey

I’ll be creating my survey today using SurveyMonkey.com. There are other survey tools out there, but I continue to use Survey Monkey because a) I already have a bunch of live surveys there; and b) I haven’t tested the others out yet.

Before I get into the site though, it’s important that I take a moment to do some basic survey planning.

As a high school teacher, I had to get good at creating effective assessments. And doing surveys is like writing a good test, except you are the one getting graded instead of the student.

Surveys are also a good interactive tool with your subscribers. They give you feedback, and assuming you remember to look at the data, you make decisions that reflect what your subscribers want.

So of course, I open up my trusty Freemind mindmapping software and I come up with a list of goals, some questions, and eventually a link to a website I’d want to send them to when they’re finished with the questions.

Get Mindmap | Get Freemind

Since I’m not distributing this map, I keep it quick and simple. Writing the questions in Freemind also wouldn’t give me much advantage time wise. So I simply give myself a starter set of ideas to focus on.

Once inside Survey Monkey, I can use an existing survey (which I’m going to do to save time), or I can start from scratch.

Survey Monkey gives you about 10 different types of questions you can ask, but I typically choose from these 4:

• Multiple Choice Single Answer
• Multiple Choice Multiple Answer
• Matrix Of Choices One Answer Per Row
• Comment/Essaybox

I like the first 3 because I can ask for very specific answers, which is great for data collection and analysis. But the comments area is very informative because that’s where the survey takers can really let you know what’s on their mind.

Design Your Survey For Your Subscriber’s Experience

You don’t need to do anything flashy with your design, but you should think about the psychology of doing surveys when you organize your questions.

By the way, in pure Take Action Revise Later style, you can write your questions as they come to you, and then later shuffle them in the order that makes most sense.

I recommend you start your survey with a couple of really easy questions that take 5 seconds to answer. Get them into a groove.

For my survey, I’m asking them 2 questions on the first page:

• What is their relationship to my training now
• How long have they been learning from me

On page 2, I ask them about their own background. These are questions involving their gender, age, current employment status, current income, desired income from business, and their business focus (service, product, MLM, etc.). For the age question, I’ve decided instead of asking them how old they are, I’ll get the decade they’re born in. This way, I don’t have to lump people who are in the low end of a bracket with those that are much older than them. I never like that on surveys myself, so the decade thing seems less aggravating.

On page 3, I’m asking specifically about business wants and needs. Using a list of areas I help entrepreneurs the most, I’m asking them to label each area as a big need now, a future need, no need for them, and a strength of theirs. This is giving me information to base future decisions on, while simultaneously letting them know all the areas I can help them.

I then ask them what weaknesses they’ve identified in areas like time management, having entrepreneurial ADD, etc. And I give them a few questions that are open ended (essay/text box) for their deeper thoughts.

It’s important to note this is on page 3 (out of 4 survey pages) because it’s the one that will take the longest to complete. But they’ll see on the survey status bar that they are most of the way done. They also answered the other 2 pages rather quickly, so they’re in that groove.

What I don’t want is to overload them with too much to write, so I do make these questions optional.

On page 4, I ask them to tell me which of my products have they already experienced as a free or paid member. Again, this helps me know who’s on the list, but also let’s them know my list of training that’s available. And since I’ll be sending them to my IM Success Library after the survey, they’ll be happy to see that all that training is in one place.

I also ask them to tell me which program of mine is their favorite (if they’ve used my stuff before), and a final question of the types of things they’d like to see from me in the future. This is tailored to find out the formats they want more than the specific lessons (which I’ll get from page 3).

The final page is a thank you page, and let’s them know I appreciate their time and answers. It also let’s them know they’ll be sent to free stuff from me. Right now, this is the IM Success Library (remember – this is my primary promotional goal with this list); but later I might make something more specific for them to download as a thank you.

Design Your Survey With Statistics In Mind

Don’t ask too many open ended questions, or your survey analysis will be the same as reading a bunch of blog comments.

Use the multiple choice and matrix formats to give you specific results that can be graphed or charted for clear analysis.

Also, use the Randomize answer choices (or rows), and use random, not alphabetical for any question that involves a thoughtful choice. This will protect your statistics from first answer biases that can exist, especially in later questions when your takers are a bit fatigued.

Try to keep your answer choices about the same length as each other. Use the same capitalization styles, and subject/verb agreements. This may all sound picky, but you want accurate results from your surveys and not results swayed by grammatical or visual influences.

Write Message 4 And Link To The Survey

Once the survey is done, I’m ready to write message 4. Why message 4 and not earlier or later?

I assume that people that join my list will do some initial self-selection during the first 10 days or so. If they don’t like what they see from the first few messages, they’ll have unsubscribed or stopped opening by message 4. This way, I get people who are more connected to me actually taking the survey.

On the flip side, I don’t want to wait too long to do a survey because I miss out on the power of getting their responses and then doing something with that information.

So it’s message 4, and it asks them to do me a favor by completing the survey. Pretty short and sweet.

I add the {!signature} field code (we’ll talk about that on Day 9 this week), and set the time to go out 3 days after message 3 (as I mapped out in my original first 10 map).

Now in the message I need to link to the survey. Survey Monkey gives me this really long ugly link that could break onto two lines in some email readers. So I make a redirect for it instead. You can use cPanel to make redirects if you want. But I’m going to use my Blogi360 system to do the redirect instead.

Instead of a link that looks like:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=hlH5nfWuwuKhfdVfndMrSA_3d_3d

I get one that looks like:

http://AskBobTheTeacher.com/about-you.php

In an email, that will be much more likely to get clicked on for sure (and actually work when it’s clicked).

With my survey ready to go out to all my subscribers in message 4, I simply need to wait a couple of weeks for me to have enough data to make some informed decisions. In the mean time, I can enjoy the comments they submit on the open-ended questions.

Final Tips On Surveys

Try not to go too crazy with your survey. Keep your questions simple, and avoid unnecessary jargon or complicated language. You want it to be finished in under 10 minutes unless they’ve chosen to go crazy on their answers.

Also, remember that you can change some parts of this survey or create new ones in the future. So don’t stress too much about getting it perfect. But you don’t want to do some spell-check and maybe run it past some folks on Twitter before you forget about it for a while.

That’s all for today!

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Tomorrow, we’ll set up a split test on the opt-in form. Short and sweet, but very powerful!

p.p.s. Feel free to look at my finished survey. But if you answer the questions, please do so sincerely! I’m using this survey for my future marketing beyond this 30 Day Challenge!

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