What makes a business fly? Some might say profitability, great products or excellent customer service. But I would argue the most important thing for any business is having ‘live customers’. Without them, nothing else matters!

Notice the all important word ‘live’. Most of us have what we like to call our customer database (some of us have several, but that’s another story). However, having 2000 names in a database does not mean you have 2000 ‘live customers’. You need to check for vital signs to establish that.

One of the easiest ways to take your customer's pulse is to use an email survey. This is simply a set of questions that customers access via an email.

The advantages of doing a survey this way are clear:

It’s cheap: no paper, no printing, no postage, no data entry of the results.

It’s fast: you can write your own survey and set up the technology in a fraction of the time taken to do an offline survey. Once you have sent it, the results start to come in within minutes and the majority of responses are in within 3 to 5 days.

It’s effective: An offline survey can expect up to 10% response rate. An online survey can expect up to 50% response rates.

Because the responses are stored as they come in, it’s easy to offer an incentive for completion of the survey. If you decide to use incentives, think clearly about what kind of response you want to reward. Do you want to reward every response within timeframe with a gift or reward every response with an entry into a prize draw?

If you are doing comprehensive market research then you would be well advised to use a variety of methodologies rather than relying on any one method. Email surveys, can be a useful way of asking your customers some simple questions or asking them for quick feedback-style comments. For more detailed information you should be looking at using focus groups and other more intensive methods.

However, for getting an indication of interest about a new product or service or some quick feedback, email surveys are hard to beat.

There are some limitations to be aware of. Unless you are very careful about selection criteria, your sample can easily be skewed. There are some groups who are more likely to respond to this kind of questioning than others e.g. early adopters and those with regular low cost interest access. You also need to be aware of the tendency to give false entries online. Some users are particularly cautious about giving any personal preference information online.

Perhaps the most important thing to watch out for is that by asking questions you are setting an expectation for change. If you ask about how your customer service could be improved, be prepared to make some (if not all) of the changes that your customers tell you they would like to see.

So, don’t hold back, start asking questions and find out if your customers are really alive and listening!

By Anna Curnow
Internet Strategist