If you are looking to gather information on customers or potential customers, there are a number of ways to gather specific data on or from your target market. Secondary research includes analyzing surveys or studies others have conducted on your demographic. If you want to hear something from the horse's mouth, however, you should consider one of the basic forms of primary research.
Conduct a phone survey using a pre-screened list of potential or current customers, or random dialing. Begin with one or two questions that qualify potential survey respondents. For example, if you are looking to survey people who make the decision for automobile repairs, your first or second question should be, "Do you make the decision where to take your car or truck when it needs repair or maintenance? If the answer is no, end the phone call. Stack your questions with the most important questions first so that if a person ends the call before the survey taker is finished, you will have gathered the most important information for your business. Phone surveys typically have a higher response rate than mail-in surveys, according to the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, but may generate less information, because most people will not stay on the phone for more than five minutes for a survey. The national Do Not Call Registry does not apply to phone surveys.
Conduct a mail survey using targeted a targeted list. You can use internal lists of previous and current customers, or purchase a list from a list broker or a trade group or association with members who are your potential clients. Mail surveys take longer to compile, as you wait for respondents to fill out and return their surveys, but you have the opportunity to show photos, drawing and charts, and ask more questions, because respondents will wait to fill out the survey when they have time. Add an opportunity to win a prize to increase the response rate of a marketing survey, which the Marshall School projects at anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent.
Conduct in-person, face-to-face surveys by intercepting people in high-traffic pedestrian areas, such as a mall or on a street corner. As with a phone survey, you will be able to ask fewer questions than with a mail-in survey, because people will not be as willing to spend more than five minutes answering questions when they are intercepted in public as they will in the privacy of their own home or at work. Instruct your survey takers to avoid a halo effect, or seeking out people like themselves to survey. An example would be college students stopping other young people to take the survey, or people of a particular gender or race intercepting a higher number of people of that race or gender than make up the general population of the area. Stack your questions in order of importance, as you did with your phone survey.
Conduct focus groups to gather more open-ended information. You can get a more in-depth analysis of a group of people and more data from them by using a focus group, which is a group of pre-screened customers or potential customers who agree to spend 30 minutes or more listening to a presentation and participating in a more free-form discussion with other members of the group. Focus groups allow you to gather more information through participants' volunteering of information, rather than limiting your collection of data to your pre-selected questions.
Conduct an online survey at your website, or at another site which has the target demographic from which you're seeking to gather data. Because online surveys are anonymous, you have no control over who responds, which can dilute the value of the information you gather. Online surveys are inexpensive because they require no survey takers and can aggregate your data into a searchable database instantly. If you are conducting a short survey or offering a prize for filling out the survey, you should consider preventing the same user from filling out multiple surveys by blocking users from a unique IP address--which allows your computer to identify another computer--from taking the survey more than once.
- Printed Surveys
- Mailing lists
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