Podcast Transcript:
It can be one thing to understand the power of using a strategy like sending out surveys, or getting feedback from your audience. But it is an absolute game changer when you actually have a strategy for how you’re going to do it, how you incorporate that into your course, or content, or email campaigns that your clients and prospects are receiving and how to do that strategically and effectively is the most important step. So if you want to know more about automated surveys to your audience, this episode’s for you.
Hey there, I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur, and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode, you’ll get real world practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
Hi there. I’m Jillian Kendrick, host of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m so excited to have you today and we are talking about surveys, specifically automated surveys, how to use them, what to do when to send them. What are you gonna look for? What do you need? What are some really important red flags to watch out for? And how do you utilize surveys most effectively in your business to get the feedback that you need to provide additional courses, content, sales opportunities to and better value you to your audience.
But before we dive into that, hit that plus button or subscribe button so that you get the latest episode downloaded to your phone automatically.
Now, when it comes to sending out surveys or getting feedback from your audience, this is literally an absolute game changer. This is one of the best ways that you can get actual first hand immediate real feedback from your audience or from your leads, your list, your subscribers. So that you know what to do next, right? This is an opportunity for you to figure out. OK, what content do I create next? What do they need? What do they want, what are they looking for? What’s happening? What do they like? What do they not like? Maybe survey more about them? Maybe you’re trying to dig deeper into your customer avatar and you want to know more about the people that follow you so that you can decide. Is this the audience? That’s right for me, is this who I want to serve and you need to know some more information about them besides just demographics. So surveys are a great way to do that. And a couple of the ways that you can send survey, obviously, you can run ads to that. But the cheap way to do that is you can post a video on YouTube on Instagram, on Facebook, on linkedin, on TikTok, on Twitter. You can post the link to your survey or even just ask the question. Hey, what do you think about this? Hey, do you want more of that? You could send an email? You could send an SMS, you could text your entire list, you could text one individual, you could text a group of individuals that are at a certain point in maybe your course or your content. There’s all sorts of opportunities and places where you can survey your audience and to do it strategically and methodically is really, really important.
So let’s get into what that might look like for you: sending a survey before, during and after a course is a great thing to do. So I love sending surveys before a course because it puts people in the mindset of like, OK, where am I? What do I want to really achieve? How do I feel like I’m accomplishing something?
Because I don’t know if you’re like me, but for me, it’s so easy to just kind of put my head down, get the work done and not realize that I’ve gone from A to B oh, I’ve accomplished something, I’ve moved the needle forward. But without recognizing and kind of documenting that starting point, it’s easy to forget how far you might have come. So I like to send a survey before one of my courses if it’s appropriate so that you can document and get in that mindset. But then that also gives me feedback of, OK, the people that are taking this particular course, they are at this specific starting point, you know, Maybe they have a list of so many or they don’t have a list and that’s why they’re taking my List Building course or they’re interested in the Mastermind because they want to accomplish, you know, XYZ, that really helps me with my messaging and my marketing. So like I can target more of those people. Second surveying during a course or during a program. This is a temperature check. You want to get a feel for where they’re at, how they’re feeling about everything, but you don’t want to have to wait until the end of the course or the end of the program, the end of the product. You want to give them the opportunity that they don’t even know that they want yet to give you feedback. I’ve always said this before and this is absolutely true. This is something that we utilize in our agency. Huge tip for you. If you run an agency or have a service based business, don’t survey or ask for a testimonial after the work is complete. On board, the client, get them some kind of a quick win, something amazing that they like that they see a return on their investment that reinvigorates their excitement about the product or the project or working with you. And that gives them some kind of a win that makes them feel good and confident about their decision to work with you. But then ask for the testimonial, then send them the survey because if you wait until the project is done, well, the project could go south and then they’re pissed off and then they don’t want to work with you. And after you’ve made them mad, they’re not gonna want to give you positive feedback, they’re not gonna wanna continue to work with you or tell their friends about you. So the best time, especially if you have a service based business and especially if you work with people long term, surveying them immediately after onboarding and getting them a quick win is really the best time to do it. That’s when to survey. That’s when to ask for testimonials. Trust me. It took me a decade to learn that the wrong way.
And let’s talk about the mechanics of a survey real quick. You don’t have to make this overly complex. A survey can be one single question. A survey can be four or five questions and a survey can be 100 questions. Although personally speaking, I don’t think I would want to take a 100 question survey unless it was something fun like a Myers Briggs test. Or something that I like got value out of at the end of it. But just be very aware that you don’t have to have more than one question in order to legitimize the fact that you are surveying your audience or your subscribers, your listeners. So if you have a one question survey, a five question survey or a 30 question survey, it is still a survey. It is still going to provide you good solid feedback. As long as you’re writing those questions correctly, we’ll talk about that in just a second. But as far as the mechanics, the structure, the even the tech that you might need in order to send out a survey, it can be as simple as a one question, text message that you send out to a client. It can be a one question email. You could create a form if you have the ability within your automation platform or your CRM. If you don’t have one of those, let me know, I have an amazing one that we love and that we utilize in our business. But you could create a form that asks them a couple of quick questions and that gets stored and saved into your database. You could send them a Google form. You could go as far as to pay for something like Surveymonkey and utilize a more robust platform that way if it was right for you, right? If that made sense financially and you needed to do that. You totally could, but you can send an email, you can send a text message you could even send if you really wanted to. You could do snail mail, right? You could totally add like a return addressed envelope, or have like a bitlink inside of that letter that would connect them to like a video or a survey where they could post their response. That’s totally fine. You could post a video on your linkedin or your tiktok or your Instagram that says, hey, I really need feedback on this thing. Comment below and tell me what you think. That’s a survey too. Totally works. You don’t have to overcomplicate it. Another type of survey that I love using is an application to join. So if you have like a high end coaching program, a mastermind if people apply or qualify in order to work with you, having an application process is a really great way to again utilize a survey because you’re figuring out where they are right now, you’re going to extract from them some marketing language that you can utilize moving forward for other marketing, other campaigns, figuring out your avatar. It’s an amazing strategy that I really, really love using.
Now, here are a few key things that you want to keep in mind when it comes to creating your surveys, figuring out what to ask, what to do, what platform to use.
How do you want to send it et cetera. Number one, the very first thing you want to do, first and foremost, don’t take any other steps before you complete this one.
You need to write out and figure out what is your outcome or the result that you want to achieve or understand before you send anything out. So this is so important.
What am I trying to do? What am I trying to understand? What do I want to see when this survey comes back to me? I want to be empowered with the knowledge to, to do what to make changes to your course, to update your pricing, to understand more about your avatar and your ideal audience, right? Like what, what is the outcome and the desire that you have? What is the information that you want to learn from receiving feedback from this survey and then let that result or that thing that you’re trying to achieve be the guiding light and the guiding principle that you base all of your questions. Everything else that comes after this is going to serve that end result that you’re looking for next, be as specific as possible when you’re asking questions. I absolutely hate getting a survey and it says, well, did you like this?
Yes or no? OK. Why did you not like it? Yes or no. Now, I will say I have definitely seen I’ve definitely filled out and I have definitely sent some surveys with vague language and the vague language was written because we wanted to kind of open up the door for anybody to give any feedback that they felt was necessary. But if we go back to understanding our desired outcome, knowing exactly what we want to achieve or the information that we want to get from this survey, then I really believe that specific questions are the best way to go. But for your very first survey, you might not know what you need. You might not know where your holes are, where your gaps are, what you need to be conscious of. So more vague questions, more open ended questions could be a great way for you to start and then you can get more specific as you move forward. I would also say, do your best to try and not ask only yes or no questions. And I would really avoid like a 10 point scale five point scale type thing. I would keep it to a three point scale either unhappy, you know, neutral or happy about it or a yes a OK or a no type of scale. When you get into five point scales and 10 point scales, there’s plenty of science and data and psychology and stuff that can back up why those are important. And I’m not saying not to ever do them. But if you can just keep it as simple as possible, think about it, not from a statistics mindset, but just from a marketing mindset, you’re trying to improve something or you’re trying to achieve a certain goal, figure out what the easiest way to do that is the barrier to entry should be shorter. There’s been plenty of times that I’ve seen 10 point scales and thought, ok, if I have to sit here and really think through whether I thought something was a 10 out of 10 or a nine out of 10 or an eight out of a 10 or, and why? Well, that to me as the taker of that survey feels very arduous, like I don’t want to do that, but there could be instances where it’s totally appropriate. So figure out what that means for you.
Next, I would say, always give an opportunity for them to add comments wherever they want. So there was this one time that my husband and I went on a tour and afterwards, of course, they ask you to fill out a survey or, you know, leave us some feedback and we had an overall great experience. But there was one specific thing that I wanted to bring to the attention of, you know, the managers or the company owner, whatever it was. And so I went and took their survey and I’m going through their survey thinking, ok, at the end, maybe it’ll ask me for additional comments or it’ll give me an email address or a phone number of where I can provide my feedback. But instead the whole survey was, please tell us that we’re amazing and we’re great and you loved every minute of it. And ok, thanks. Bye. And I was really disappointed to see in the survey that there was nowhere for negative feedback. There was nowhere that they seemed open to the idea of wanting to grow.
And sometimes the only way to grow, the only way to, to know what to do next is to get some of that negative feedback. So I would say of course, when you read it, take it with a grain of salt, understand that some people are just coming from a bad place or they’re, you know, they’re coming from a hurt place and that’s all right.
But always in my opinion, leave a place for comments or for any additional feedback, you could get some really great testimonials out of that. You could find things or get feedback that’s totally glaring, but that you wouldn’t have found out otherwise. Or if you find that it’s just really negative or you find out that it’s not valuable to you, then maybe you can get rid of it. But truly, I believe in always having a place for comments.
Next, a strategy I like to utilize when I’m finished with a survey is the submit button or next action step for that survey should be that it takes them to leave a review or a testimonial or it takes them to that place where they can leave an additional feedback. So that’s just an extra step. Imagine, in your sales funnel, you have a freebie or an opt in and then you have an Upsell. This is your survey Upsell so to speak. This is a place where you can say, hey, if you had a great experience with us and you wanna leave feedback or you want to leave us a great testimonial, we would appreciate that so much. Click here to do that, right. Maybe 10%, maybe 2% of people will take you up on it. But just think that’s a few more testimonials that you wouldn’t have. Otherwise, just like in your Upsell, not everybody is going to take the Upsell in your funnel. Not everybody is going to opt in to your $7 thing or whatever it is. But it’s just a few more that you wouldn’t have had in the bag.
Otherwise when you’re writing out your questions and figuring out what to ask, I want you to write from a negative and from a positive perspective. I love taking the Myers Briggs test, the engrams, the love language tests. And when you look through those, a lot of them, if you’re like me and you take a lot of them because I do that for fun because I’m a nerd. But when you take these, it’s really interesting to see that they have a lot of repeated patterns that they ask the same questions over and over and over and over over again, they just use different language or different words or they say them from a different perspective, maybe they’ll say them from a positive perspective or a negative perspective. I love looking at that and just figuring out the psychology behind, OK, if they say it from a negative perspective, somebody can have this kind of reaction. But if you say it from a positive perspective, somebody can have that kind of reaction. And how cool is that like? Is, is that the reaction that I’m trying to invoke when I’m asking these questions in my survey and mix it up? Every single question doesn’t have to be. Did you like this specific thing? Did you not like this specific thing? Right? You can totally mix it up because it makes it more interesting for your reader and makes it more, more engaging for that person who is completing the survey.
Next thing I want you to think about is your ability to reward the survey taker for their time. I’ve been in a couple of programs or masterminds and I think this is absolutely brilliant rather than just saying, hey, it would be great if you guys get any benefit out of this course or program, if you want to, you know, give us your testimonial, that would be awesome. That’s perfectly fine and totally acceptable. But another great thing to do is to say like, hey, at the end of the program, we’re going to give away a free coaching call or, $100 Amazon gift certificate or something. Right. And if you submit your testimonials throughout the course of the program, then you’re entered in to possibly win this thing that’s enticing. I think we’re all much more likely to spend our time and give our feedback if we know that we’re going to get something and be rewarded for it. So, maybe you give them a coupon code for completing a survey. Maybe you enter them into a raffle to win something to complete the survey. Maybe the survey has to be something that they complete at the end of the course in order to receive credit for having taken the course or receive like a certificate for taking the course, whatever that might look like for you. If you can create some kind of reciprocity and reward system, I think you’re so much more likely to get more responses if you can reward them for their time.
And then of course, in my opinion, I love automation. I would automate everything in my life if I could. But you want to automate as much of the survey, sending and receiving and taking as you possibly can throughout different steps along like the life cycle or lifetime of that customer so that they’re getting surveys for different things and they get more used to it. It’s not just a one day, a random survey pops up and then they never see another survey again. Or they never hear a response to that feedback. But if you’re surveying them regularly throughout the course of their time with you or throughout the course of them being client or them being a student of yours or a subscriber, I think you’re more likely to get that feedback because you’ve gotten them into the habit of seeing you request feedback and information and sending out surveys. So I think you’re more likely to get more positive interaction in that way. But when you can automate it as well, then you’re going to be getting consistent feedback throughout the lifetime of that customer. And as long as they stay with you and, and you’re kind of trained their brain that OK, at some point, Jillian is going to survey me again and I’m gonna be ready with my comments. I know that when I am in a program or if I buy a product and I turn over the label on that product and I don’t see any questions, call this 800 number or for feedback, visit us at Blah, Blah, Blah website. I get really, really concerned as a consumer or just how serious the company is taking, how their client, how their customers interact with their product or service and how much it actually means to them. If a company wants to be around long term, they’re going to have a mechanism for receiving that feedback. If a company is just trying to earn quick cash and turn and burn. Then there is going to be no mechanism that to me is a huge red flag.
I made a really good point that I want to touch on real quick is following up with the feedback with that survey. There have been a couple of times that I have filled out surveys and then have gotten an email response from the business owner. I cannot tell you like it genuinely warms my heart. So if you have an opportunity to immediately get, like, a notification email with the survey filled out with the responses and then not automatically but manually go in and maybe you can do it automatically. That’s fine too. But a manual email responding saying, hey, Bob, hey Danielle, thank you so much for taking a minute to complete this survey.
It really means the world to me and your feedback is genuinely going to help change lives and change our business and the way that we show up for our clients, even just something so simple and heartfelt is really going to go a long way with building that like know and trust with your audience and to the point again about making it worth their time or rewarding them for their time.
I want to give you an example. So occasionally when I’m bored, I have a little game that I like to play on my phone. I was so impressed when I was playing this game and then it popped up. And said, hey, if you complete this survey, you’ll earn five diamonds or five credits. But I was so impressed as a marketer, my marketer hat went on immediately and I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so brilliant because they’re enticing people to complete the survey. They are strategically sending out that survey at a time when I need more of those credits to help advance my little, like, village or city. I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so brilliant. I love that. So of course, I want to earn the credits. Of course, I want to get the reward. So I filled out the survey and then of course, my market or brain goes on immediately. And I’m like, how did they do this? And what do they do for that? As soon as I filled out the survey, I got the credits or the rewards immediately, which felt so so good. And I’ve continued to play that game as a result of that. I was so impressed with them and they continue to send out more surveys, so brilliant. So they’re training me, they’re training their users to expect to get these surveys. I thought it was so brilliant.
The last thing that I want to mention is when it comes to sending surveys, don’t ask too soon or too late. If you, whether you’re a service based business or you have a product or whatever, you sell your course. If somebody buys a product from you and you send them a survey asking them how their experience was before they even receive the product. Well, that’s a glaring obvious example of sending it way too soon. You want to give them time, give them an opportunity to receive that product. To use it in their daily life or in their business or in their family or whatever it is. So figure out what that timeline might be and just understand about not sending a survey too early or too soon in the buying process. But then you also don’t want to ask or send it too late. I did a launch back in September. It went pretty well when I was in the process of fulfilling on that. I had a one on one call with a brand new client of mine and it was great. We had an amazing call. We mapped out her entire funnel. We had so much fun together. We were chit chatting. She had a great business, a great model. And at the end, I was so disappointed I even did it over zoom and I, myself to this day because I didn’t think to stop and hit the record button and say, ok, now we’ve had such a good time together. I really enjoyed getting to know you and your business. I think it’s awesome. I think you’re totally on the right track. I would love to get a testimonial from you as to, like, how you felt about our time together today. And would you recommend other people do this thing that I launched? The reason that I had asked her to do that was because at the end, I was like, how did you think that this went, how do you feel about our time together today? And she was like, oh, it was amazing. I had such a good time now. I know exactly what to do in my business and I have a strategic plan. This is perfect. This is exactly what I needed. And I kicked myself and was like, gosh, I should have recorded that. Why didn’t I hit the record button on Zoom? I was so mad. So then I asked her if she wouldn’t mind, like writing that out in a testimonial and she could email it to me and she’s like, yeah, as soon as we hang up the phone, I’ll definitely get to that. And I was like, ok, cool, perfect. What I should have done because I ask too late and let me tell you when they hang up the phone, it’s already too late.The second they hang up the phone or they close out of Zoom or they exit your website or they exit the survey or whatever it is, their mind resets and they’re already on to the next thing. What’s the next fire I have to put out? What do I have to do next? What’s my next meeting and so on they’re not thinking about me and giving me a testimonial. They’re thinking about themselves and their own business as they should. That’s totally OK. What would have been smart to do is to say, hey, I’m gonna hit record on Zoom and if it’s OK with you, I would love to record your testimonial right now while we’re still together to, you know, just give you an opportunity to give feedback from a fresh perspective So we can just do it right now and then you don’t have to do it later or I don’t have to bug you about asking for it or something. So that would have been the smart thing to do, which I did not do so, please do, as I say, not as I have done.
And that is it for our topic today.
Key points for automating your surveys, be specific as possible. Don’t ask only yes or no questions, leave a place for comments and feedback, send an email, text message, survey, ask questions from both a negative and positive perspective, decide on your desired outcome and let that be the guiding light for how you word all of your questions throughout the survey. Continue to survey on a regular basis so that you get your audience accustomed to and trained to receiving surveys and filling them out from you. Reward them for their time. Don’t ask too soon or too late and automate it at different steps throughout the buying journey, or within the lifespan of that customer, everything from a one question, two question, a Surveymonkey and email a text message or even an application can be a survey and can help give you feedback for what you need inside of your business. Now, thanks so much for joining me on this episode today of the Momentum Marketing podcast. If listening to this has brought you value and improved your life or given you insight to help you build your own momentum in your business, please like it and share it with your friend.
I will see you on the next one.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: #7
Topic: Gathering Feedback though Automated Surveys
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
