How to conduct an online survey

Last week, I told you the secret to getting free information by conducting a survey. Today, I’ll tell you how I did it.

Mailing list
I already have a small list of about 150 people that organically signed up. This should give me pretty good results since it highly targeted. they opted in and gave me their email address because they want something from me.

FREE prize
As incentive for people to take the survey, I offered 2 prizes.

1) A never before released ebook of the 1st book on the Philippines with exclusive new content. This is worth at least $20.
2) 3 early entries to my program for the ones that provide the best feedback

I could’ve just offered the ebook or the entries but I’m a firm believer of over delivering to make an impact. I felt that if I just offered the FREE ebook, I wouldn’t get good quality answers because they may just run through the survey to get the prize. The early entry prize incentive would give me better answers. The great thing about the 2 prizes was that the didn’t really cost me much. The ebook was created in about 1 hour and the early entries are actually beta testers.

I blasted my network via my mailing list that consisted of:

Existing mailing list – 150
Facebook Baybayin page – 4.5K members
Facebook PinoyTattoos – 9.8K members
Personal Facebook – 1.2K friends

I wrote a posts about the survey along with the mechanics and prize info on 2 websites that also automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter.

Services used

Web form (survey) – FREE
Google docs is the best free service for surveys. When you create a survey form, it also inputs all the data in Excel so that you can easily manipulate and report. Don’t forget to uncheck “display” survey results on the confirmation page. If you leave it checked, it will display your survey data. Don’t check this if your collecting name, email addresses and other sensetive information.

Email list – FREE
I used Mailchimp because it’s FREE for up to 2k emails and you can plan everything ahead of time and schedule the emails. That means timed auto responders and follow-ups. Please note that I’ve since switched to Aweber. I’ll go over why in a future post. Feel free to reach out to me if your thinking of getting a mailing list service.

These two are optional

URL shortner – FREE
This is a URL shortening service from Goo.gl. It provides basic analytics about who clicked on the link. however, when I used it in Mailchimp, the URL was busted. I shouldn’t have used it in Mailchimp because they already provide their own tracking. It did come in handy to keep track of how many people downloaded the free prize.

Amazon AWS
Amazon AWS allows you to host your content on their servers for a small fee. Many companies use Amazon for their cheap data rates. You probably will not need to use this. If you already have a website, upload it there unless your exping a lot (thousands) to download your file. Otherwise you can just use Mediafire for FREE.

Here’s the communication flow I used:

Email sent > User clicks on the survey link > Survey is filled out > User submits > User is redirected to a “Thank you” page with the download link for the free prize. The end!

The secret to getting FREE information

The secret to getting all the FREE information you want is…….Just ask! Sounds simple but we don’t do it. The trick is how and what to ask. How to gather your data. What incentive to give.

I going to launch an online coaching program where I would teach the Filipino writing system. It’s a very small niche and since 40% of my site visitors are from the Philippines, it will be challenging to charge for access. I learned this since less than 1% of my art commission orders are from there. I have a few assumptions about what people need and how much i could charge but I need some hard data to guide my decisions.

One of the dumbest things businesses can do is launch something blindly. Just because you, your family and friends like it, doesn’t mean the public will. You need to ask your target market what they want. Be blunt and don’t assume anything. I’ve learned that assumptions can be expensive and a waste of time. Faith in your product or service isn’t enough. Better to find out people hate your idea before you go in to the production and marketing phase.

Before you do any survey, you will need to get people to actually take it. You should expect a 1-10% response rate, so the more people you contact to take the survey, the better. Aim for at least 100 people to invite. My goal was to get 100 people to take the survey.

If you don’t have an existing mailing list, get one started. Another great way to find these people are on Facebook and Twitter. Most of us have at least 100 friends. As them to share your survey. If you have a little budget, you can run a Google Adwords campain to buy traffic to your survey.

In my next post, I’ll go over the mechanics of my survey