@MarketingForYou I often hear clients wonder aloud, “What do customers want?” My answer is simply, “Ask them.” Believe me, customers are not shy about giving you their opinions. If you ask, they will tell you the good and the bad points about your business.

Getting new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining existing customers, so time and money spent finding out how to satisfy and even delight your existing customers is certainly well spent. It can pay off tremendously by helping you increase your sales.

Whether you use a traditional written survey or an online survey, the methods of ensuring that you get useful information are the same. Below are tips to ensure that your survey is successful:

1) People are busy, so an effective way to give them a reason to take the time to fill out a survey is to offer some kind of reward for completion. You could offer a coupon for a discount on a future purchase, a gift certificate, or a sweepstakes entry for a bigger prize.

2) Make your survey questions clear and concise because the longer your survey is, the less likely people will take the time to complete it.

3) Make sure you can use the information you get. You not only want to know how your business rates, but why. Knowing about customer approval or disapproval without knowing specifically why customers feel that way won’t help you make the necessary changes.

4) At the end of your survey, have a few blank lines where people can give any comments about issues you may not have asked about in the survey questions. This section of the survey can often be the most revealing because you will learn about unexpected problem areas you can correct.