Your customers’ opinions matter. In fact, they form the foundation on which you develop your products, services, and your brand. What they say, think and how they act directly affects your business growth and success. It’s crucial to regularly get their feedback to help guide all decisions and actions you take, from product development to marketing strategies you deploy. The easiest way to interact with your customers and get their input is to conduct a consumer survey.
What is a consumer market survey?
A consumer survey is a research tool consisting of a questionnaire used by businesses to collect customers’ thoughts, feelings, preferences, and feedback about company products, services, and experiences.
Using a consumer survey report, companies can gain better insight into customers’ current satisfaction levels with their products and services, their likelihood of recommending their brand to friends and family, and identify opportunities for development innovation.
When structured and utilized effectively, consumer surveys are an extremely useful research tool that can help businesses better understand their target audience, remain competitive in the market, and grow their revenue.
How many types of consumer surveys are there?
There are six different types of consumer surveys used by businesses for gathering customer feedback:
- Product surveys – used to gather consumer feedback and sentiment about a particular product or service, including likes, dislikes and whether or not they’d be likely to recommend it to someone else.
- Market research surveys – a survey used for product development that gathers data about market trends, competitor offerings, and customer interest, and preferences. This is especially useful for developing and refining products, as the consumer survey forecasting method directly gauges customer interest in potential new products and service offerings.
- Customer satisfaction surveys – measure customer satisfaction about a company’s brand and quality of service delivered, taking into account customers’ feedback on product quality and price, as well as service experience.
- Net promoter score surveys – measure consumer loyalty by asking customers to rate the likelihood of them recommending a business’s products and/or services to others, usually on a quantifiable scale of one to ten.
- Brand perception surveys – help organizations understand how familiar consumers are with their brand. The survey may ask customers questions about the brand’s visibility, credibility, and trustworthiness to gain a better understanding of the brand’s general perception by consumers.
- Demographic surveys – measure customer data like age, gender, education, and income. Customer demographics can help businesses better understand their target market and segment their customers into smaller groups for more personalized communications and product and service recommendations.
Surveys can be conducted via telephone, mobile device, on the internet (web-based), and traditional posted mail. Consumer survey questions tend to fall into four broad categories: psychographic, demographic, purchasing patterns, and consumer convenience.
Do consumer surveys work?
Consumer surveys, provided they’re well-structured and target the correct audience, can be very effective for collecting valuable consumer data, including feedback, ideas, and brand sentiment.
Proper planning is essential to creating a successful survey, which includes:
- Determining the survey’s objectives.
- Identifying what consumers or audience segment you’re trying to target.
- Choosing the best method or methods for the intended audience.
- Creating the survey questions.
- Designing and formatting the survey.
- Testing the survey with a smaller sample group and implementing any necessary changes.
- Distributing the survey among consumers.
- Analyzing the data collected in the survey for quality and relevance.
If you’re unsure of how to create a survey that best suits your customers, or don’t have the time, many consumer survey companies specialize in creating, measuring, and analyzing consumer surveys on behalf of businesses.
Top 5 Consumer Survey Trends in 2024
1. AI and machine learning
AI and machine learning capabilities can help to create tailored, personalized customer surveys at scale, and assist with data cleaning and interpretation. Using ML and NLP, AI can create a customer survey by adapting or generating specific questions that are relevant to that customer.
It can also design segmented surveys based on a target audience’s demographics, purchase history, and online behavior. AI can process and analyze large volumes of consumer feedback data to identify trends, patterns, and correlations, and flag potential risks, like extreme customer dissatisfaction, for easier next best steps.
2. Mobile optimization
Based on research from Statista, nearly 60% of global web traffic came from mobile devices in 2023. As more people use their smartphones to access the internet, making sure your surveys are mobile-friendly and accessible is crucial to reaching a wider audience.
Optimizing your surveys for mobile includes formatting the survey layout so it fits a mobile screen, avoiding open-ended or longer questions, and minimizing the use of images and videos which could create lag in loading speed time.
3. Mixed-mode surveys
Mixed-mode surveys use more than one format or mode to collect customer data and can incorporate mobile, face-to-face, telephone, and even video and audio recordings. Using more than one mode to collect customer data can help to overcome the limitations of one survey format that could impact the quality of customers’ responses and the data gathered.
For example, a consumer might not select a checkbox for a multiple-choice answer on a web survey, but give a direct answer over the phone or via video chat. Mixed-mode surveys can create more opportunities for nuance and comprehensiveness in consumer responses, which enriches the data quality collected.
4. Gamification
Gamification is the use of game-like elements and features in non-gaming environments to increase individual participation. Incorporating gamification into surveys, like earning points, tracking scores, earning rewards or vouchers, or winning something, can boost consumer participation because users feel they’re getting something back in exchange for taking part in the survey.
Invisibly, for instance, allows users to unlock access to premium news content in exchange for filling out online surveys on the platform. Gamification can increase response rates, decrease dropout rates, and improve the data quality you receive from your surveys.
5. Microsurveys
In the age of the attention economy, consumers have a shorter attention span and are more easily distracted, making it harder to win – and keep – their concentration for answering surveys. Microsurveys have emerged in response to this challenge as shorter, more concise surveys, aiming to capture very specific consumer data.
A microsurvey is a short-form survey consisting of 1-3 questions that allow businesses to collect consumer feedback quickly. They often enjoy higher response rates and better quality responses because they target very specific customer segments and their questions require concise, direct responses.
Make your surveys go further with help from Invisibly
Sometimes the challenge of consumer surveys isn’t so much design and development as it is deliverability and reach. Invisibly can help you expand your online brand presence and reach an even wider target audience beyond your existing platforms.
Invisibly is committed to building a better digital ecosystem for brands and people alike. We use Realtime Research – which relies on voluntary participation – to reduce bias and give you the most accurate results.
Partnering with Invisibly will grant you access to a wider net of users, providing high-quality zero-party data in their survey responses that you can leverage to power your business growth and innovation.
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