Online Surveys, Part 2: Pump Up Your Results Using Online Surveys

Need to take your target market's pulse? As we mentioned in Part 1, online surveys give marketing professionals a fast, easy, and effective tool for finding out what makes their audience tick.

Here's an illuminating case study that came our way. It proves great marketing research can be done on a small budget.

Membership Survey Yields 47.4 Percent Response

"We wanted to provide our membership with a great experience from day one," says University of North Carolina Wellness Center Executive Director Bob Stedman about the survey sent prior to the opening of UNC's Wellness Center at Meadowmont.

"We chose an online survey over a traditional mail version because of the cost savings, the fast execution, and the likelihood for a much higher response rate," Lynne Cole, director of sales and marketing, told us.

The online survey was sent to 90 percent of members (800-plus people) who had agreed to receive e-mail from the Wellness Center. It included over 20 questions intended to help gauge staffing requirements for peak hours and determine what activities to put into place. Customer-service questions asked how the member would prefer to be addressed (formally or by first name or nickname) and what kind of music they like.

What is great about the survey is the questions were phrased in such a way respondents could clearly tell their answers would enhance their experience of the Wellness Center. Anyone who answered the survey by deadline was entered into a drawing for a free warm-up suit, aerobic shoes, or gym bag -- great incentives for people embarking on a new fitness experience.

The Wellness Center used an online survey and also distributed a paper-based survey via traditional mail to members who had not provided e-mail addresses.

With expectations of a 10-15 percent response rate, the Wellness Center instead saw a whopping 47.4 percent response rate for the online survey. Unlike traditional mail surveys, which can take a month or longer to complete, the online results were collected over one week. The majority were completed and returned in the first 72 hours. Results could be viewed in real time via an online tracking report.

Total cost for the online based survey was less than 50% of the budgeted amount.

That doesn't take into consideration traditionally low response rates for paper surveys. A cost-per-response metric highlights this point. The online based responses cost approximately $4 each, while traditional mail responses (assuming a 10 percent response rate) would have cost $40-$60 per response.

The immediacy of the survey results gave the Wellness Center the ability to allocate staffing and resources before opening the facility. Management could forecast peak hours, whether water aerobics would be more popular than yoga, and what kind of instructors they needed to hire. The online survey helped the Wellness Center save even more money by providing marketing intelligence needed to optimize resources.

"For organizations like ours, there is a great opportunity to streamline business processes -- including surveying customers -- by utilizing the power of online surveys," Bob told us, "This was our first foray into online-based surveys, and we found it to be a straight-forward and efficient process."