Use Surveys To Boost Your B2C Marketing

Do you find yourself constantly second-guessing what your customers may want or need? Do you know what subtle details may be the key in securing a conversion? Do you wonder what strategy is the best to employ for a particular prospect?

If your answer to any of these questions was coloured with even the subtlest shade of doubt then you should definitely consider using surveys to sharpen and improve your marketing efforts.

A SURVEY SHOULD BE YOUR FIRST ACTION

Depending on the product / service you sell, running B2C lead generation campaigns can be a long game. Often, generating the lead is simply the first step in a longer process towards eventual conversion. Whilst the work after this point may be primarily down to the Sales Team (more on this later), one of the most useful things we can do as marketers is establish a system to nurture prospects and kindle engagement. With that idea in mind, a survey may be viewed as your gasoline.

Again, the product / service you sell my dictate the effectiveness of the survey to a degree, but assuming the lead you have generated is qualified and interested - but is yet to convert - then getting all the information required to make a sale can be gleaned from the answers to a survey at the start of the journey. If, for example, you’re selling a multi-faceted service / SaaS, then knowing which particular aspects of your service the lead is interested in can vastly reduce wasted time and allow you to tailor your message to address the very thing that may lead to a conversion. I use this as a hypothetical, but the great thing about using surveys as part of your B2C Lead Gen and Marketing Campaigns is that you can create bespoke questions to give you the exact insights required to make a sale.

In this sense, sending a survey should be your first action. All that is required is an explanatory note in the email saying something along the lines of “Give us 2 minutes of your time to learn more and we will customise all our content and only send things that we’re sure will really benefit you.” From my own experience, the CTR on this is really high as people, especially shortly after submitting their details, are receptive to and appreciative of this offer.

From this point, assuming you have used your survey to retrieve the necessary information about a lead, everything you send should be a Reaction to the responses you have generated.

A survey is a great way to separate your leads into the correct marketing funnels. After all, you now know what may interest them and what not to waste time on. Depending on the depth of your survey and the resources you have available, you can now create bespoke marketing funnels, tailored to the lead in question, and ensure you send them the content to keep engagement high.

This is also a great opportunity to save time and money by qualifying leads to an even sharper degree and in essence begin a form of manual lead scoring to work out where best to spend your time and resources.

(NB: For more on lead scoring through machine learning, check out out guide here).

FUNNELS AND THE LONG GAME

We all know the end game, but again it is worth remembering that when it comes to Marketing Leads a long game is often required before eventual conversion. With that in mind, placing leads into the correct funnels at the onset of the journey is a great way to reap rewards later on and be confident you are sending prospects on the correct journey. It as this point I introduce Databowl’s automated Email and SMS Marketing tools which allow you to send out the correct message to the correct prospect and further fan the flames of interest and engagement whilst also saving you time.

THE TRUE COST OF INCENTIVES

It is worth considering the relative ratio of spend on lead generation in the first instance versus spend after the lead has first been generated. Generally, most companies favour a split which focuses upon bringing the leads in, with very little spent after the fact.

Again, this largely works on an individual basis, but I raise the question of why we do this? Why are we willing to spend far more on ads in the hope of generating leads than we are on incentivising and engaging the leads we have? This pertains to a larger question (which I will aim to answer in a separate blog), but it is worth considering this question in relation to the use of surveys. I will simply pose the following idea:

THE CROSSOVER

As I suggested earlier, a lot of these points may be seen as an issue for the Sales Team (if your company works in such a way). But, I propose there should be a fine line between Marketing and Sales. The key to perfecting overall strategy is making the two departments work seamlessly together. The results generated by these marketing surveys will be an invaluable asset to any sales team and help improve conversion rates, which is of course the ultimate goal of any B2C Lead Generation Campaign.