Readership Surveys: When“No” Means“Yes”

What are the preferences of your clients and prospects? Long walks on the beach? Candlelight dinners? Soft music? Oh, uh, we mean content preferences. Well, it’s really the same thing. Your best chance to advance the relationship is to know what the other person is looking for.

Readership surveys can shed some light on these preferences, especially if you focus on the habits, preferred frequency and topics of your audience. You have the chance to get a true feel for what your list members are interested in and increase the efficiency and effectiveness for your marketing efforts. The best time to execute a survey is between your company’s strategic goal-setting session and the preparation of the annual marketing calendar. This allows you to gauge what kind of marketing will help you reach your top prospects.

Know Your Audience

And we mean your audience. In most cases, you should only send your survey to your house list. However, if your house list is extremely small and you’re contemplating increasing your marketing efforts, you can send a readership survey to a rented guest list from a targeted external community. However, this is generally viewed as a poor use of marketing dollars. Response rates are typically very low because the recipients will have little to no exposure to your company’s communications.

Make Them An Offer

To improve your response rate, consider an offer for list members who complete the survey. For example, offer a $5 Starbucks gift card to the first 100 people who finish and submit their responses.

Respect Their Time

Try to keep the survey text brief and limit the number of questions. Also, don’t send a survey more than once a year. In order to help explain the different components of a readership survey, the following points of interest are addressed.

POINT 1: Find Out About Frequency

Find out how often your list members prefer to receive communication from you. If you can determine their ideal frequency, you will improve response rates. While you’re at it, ask list members about the best time to send emails – what day, what time and what time of year. The phrase“when‘no’means‘yes’” comes in to play when projecting ideal frequency. People often receive more impressions than they are realize and therefore may not offer accurate feedback about frequency. Assume that people can tolerate more impressions than they report in a survey. To test this assumption, ask them how many impressions they currently receive from you. You’ll find they generally underestimate the actual frequency by two-thirds.

POINT 2: Ask About Communication Channels

Not everyone will respond to emails, so it’s imperative that you offer different forms of communication as choices for your list members. Create a five-point scale (1 being “not important,” 5 being “very important”) for each form of communication, and ask your list members to rate each option, including:

• Email (plain text, HTML)
• Direct mail
• Supporting voicemail
• Supporting video
• Fax
• Web 2.0 – and be specific about methods.

POINT 3: Align Subject Matter With Goals

Go back to the goals and desired outcomes you set out in your annual marketing plan. Use these goals to create a list of topics for webinars, white papers, articles, videos or podcasts that you think will interest your prospects with a five-point scale to rate each topic based on their interest level. Limit the number of questions to 10 or 12, including:

• Qualifying questions: Ask about issues such as company pains and different solutions to give your company an opportunity to figure out where you stand, as well as where your prospects stand.
• Vacations: Ask when list members take vacations, so you know when to expect lower response rates.
• Trade shows: It’s important to understand where your prospects perform product research. Ask which trade shows they go to, what blogs they read, what newsletters they subscribe to, etc. This will help shape your media strategy.

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