Benefiting From Customer Surveys

What could you learn by conducting customer surveys or focus groups more often? The number of doors of opportunity opened by the information gathered from these efforts might surprise you.

As part of its 1-1 marketing effort, the National Hockey League asked fans to register on its website and select their favorite team. One of the things the NHL immediately discovered was that 40% of its fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means that they can’t regularly attend local games, access highlights or view the games on television.

Imagine the opportunity for the NHL! Say the League identifies Detroit Red Wings fans that live outside of Michigan. If Red Wings games are not available on television outside of Michigan, the League could send these fans an e-mail explaining how they can watch their favorite team on the NHL’s Center Ice, its on-demand broadcasting service.

Reeling Them Back In

There is much you can learn from online survey forms or customer surveys of the type that has been so beneficial to the NHL. But there is much you can learn from surveying your inactive customers, too. Why have these individuals stopped shopping with you? Are they shopping somewhere else? What attracted them to their new supplier? Wouldn’t you want to know?

One of the techniques marketers often use to boost sales is sending special promotions to customers who haven’t purchased with them within a certain time frame. How much more effective would these promotions be if you could target the offer to the very reason the customer stopped shopping with you in the first place?

Say a high percentage of customers cite price as the reason for jumping ship. You could offer them a discount to bring them back on board. Or you could try a longer-term incentive, such as offering to enroll them in a customer loyalty program that would provide discounts and special deals over the lifetime of that relationship.

Find out what your customers think. While 1:1 print personalization, in itself, will boost marketing effectiveness, pairing it with relevance based on a deeper understanding of your customer base can send that effectiveness off the charts.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves, they have the first secret of success. 

Norman Vincent Peale