Getting Your Audience’s Opinion is Critical, Easy and Profitable

Let me show you how easy it is to survey your audience, gather valuable marketing intelligence and generate leads for your business.

You would think with my background, step one in any survey would entail setting up a sophisticated polling solution. I could put my Infusionsoft consultant / expert hat on and build a web form for posting on my website. You’d think I’d setup a cool looking survey form people could fill out by clicking on pretty little radio buttons. I could display a running total of the current votes so people could check in and see which choice was everyone’s favorite. I could put something together that would be very impressive.

We’ll that’s not what I did. I wanted something I could get done fast and I wanted something that would maximize the number of responses I would get. What I describe below took me an hour at Starbucks while my wife and daughters shopped at the outlet mall.

My goals was to gather information I needed for my role as chairman of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce’s Technology Committee and to guide my own firm’s marketing. My desire was to gauge people’s interest in one of three topics. Later this summer I’ll be promoting a webinar and in-person event on covering one of these. I may also consider one for use in a Technology Committee event.

So what I did was send out this VERY short email messages:

Subject: Please give me your opinion. 5 seconds is all I need

Dear xxx,

Can you give me your opinion on one of three topics to cover in a webinar I'm holding later this summer? Just reply to this email with the number of the topic you like best.

1. Email, Blog and Social Media Marketing: Getting Very Real Leads (and Sales) for Your Business
2. Search Engine Optimization: When Is the Right Time to Use This Lethal Weapon?
3. Keeping Prospects and Current Customer Engaged Using Proven Internet Techniques

Thank you in advance,

My reason for making it so simple was so no one would have the excuse, “I don’t have them time or mental energy.” Responding only required:

1. Clicking on reply button.
2. Entering number of the topic.1
3. Clicking the send button.

Who got this email message? It was my list of 1,782 contacts. This is a list of contacts I have built over the years collecting business cards at networking events. I’m VERY systematic about this.

Years ago I would manually enter them into my system myself. Then I upgraded to a card scanner. For a time, I had my admins enter them into my email system for me. My current state of the art (and this works really well) is using my Infusionsoft Snap phone app that scans the card and sends it overseas where an offshore team reviews it, confirms it was entered correctly and inserts it automatically into my Infusionsoft email database.

Shameless plug: My practice caters to the needs of Infusionsoft users. I offer a package that implements this exact same process and enables any business owner or sales person to consistently stay top of mind with all their contacts with minimal effort.

But for simplicity’s sake, it’s basically it’s the list of people my email contact list. This would include vendors, clients, business contacts, etc.

The Results

The first bit of good news was that 52 people responded. That’s a 3% response rate. That may not sound like a good number, but it’s in the range of what I had hoped to get. There wasn’t much incentive for them to participate. I wasn’t offering them anything. I just wanted their opinion.

Below are the votes that each of the titles received:

• #1 – 21
• #2 – 11
• #3 - 20

Clearly topic #1 and #3 are the favorites. That’s no surprise because it’s a more advanced topic. Business owners wanting to promote their businesses online need to have other things in place first before position number 1 in a search engine can get them results.

What did I accomplish?

1. Current Infusionsoft users preferred #3 more so than none Infusionsoft users. One respondent mentioned that Infusionsoft is geared towards the engaging of clients and that seemed to drive that group of respondents.
2. One of the respondents like #3 and asked if I could present it to her team. That sounds like a lead if I’ve ever seen one. Just as important, it give me an opportunity to present the topic to a live audience and get their feedback on it. It’s an opportunity to help me hone my message.
3. The biggest benefit is that I communicated in an engaging way, the offerings I make available to customers and I did so in an engaging way.

Let me know what you think about this and your business need.