Lead Generation Surveys: Their Value To Your Business

When it comes to your business, lead generation surveys are a fantastic tool to gain a greater insight into what your prospective customers need. The result of this, is that you’re less reliant on guesswork and better able to align your business to serve your customers’ needs.

Given how important lead generation surveys are to the sales process, this blog will outline the importance of lead generation and what can happen if you don’t have it in place. It will then explore what you can achieve with lead generation surveys and ways that you can increase the response rate to these surveys.

So, let’s begin.

Why is lead generation is important?

The ability to generate leads is crucial to business success, as many firms lack the sales capacity and customer base to develop without it.

Customers are also fickle, making it difficult for companies to rely on their instincts. So, they must develop lead generation strategies to attract the types of customers they want instead.

Without this an organisation will be unsure as to the types of people it should be targeting. And without this identity, it will have trouble generating leads.

By contrast, lead generation allows you to go after the target market who is searching for products or services that are similar to yours.

However, even with a lead generation strategy in place, you’ll need to ensure you have a constant influx of potential clients to maintain your success.

What can you achieve with lead generation surveys?

Similar to most things in life, if you don’t know exactly how something works, you’re likely to get it wrong more often than not. And the same can be said with lead generation surveys.

However, what's great about lead generation surveys is that you’re getting responses directly from your customers’ mouth. This helps you to eliminate guesswork and provide your customers with what they really need.

Segment your leads

When it comes to your survey, new leads often come from your opt-in page. Subsequently, this allows you to quickly segment them with the help of the questions you’ve created.

For example, if you have five products, you can ask respondents in your opt-in form which product they want. You can then follow this up with a particular set of content that will bring them closer to your brand. In addition, you might be able to build a lead generation chatbot into your opt-in form to provide them with a more interactive experience.

Pinpoint your most qualified leads (MQL)

The aim of any lead generation questionnaire is to identify prospects who are most interested in your product or service. It will also save time, resources and effort if you only go after the ones who most want to have a conversation with you.

Let’s say someone downloads a relevant piece of content from your website. The next step would be to follow this up with a survey. You could then use the survey to ask them what they were looking for and any feedback they could provide to improve the experience for them the next time around.

Asking questions in this way, lets them know that you care about their expectations. It also helps you to identify who is most likely to turn into a customer.

Gather testimonials

When a prospect is close to selecting a particular product or service from your portfolio, showing them testimonials of satisfied customers can encourage them to sign on the dotted line.

Whether it's in the form of a video or text, there are few things as powerful as social proof. When a prospect sees positive feedback from your customers, it will usually work in your favour.

If they then go on to purchase your product, you can send them a simple survey form with questions about what exactly they like about your product, to help you to make further improvements.

Find out more about your lead’s decision-making power

For many of us, when an individual downloads a piece of content from our website, we often think there is a considerable chance that this lead will end up turning into a customer.

However, there’s just as much chance that this is an individual on the lower rung of their organisation and maybe all they wanted was to download an e-book, which you provided in return for their contact details.

With a lead generation survey however, you can include questions such as the following to get a better idea of that site visitor’s intentions and decision-making power.

What is your designation?

Are you responsible for taking your organisation’s purchasing decisions?

What level of influence do you have in the decision-making process?

Is there anyone else involved in the decision-making process for products and services at your organisation?

The responses to the above questions will help you understand if the contact can take decisions or at least have some level of influence in the decision-making process. And if not, be able to direct you to the people with that decision-making power.

Tweak your content strategy

Ultimately, you’ll want to drive as many leads as you can for your sales team to close. But this requires you to segment your leads and nurture them based on what they prefer.

However, if you don’t know their preferences, it’s possible to collect information from them about the kinds of content they’re expecting from you, which stage of the buying cycle they’re in, and the sorts of topics they’re interested in.

To get this, you could consider including the following questions in your lead generation survey.

Where do you typically collect industry information from?

What are the different sources you use to learn more about your business?

What industry trends do you want to learn more about?

Understand your customer’s pain points

When a lead first gets in touch with you, you will not know very much about them. And only when you tell them what their most pressing issues are, will you be able to send them the right solutions.

One of the best ways to help solve their pain points is to send them relevant content. This is where you can use lead generation marketing surveys to better understand which areas your leads have greatest problems with.

Here are some of the questions you might consider including in your lead generation survey to better understand their pain points.

What are the biggest challenges that you currently face in your role/industry?

How do these challenges impact your day-to-day operations or business objectives?

Are there any specific pain points or obstacles that hinder your progress or success?

What primary goals or objectives are you trying to achieve?

Are there any solutions or strategies that you’ve previously explored to try and overcome these challenges?

Once you understand your lead’s pain points, it's easier to create content that is relevant to them.

Provide a superior brand experience

B2B and B2C customers these days typically want a personalised experience, not a cookie-cutter one style fits all approach. And it’s possible to provide a more personalised experience when you have a lot of knowledge about your prospects.

However, it’s not always possible to get a lot of information from your leads as soon as they get in touch with you, which is where lead nurturing can help.

Try to establish a relationship with your prospect by sending them relevant content and useful updates. This should help them to slowly warm up to your brand. Then once there is a rapport between your brand and your prospect, you can send them a survey asking follow-up questions about their expectations and specifications, if any.

Following this, you can develop content that will bring them closer to your brand.

Engage your audience

When it comes to buying something from you, a disengaged audience tends to take a lot of time and thought to come to a decision. Therefore, if you’re to get their attention every time you send them a sales email, you need to find a way of keeping them engaged with your brand.

Quizzes and polls are a great way of keeping your leads engaged, performing particularly well on social media platforms. The data you collect from quiz surveys can also be used for market research.

Here are a couple of questions, you might consider including in your lead generation survey.

What sort of content would you like to see from us?

Could you tell us your thoughts about our product?

By sharing quiz or poll surveys on social media, there is also a strong possibility that people will share it with their followers and friends. Not only will it increase the reach of your quiz or poll but may open you up to a new audience too.

Qualify your leads

If you’re to generate sales through leads, you need to be able to qualify them first. Fortunately, you can use lead generation surveys to qualify whoever sends you an enquiry.

Trying to go after every prospective lead is a waste of time and resources. So, by asking a raft of qualifying questions, you’ll get a better idea of how close that potential customer is to having a direct sales engagement call with you.

Here’s some sample questions to think about at this stage.

Are you the final decision-maker for the purchasing of external product and services, or do you need to consult with others first?

Do you know your budget range for this purchase?

When do you think you’ll be ready to make a purchasing decision?

Have you received any proposals or quotes from any other solutions providers?

What factors are most important to you when selecting a solutions provider?

Gauge customer satisfaction and cross-sell opportunities

Having secured a client, you can still make more business from them by upselling and cross-selling, not to mention getting them to renew their services with you when their contract expires. This is why the post-purchase experience of your customers is so important.

From their website and customer support experience to their interactions with your sales team and use of your product and more. With the use of customer satisfaction surveys and product feedback forms, you can get a better idea of your customers’ contentment levels and how they are getting on with your product. Through this feedback you’ll have the opportunity to make any improvements or see where your customer may be potentially interested in some upsell or cross-sell opportunities from you.

Having realised the many benefits, you can get from running a lead generation survey, I’m sure many of you are keen to crack on with developing a survey. However, it’s important to note that you will need to acknowledge and take action on your customers feedback, if you’re to ensure a steady stream of incoming leads and avoid damaging the future response rate to your surveys.

How to boost response rate to a lead generation survey

With this in mind there are a number of things you can do to improve the response rate to your lead generation surveys.

Make respondents feel important

One of the simplest and most effective ways to encourage your customers to complete your survey is to show your gratitude to them for taking part in this exercise.

Communicate with them about how much you value their opinion and share how their responses to your survey will bring a world of difference to your business.

Employ an omnichannel approach to your customer communications

If you’re to maximise the response rate to your survey, you need to be flexible with the range of channels that you offer it on, as not everyone will regularly check one particular channel such as email.

So, whether you’ve also embedded them on your website or used SMS, or maybe posted them on your social media platforms. Whatever range of channels you’ve chosen to distribute your survey through, the more channels you use, the more opportunities respondents will have to see and complete your survey with.

Create short surveys

Although, it does depend on the industry you operate in, generally it’s best to keep your survey as short as possible, if you want people to complete it.

When it comes to your survey questions, be as strict as you can be. You should be asking yourself if each question is necessary to the overall objective of your business goals. If the answer to that is only ‘maybe,’ then do not add it.

Most people tend to have short attention spans. So, the shorter your survey the more people are likely to complete it.

Keep your surveys relevant

If your customers are IT professionals, you may not want to ask them about parenthood, even though that persona may be relevant to some of your customers.

Generally, try to ask different questions for different personas, based on their interests and expectations. Also remember to enable ‘Does not apply’ or ‘Skip’ options, so that respondents are not forced to answer something that is not relevant for them.

One way to achieve this is to use conditional branching logic. In this scenario, when a particular question is not relevant for your user, you can send them on a different path that skips them to questions that are more relevant for them. Such a tool as this helps save respondents time and reduces their likelihood of abandoning your survey.

Encourage respondents with incentives

Again, it does depend on the industry that you operate in, but being able to provide some sort of incentive can encourage more people to complete your survey.

Even a simple Amazon gift card can work wonders for your survey response rates. There are a variety of rewards that you can choose to give.

From a simple Amazon gift card to access to an exclusive community, or a free consultation call. Whatever industry you operate in, there are a range of different rewards you can offer to help inspire your customers to respond.

Final thoughts

Lead generation surveys are a hugely powerful tool in helping you to better engage and understand your prospects and remove uncertainty from the sales process. And as long as you can implement them at the right touchpoints, the insights they provide will help you to convert more prospects into customers. There’s never been a better time to get started.