«I have a virtual store selling regional products, which has been working well for me in the short time it has been open. But I would like to expand the products more and I want to know if I will have clients for the new products or lines. They have advised me to do a market study. What should I do to know more about my clients and the visitors of my online store? Maybe you should include a questionnaire? If so, what kind of questions should I ask them? ” JLM Valencia
One of the most important marketing elements on a website is the means of obtaining " feedback " from our visitors. It is they who have to tell us what products they expect to find in our store, what sections of our website they have missed (the most popular sections we have to know from the statistics on our website), what products they have not found, etc..
The only way to know this, even on the Internet, is to ask it. And it can be done in two ways: either ask those who have already bought something or ask those who are visiting our website.
1.- Those who have already bought something from us: Email survey.
It is advisable to do a survey to all customers who have already bought from you. You have to ask him a few questions directly, no more than 10 because people don't have time and are scared of large surveys.
You will do this by email (I suppose you will have the email of your clients) and you will use the BCC field of your email program. This means that with the same message you can reach all those email addresses at the same time, but using this field (unlike the "CC" field) none of the recipients see the email list of the others. No one likes to be seen on an email list in danger that they may catch your email and send you non-stop advertising.
Well, to get this field in Outlook 2000 for example, when creating a new message, we go to the View menu and within this menu the BCC Field option, with which this field opens so that we can paste the list of emails that we want to use. If your mail program is Outlook 2000, Netscape, Eudora etc., look for this field in the help menu and there you will be instructed how to obtain it.
I am sure that at this moment you have an idea of those products that you want to add to your store. However this is what your "nose" tells you, it is not something scientific. Doing this survey to your clients you will draw more approximate conclusions to their needs.
2.- Online survey: in this case we will have to include a new section on our website that will be a question form where we will ask the things we want to know:
- What products would you like us to include in our catalog? Do you think the payment methods available in our store are suitable? Which one would you add? etc.
It should be noted that an email survey will be done by ourselves, but adding a new section to our website will be something that normally we will have to ask a web design company.
One of the things we can do to increase this response rate is to offer something in return. This something has to be of value for the Internet user who visits us, and this something can be a draw for example. In this way we can have the message on our main page: "Fill out our survey and travel for free to…" or in your case "Fill out our survey and get free…" Etc. Then monthly we raffle among all the participants an object from our store. People love free things and if you offer them something for free, or the possibility of obtaining it, be sure that they will fill out the survey.
Internet is a perfect way to do a market study without spending money, just time.
