Pollfish Marketing Team, Author at Pollfish Resources

Building Effective Marketing Personalization with Survey Research

Marketing personalization is a key ingredient in sustaining a business, as it improves businesses’ relations with their target market on several fronts. 96% of marketers say that personalization helps them advance customer relationships, while 88% said that it had a considerable lift in business results.

Customers themselves prefer personalization in marketing, as 36% of customers believe brands should provide more personalized marketing materials ; however, they are hesitant to share too much information. Thus, the onus is on brands to deliver personalization, but without making their customers feel uncomfortable when performing market research.

There are several ways that survey research solves this problem, so that brands don’t have to choose between the two alternatives of a personalized experience but with intrusive probing, or a non-personalized experience, but without intrusive prodding.

This article explores marketing personalization, its importance, types and how survey research helps businesses execute personalized marketing.

Understanding Marketing Personalization

Also referred to as personalized marketing and one-to-one marketing, marketing personalization is the practice of using data and technology to deliver individualized brand messaging, product offerings and customer experiences (CX) targeted to individual customers.

As its name suggests, this method is an alternative to generic messaging and even the kinds targeted towards particular target markets (albeit broad groups).

This kind of method is also oppositional to traditional marketing, which focuses on the quantity of messages over their relevance. In traditional marketing, brands would cast a wide net of marketing efforts, such as cold-calling, billboards, subways ads, emails and more, but earn a small number of buying customers.

Marketing personalization, on the other hand, is centered on creating personalized messaging relevant for specific people, the kind that doesn’t appear to be mass-produced. It is a means of interacting with customers that feels more human, as it involves their preferences, interests, likes and dislikes and other aspects.

A marketing personalization strategy can include the following examples:

Customized email marketing campaigns
Customized social media marketing
Personalized ads
Fear of missing out (FOMO) messaging
Targeted product recommendations
Tailored content
Personalized calls with representatives

The Importance of Marketing Personalization

Personalized marketing is critical for a number of reasons. Broadly speaking, it can help businesses optimize a wide number of marketing campaigns and make headway in ROI.

First off, personalized marketing grants businesses the ability to reach specific audiences. Collecting customer data allows businesses to better understand the makeup of their target market. Thus, performing personalization allows brands to perform market segmentation in the process, acquainting and acclimating businesses with their various customer segments.

This allows brands to build more effective email, content and other targeted marketing campaigns. For example, if your market segment likes certain music, brands can use music references in their email campaigns, blog posts, or their email opt-in forms for a more personalized experience.

Personalization also improves the customer experience. CX goes beyond hiring friendly customer agents to assist and engage customers. This is because CX involves all the experiences that customers undergo in their customer journey, from nurture content and emails, to social media interactions, browsing a website, making a purchase and revisiting a brand post-purchasing.

Given the importance of customer experience, businesses ought to personalize their content at any point in a customer journey. 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized experiences.

Personalization helps improve content marketing strategy, which is especially important given that content steers many decisions, thoughts and associations with a company. Personalized content marketing makes businesses stand out from the crowd by creating unique and relevant content.

In turn, this creates positive associations with a brand and increases the chances of prospective and current customers returning to a website. This allows businesses to further nurture them, as well as to be continually etched in their minds.

Personalization is also a means for relationship-building, as it creates more personal and stronger relationships with consumers. As such, businesses can show their customers that they care about them, with personalized marketing such as birthday wishes, discounts on birthdays, a personalized rewards system, thank you emails and more.

As a result, personalization boosts customer loyalty, a critical concept for maintaining a successful business, as loyal customers buy frequently, make recommendations about a brand, act as brand advocates, are more willing to try a brand’s new products, along with contributing in other ways.

Given that personalization involves studying customer buying behavior in order to send individualized messaging, it allows marketers to make better product recommendations. Making recommendations is key to pushing conversions, given that they tend to be relevant to the customers' interests and past shopping activity. This is also a key tactic for cross-selling and upselling.

Finally, the most considerable benefit that marketing personalization offers is raising sales and conversions. When businesses grow their customer loyalty and retain consumers through personalized messages and offers, they will be more likely to buy. This idea piggybacks off of the aforesaid figure of 80% of customers being more likely to buy from a brand with personalization. Thus, businesses can count on this tactic to increase their revenue.

The Aspects of Marketing Personalization

There are a number of ways that brands can forge marketing personalization. While the means are plentiful if not virtually limitless, there are certain aspects that form the basis of personalized marketing. Businesses should include these components in their personalization efforts, whenever they are in doubt.

The following lists the key elements of personalization in marketing:

Hyper-targeted content
1. Content that calls out a particular segment, persona and individual customer
2. It involves understanding customers beyond their gender, ethnicity and age.
Specified content
1. This content addresses specific needs, desires, behaviors, habits and more.
2. It involves prospect-specific news feeds, topics, and content resources/ collections.
Responsive design
1. A kind of dynamic content, which omits setting up individual campaigns, and trying to route customers into the most fitting one, you create a single campaign, (1 email, 1 landing page, etc.) which are presented differently based on the target on the receiving end.
2. This brings out the convenience side of personalization, as it is customized for a particular customer. In turn, it will make the customer feel that the company took the time to know him.
Forging a sense of customer identity.
1. Personalized messaging gives customers a sense of identity rather than being treated as another part of the masses. Instead, they are made to feel like unique individuals.
2. This solves the grievances of mass marketing, given how often customers are flooded by it, whereas a personalized message treats customers as not just another member of a herd. Thus, the messaging will be more credible.

How Survey Research Fosters Marketing Personalization

Survey research is an invaluable component of the personalization process. Before creating any personalized marketing campaigns, let alone reaping their benefits, brands must understand their customers as close to an individual basis as possible.

After all, it’s impossible to engage in personalization when you do not know how to personalize. Every market segment iis different, not least every individual customer. What works for one segment or customer, will be ill-fitting for another.

Thus, brands need to establish a firm grasp of their customers’ identities, thereby extracting customer data on who the customers are, what makes them unique and how a business is fitted to cater to their individual needs and remedy their unique pain points.

Surveys obtain the insights into all of these concerns and more. They allow brands to collect better data for decision-making and gain quick access to a wealth of customer feedback. This feedback is useful for gauging existing marketing campaigns, along with setting up new ones based on the intel brands gain on their target market.

Surveys help brands learn the ins and outs of customer behavior, along with gaining valuable insight into the unique characteristics, habits and thoughts of their customers. Therefore, businesses and market researchers should use surveys as the primary means for personalization campaigns and understanding their customers at large.

Taking Personalized Efforts to the Next Level

Customer data is the most valuable thing that businesses can leverage in order to build the most effective personalized campaigns. To do so, they need access to a breadth of customer data; while this may appear to be a feat, survey research makes it easy and practical.

However, not all online survey platforms are built the same. Businesses must bear that in mind and choose their online survey tools wisely. A strong online survey platform allows brands to hyper-target their respondents, set up a number of surveys, deploy the surveys on a large network and ensure the respondents are chosen via randomization — something that random device engagement sampling (RDE) makes possible.

The Pollfish platform offers all of these capabilities and more to ensure that market researchers are obtaining the highest quality of data for their personalized marketing campaigns, along with all others.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Identify and Build Customer Personas with Market Research

It is critical for businesses to be able to identify and cater to their customer personas, as these entities are not the same across businesses, regardless if the businesses share the same industry or niche.

Customer personas place a business’s customers into specific, collective archetypes, the kinds that help avoid targeting the wrong people in marketing campaigns. But customer personas can help b businesses achieve much more than identifying and targeting the correct consumers.

As a matter of fact, 93% of businesses that exceed lead and revenue goals segment their target market by customer personas. 56% of companies developed higher quality leads by using personas.

This market research guide explores the notions behind customer personas, their importance and how market research — particularly surveys — help businesses identify and construct their consumer personas.

Understanding Customer Personas

Also called buyer personas, marketing personas and audience personas, customer personas are a form of customer segmentation, but a far more granular subset, as they represent individual people.

A customer persona is a detailed description of a member in a business’s target market, i..e, the group of people most likely to buy from them. This persona is not a real customer, but a fictional character who possesses all the traits of a target market segment.

Building these personas is the more concentrated practice of market segmentation — the process of categorizing a target market into smaller, more defined customer segments. However, customer personas are not the same as customer segments.

Customer segmentation refers to dividing a target market into different sets of customers. These sets inform on a group’s demographics, geographical location and some aspects of their customer buying behavior. Segments help businesses understand the makeup of their target market as different sets of groups.

On the contrary, a customer persona refers to defining individual customers within the segments discovered during customer segmentation. Customers are assigned fictional characters that represent a typical customer in a market segment; they are assigned a granular depiction, one that includes various specifications for each persona.

After establishing a few customer personas, a business can then categorize its leads, prospects and customers into particular customer personas. This is especially useful for businesses with hundreds or thousands of clients and prospects.

The Key Aspects of Customer Personas

A buyer persona is formed as a profile of a customer, therefore including demographic and psychographic traits, along with other detailed characteristics. This includes their values, behaviors, goals and other defined categories.

The following enumerates the key factors of customer personas so that businesses can understand them thoroughly and easily form their own:

Demographic details
1. This includes age, gender, income, marital status, location, race, ethnicity, number of children (if any), etc.
Customer behavior
1. This includes all the actions and behavioral patterns of how customers shop, consume and discard products.
Pain Points & Objections
1. Paint points involve the challenges that customers typically face, how they feel about them and how a business can help them overcome or bypass these challenges.
2. Objections include frequent dislikes and concerns in regards to a business, its products, services and experiences.
Workstyle
1. This involves their industry, position, salary, area of responsibility, decision-making authority.
Lifestyle
1. This concerns what customers and leads do in their spare time, what they enjoy doing, their hobbies. whether they own a vehicle, etc.
Personality
1. This is a snapshot that includes determining whether customers are competitive, emotional, logical, outgoing, people-oriented, how quickly they make decisions, etc.
Goals
1. This explains what they hope to do or achieve. Are they more career-focused and want to impress their boss and colleagues? Are they interested in saving money or time?
2. It also addresses what would make them purchase from a business in relation to their goals.
Information Consumption
1. This regards how customers prefer to receive and consume information, such as doing internet searches, scrolling on social media, talking with people, reading newspapers, watching various broadcasts, listening to podcasts, reading magazines, etc.
Designated Marketing Message
1. Composed of a few sentences, it outlines how a business helps their customer personas relieve themselves of their pain points and meet their needs.
Identity
1. This includes a name and a stock photo to humanize and visualize the persona, since it is meant to represent a real person.

The Importance of Identifying Customer Personas

Buyer personas are important for businesses on a number of different fronts. All of these bring different kinds of value across departments.

First off, these personas give businesses a comprehensive view of hypothetical customers, one that is far more concentrated and precise than a market segment. Their key factors such as their goals, motivations and lifestyles helps businesses form better targeted marketing campaigns and messaging.

In fact, 90% of companies that use customer personas were able to create a clearer understanding of their target market. In addition, 24% of companies gained more leads by identifying their personas.

These entities help guide numerous business strategies, such as brand voice, product development (such as in customer development, for example), social media campaigns, advertisements and more.

Given that marketing personas form the basis and style of a number of business activities, they align various departments, such as marketing, sales, product development and customer support, by giving them a concrete profile on ideal customers. This way, these departments can strategize to satisfy these personas accordingly.

Identifying personas can make a business more competitive and avoid product pitfalls. This is because persona-building involves establishing and addressing customer pain points and objections. These factors help businesses understand what’s bothering customers, what they dislike about current products in their niche and mainly, what would make them leave a competitor and switch to their brand.

Thus, product developers can refer to personas when forming product roadmaps, as they help them discover and prioritize changes to product offerings based on customer needs.

Marketers can identify and prioritize promotional activities to use in digital ads, remarketing and retargeting efforts with buyer personas. Content marketers also benefit from personas, as they help guide thor copy and build a content strategy relevant to customers.

These personas are useful for sales teams as well, given that they allow sales employees to understand the needs and pain points of their prospects, enabling them to be more prepared and better versed in dealing with prospects' concerns.

All in all, customer personas help a business understand its customers at deeper levels, in turn allowing them to better empathize and serve them, while improving their own processes with better alignment across departments.

How Market Research Helps Build Customer Personas

Firstly, market research helps build these profiles with the critical preliminary process of market segmentation. The importance of market research also extends to building specific personas themselves.

First off, there are various market research techniques that businesses can incorporate to learn more about their target market. Secondary resources are often used in the early stages of learning about a particular target market. While secondary research helps form the bedrock and key insights on customer needs and behaviors, it cannot address specific concerns that businesses have, let alone form personas that are unique to a business.

Therefore, a business must always conduct primary market research. There are many means of conducting firsthand market research; surveys provide the most simple yet potent method to collect such research.

This is because surveys allow businesses to study the exact people who fall under specific demographics, geographies and even behavioral traits, should the online survey platform allow it. In this way, market researchers can learn about their desired populations only, further segmenting them and using their data to identify and build personas.

Surveys provide an easy method of gaining a wide swath of insights and can be based on any campaign or sub-campaign. When it comes to forming buyer personas, they allow market researchers to gather information on all the factors that make up a bury persona.

Nobody likes taking long surveys, as such, researchers can design surveys on different factors of the personas in their process. They can also create follow-up questions on a particular topic to unlock deeper insights.

Surveys allow market researchers to quickly draw responses and even provide a completion time, depending on the online survey platform. They also grant researchers different data viewing and exporting options in order to analyze their data to their preferred method.

Surveys can uncover key trends and patterns crucial to the makeup of a customer persona. They also allow businesses to gain access to thousands of respondents.

The following presents just some of the insights that surveys can effectively provide:

The backgrounds of customers, including their lifestyle, workstyle and demographics
The challenges and hurdles they deal with
Their interests and hobbies
What they seek in a product or service
What they dislike or try to avoid
Their goals and needs and how a business can help attain them for customers
How a business’s solution alleviates their challenges

How to Create Surveys that Identify and Build Customer Personas

Creating surveys for the purpose of developing customer personas can be difficult, even for those with some familiarity of market segmentation and building personas.

The correct online survey platform should relieve this process with functionalities that allow researchers to screen respondents, create questionnaires and deploy surveys.

The following lists the necessary steps to create surveys to identify and build customer personas:

Determine the main purpose and needs of the survey campaign.
1. Decide on the main needs of your campaign.
2. Pinpoint the unknowns of your buyer personas. Do you need to understand them better, or do you need to create new ones entirely?
3. Does your business seek to form a more personal connection with its customers? Or do you need to understand their problems more clearly, to ideate solutions?
Assign your survey to specific target populations.
1. First consider who you need to take part in your survey: existing customers, website visitors, your general target market or a specific segment from it?
2. Finding who you need to involve in survey research can also help narrow down the purpose of the campaign in Step 1.
Narrow down the premise and setup of your survey.
1. Although similar to Step 1, this step involves taking the purpose of your survey and using it to settle on a persona subtopic, or several, such as customer goals, objections, pain points and buying behaviors.
2. If you have some of this information on your personas, consider whether you need to explore new topics to build the persona further or gain more information on existing aspects.
Form the questionnaire.
1. Begin with general questions and make them more specific.
2. Consider using advanced skip logic to route respondents to a relevant follow-up question to the previous question.
3. Use a variety of question types to make the survey more engaging and avoid survey fatigue.
4. Some questions will need more specific answers, so consider using both multiple-choice, multiple-selection and open-ended questions.
Send out the survey to its intended respondents.
1. Don’t forget to include a thank you section to the survey, along with an intro that briefly explains its purpose and the importance of the respondent’s participation.
2. Assure that the platform you use allows for randomization and the random device engagement (RDE) method.
Analyze your survey results.
1. Organize them into a document that lays out patterns and common findings.
2. Filter the findings into a customer persona profile or profiles, if you suspect the presence of more than one, or traits that apply to partly established personas.
Put together your marketing personas based on your survey research.
1. You can use the data you reaped from your survey campaign into existing personas or create new ones. Additionally, you can add another aspect to an existing persona if you haven’t already. For example, their buying behavior, if you haven’t formed this aspect in previous persona-building studies.
2. Consider if you have enough information on each persona. If you need considerably more, run another survey and ask questions specific to the missing gaps on your persona(s).

Creating the Most Effective Marketing Campaigns

Mapping out a plan for effective marketing campaigns requires knowledge about your customer base. In order to form successful marketing and sales campaigns, businesses must be attuned to their customers to make informed decisions.

Customer personas allow businesses to do just that, as well as align all team members on all their customer-facing efforts, from the support team to the product team. With these personas, businesses can even designate an upcoming campaign or sub-campaign to particular personas. This way, they can jumpstart a campaign with targeting already set.

Survey research provides businesses with ample data and insights, depending on how they set up their questionnaire and how often they deploy surveys. Surveys are also strong tools to use for forming customer personas, allowing market researchers to gain a deep read of their customers on multiple factors.

Aside from asking relevant questions, using the correct online survey platform is vital for building buyer personas. Such a platform should offer advanced skip logic to direct respondents to relevant questions, allow for a multitude of questions and pre-selected answer ranges, deploy surveys to a vast network of users in their natural digital environments by using the random device engagement sampling method and be easy to use.

When researchers are equipped with a strong online survey platform, they can take their customer persona-building campaigns to new heights.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Syndicated Research Vs Custom Research: Which is Most Ideal for Businesses?

When tackling market research, businesses have the option of using syndicated research, custom research and a slew of other kinds of research providers.

When it comes to steering your business forward, market research techniques provide a vast array of insights into your target market and industry at large. While secondary sources can provide critical information, it is even more important to conduct primary research, which grants unique and updated data that informs your business on a variety of matters.

Thus, researchers are often presented with using either survey panels, syndicated research or custom research as the foremost methods of conducting market research.

This article lays out the key aspects of syndicated research and custom research, along with their differences, so that businesses can informatively choose their best-suited market research method.

Understanding Syndicated Research

Syndicated research refers to the kind of research that is conducted independently, published and sold by a market research firm. This kind of firm is usually industry-specific and is therefore funded by several companies within a particular industry.

Thus, the market research firm and its partner companies own the data that the firm conducts. Other companies within its particular industry may be interested in obtaining the data and can thus patronize the firm.

The firm publishes the data to those who intend to purchase it — other companies within the space, as aforementioned. The data becomes available in the form of presentations, reports and times, as a raw collection of data.

Unlike custom research, syndicated research involves the market research firm and its collaborating companies — those that jointly funded a research project — as the sole owners of the data. This means that companies that purchase the data via syndicated research do not own the data.

In this form of research, the market research firm dictates the subject of the study, along with its direction. The patronizing companies can request additional questions to be added to the firm’s interview, or to have the study extended in some way or another, whether it involves adding a more diverse survey sample or more participants.

Thus, despite the firm’s ownership of a market research project, its purchasing customers have the option to customize it and change it to suit their research needs.

The Key Aspects of Syndicated Research

Syndicated research is characterized by several traits that define and distinguish it from custom research. The following lists several major aspects that form the basis and composition of syndicated research.

The market research firm conducts the data and is funded in collaboration with other companies that also own the data.
The scope, direction and methodology of the research is determined almost entirely by the research firm (although purchasing companies can make requests).
It allows companies to gain access to general data on the state of a specific market.
The costs of syndicated research are shared.
The results provided are the same, so there is no exclusivity among any of the parties involved.
Since purchasing companies do not conduct the research, syndicated research is considered secondary for customers.
1. However, it is primary research for the firm conducting the research.
It often uses large sample sizes and exits as quantitative research.
It is often conducted within exploratory research, given that is used as an early form of research.
A syndicated research firm can specialize in research in one industry or cover multiple industries.
It is not funded or created for one specific client.
It allows businesses and researchers to discover information about a market before taking on a full-scale market research campaign.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Syndicated Research

Syndicated research offers its share of benefits to researchers and businesses alike. However, it does not come without several drawbacks. When deciding between syndicated and custom research, businesses ought to review the following.

The Pros

Cost-effective, timely and cheaper than ad-hoc research.
It provides a primer into market research within an industry, given that the information is general and not particular to a niche or company.
It helps companies identify key trends and the main issues surrounding their industry.
It uses large sample sizes, which is fruitful for forming predictions.
It offers competitive intelligence within an industry.
It assists companies with brand awareness and brand tracking should they make this request to broaden their data.
Ideal to use for a research thesis, or need to create an investor pitch from various data providers on short notice.
It can improve the visibility of a company by using syndicated research for amplifying publicity.

The Cons

The market research firm wields almost complete control over the study, its methodology and direction.
The acquitted data is too broad and doesn’t address the specific needs that vary from company to company.
The data can be available for purchase by competitors.
Investing companies cannot claim full ownership of the research, given that other companies fund it and the research firm is at the helm.
Although it is an ideal starting point in market research, it does not cover the many unique aspects individual businesses will need, especially when brand tracking is concerned.
The data does not provide granular insights for research beyond exploratory.

Understanding Custom Research

Custom research is a kind of research that is conducted for and funded by one company — the client, who owns the resulting data. Market research companies run the campaigns and provide the data, made custom for the client.

In custom market research, the company, namely the client that procures the data has control over the campaign, thereby controlling the participants of the survey, the questionnaire, the quotas and virtually all else. In this regard, custom research fulfills its name, as it is customizable according to the client’s needs.

Custom research ensures that the client company dictates the requirements of a research campaign, sets the participant qualifications and meets all of its specific needs. When a company seeks information that closely aligns with its unique business aspects, it is ideal for it to turn to custom research.

Thus, custom research is better suited for handling research beyond the early stages, such as exploratory and explanatory research. It is also more fitting for obtaining a more in-depth analysis of a target market since the client company can format a survey campaign to its liking to fit its precise needs.

Both client companies and individual researchers are not obliged to share their insights with any other entity, nor do they have to publish their insights, although the latter is used for thought leadership, therefore making custom research ideal for content marketing strategy.

As for the former, the insights brands derive from custom research are completely unique to them and no other company can claim them as theirs, as the client company owns the data.

The Key Aspects of Custom Research

Custom research features several aspects that differentiate it from syndicated research and shape its experience. The following lays out various major components that form the offerings of custom research.

It is produced specifically for one company, rather than being a joint effort by multiple companies.
Although a market research firm provides the means of conducting the research, the client company owns the extracted data.
Custom research is suitable when a company requires more precise data about something specific to its business.
It is conducted after the early stage of the research process, for example, during descriptive, correlational and experimental research.
Custom research can provide clients with industry benchmarking, trade dynamics, segmentation analysis, economic impact and more insights.
It allows clients to take control of the direction of the research campaign.
Market research firms either conduct the research themselves or provide a tool for the clients, who then conduct the research themselves.
1. For example, an online survey platform.
It incorporates a client-centered approach, thus the insights are particular to the client and their customer intelligence needs.
This kind of research allows companies to customize any aspect of the research, from qualified respondents, to the number of respondents, to question-formatting.
The market research firm has no sway over a market research project as it would in a syndicated research project.
The client company is the sole proprietor of the data, but must also fund the research project on its own.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Custom Research

Custom research has various advantageous qualities that complement a market research project. However, it also has a few downsides. Businesses and market researchers ought to understand both before embarking on a custom research project.

The Pros

It is ideal to use when a company requires in-depth information about a particular target market segment, or an issue unique to the company.
Businesses do not have to share the resulting data with similar companies, making them more equipped with insights than their competitors.
This allows companies to extract only the information they need, avoiding information overload and having to parse through unneeded information.
It provides hyper-targeted Information so that businesses can improve on a number of fronts.
Researchers ideate individual questions and use all the ones they find necessary for their business’s particular needs.
The data is much cleaner and easier to analyze when it concerns one business’s specific matters.
Businesses gain deeper insights rather than broad generalizations that can be applied to multiple companies, reinforcing the strength of qualitative and quantitative insights.
1. It offers an additional layer of insights that syndicated research cannot find.
Market research firms often provide different pricing plans for businesses, so that even those on a budget can implement custom research.
It can be used as an extension of a syndicated research project, or as the missing piece to other secondary research.
Custom research is tailored to a company’s specific needs, thus the insights are more applicable and actionable when a company seeks to make changes.

The Cons

This kind of research is the costlier option as it is funded by only one company with the research tailored specifically to the company; thus it bears the burden of paying a full price, one that is more expensive than it would be in syndicated research and other joint projects.
It takes more time and effort to conduct from a logistical and planning perspective.
It must be performed by a market research company, if not, it carries too many risks, such as survey biases and incomplete information.
Researchers are left to fend for themselves when it comes to ideating the project and its needs.

Which Research Method is Most Ideal for Your Company?

When choosing between syndicated research and custom research, a business must consider all of its market research needs: from the highest priority to the lowest. It must also consider the campaign for which it needs the research.

Critical inquiries to consider include: does your budget better fit with the syndicated research model or can you afford custom research? Are there already available insights on the subject you seek to study? If so, how much primary research does your study require?

When a business is at a critical point in its journey, one that requires immediate and actionable insights, custom research is the objectively better choice.

This is because unlike syndicated research, which provides general answers and those that pertain to various companies, custom research provides granular information as specific to a particular company as possible.

Thus, there are little to no questions or hesitations that follow custom research, as the researchers can design the questions and other key aspects of the research campaign to their exact liking. On the other hand, although syndicated research provides valuable data, it is not only too broad, but it can be lacking when it comes to the intelligence needs of a business.

Thus, businesses ought to choose a custom market research provider wisely. A strong online survey platform performs custom research with the prowess of artificial intelligence and a global presence of support.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Conduct and Perfect an RFM Analysis with Survey Research

An RFM analysis continues to remain relevant in the present day of big data and automation, despite being born in an age where direct mail was the most effective method of communication.

Although its origin traces back to 1995, the RFM analysis is still a valuable method for performing customer segmentation, building customer personas, improving marketing efficiency and executing other applications.

Thus, market researchers should develop an analysis on the RFM model, as part of their market research techniques and to understand the value of various customers.

This article explores the RFM analysis, its importance, scoring system and model, how to conduct it and how survey research completes the process.

Understanding the RFM Analysis

An acronym for recency, frequency and monetary value, RFM is a model for customer behavior segmentation. Also called RFM segmentation, this technique is used to analyze and estimate the value of a customer based on the three data points in its abbreviated title.

The idea underpinning this kind of analysis is to segment customers based on the three major factors that make up customer buying behavior.

This way, market researchers and business owners can identify which customers are regulars, big spenders and those who make one-time purchases. This kind of analysis allows businesses to distinguish between their different customers in this way, but on a larger scale.

The RFM analysis model assigns each customer numerical scores based on the three measures to provide an objective analysis of their value to a company.

The system uses a scoring system that allows businesses to identify 64 kinds of customers (more on that in a below section). The RFM system allows market researchers to segment customers by assigning them scores based on the three data points of recency, frequency and monetary value.

These scores, in turn, allow businesses to understand the value of their customers, whether they are worth pursuing and nurturing and how to better engage them.

This analysis is based on the marketing adage stating that 80% of business comes from 20% of customers, which is also known as the 80-20 rule.

As such, the RFM segmentation model provides a quantitative method for gaining a meaningful impression of customers.

Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value

Marketers and market researchers should be well-acquainted with the three data points comprising the core of the RFM model. All three of these measures are proven to be effective predictors of the various personas’ willingness to engage with the messages in different marketing campaigns.

The following explains the meaning behind each measure and their unique KPIs:

Recency

This measure deals with the following: When was the customer’s last transaction? When was the customer’s last engagement?

Recency is usually expressed in days from the last purchase as its primary metric. However, depending on the product, it may be measured in hours, weeks or years.

Customers who made a purchase recently are more likely to have a product and its brand on their minds and are also more likely to purchase or use the product again.

The KPIs of recency include:

Date of the customer’s last purchase
Date of the customer’s last engagement (ex: site visits, conversation with reps)
Date of the customer’s last activity (ex: logins, in-app usage, commenting)

Frequency

Frequency is concerned with the following: How often did a customer make a purchase within a given period of time? How often did a customer visit a store?

Aside from the physical space, this measure is also used to rate activity in the digital space, such as page visits, unique number of sessions, total logged-in time, time spent on site, time spent on a page, etc.

Customers who purchased once are more inclined to purchase again. First-time customers are good targets for follow-up advertising to retain them and convert them into frequent customers.

The KPIs of frequency include:

The number of sessions/ visits
The number of click-throughs
The number of conversions

Monetary Value

This value answers the following: How much money did the customer spend within a given time period? What is the total revenue generated from the customer?

Not all businesses are ecommerce, such as news sites or content sites (blogs, social media, etc.); therefore, they cannot measure monetary value much like a traditional business would. Instead, they can assign an engagement metric that they deem valuable.

Customers who spend a lot of money yield the most profit for a business. They are also more inclined to spend money in the future, more so than those who have spent less. These kinds of customers bring a high value to a business.

The KPIs of monetary value include:

Total Revenue
Average Order Value (AOV)
Engagement Metrics- Useful for two-sided business models that don't directly sell products.

The importance of Conducting an RFM Analysis

An RFM analysis is crucial for businesses to conduct for a number of reasons. Firstly, it informs businesses on critical customer behaviors and allows them to build customer personas by ranking and grouping customers quantitatively.

As aforementioned, this kind of analysis helps businesses predict how willing customers will be to engage in marketing messages and new offers. However, this kind of analysis can help with several other fronts.

Conducting an RFM analysis gives businesses the opportunity to increase their sales. This is because using this data for decision-making allows them to understand how customers feel, think and shop, and most importantly, what fuels their buying decisions.

The RFM model allows businesses to support personalization efforts, which includes creating more personalized marketing campaigns or website and in-app experiences for logged-in customers. This in turn increases engagement, as it provides relevant messaging and offers to the current customer persona or group.

This helps improve upon conducting a cohort analysis along with increasing retention. In terms of the former, an RFM analysis helps provide more info of customer behavior within different cohorts. As for the latter, personalization allows companies to provide more tailored experiences and messaging — the kind that can resonate more strongly with customers, thereby retaining them, either via engagement or keeping the business on their minds.

Finally, RFM segmentation plays a role in customer retention, which is of the essence for any business. Although customer acquisition is important, retention carries even more weight for businesses, as existing customers are 50% more likely to try a business’s new product. In addition, 9% of businesses lose customers when they don't take customer retention seriously.

When products, services and experiences are personalized and engaging, customers are more likely to remain patronizing a business. Thus, the RFM model contributes to customer loyalty.

The RFM Model and Scores

The RFM model segments customers based on a scoring system.

Each data point — recency, frequency and monetary value — is typically assigned a score of 1 to 5. 1 is the lowest score, signaling a poor ranking of the data point, while 5 is the highest and signals the most positive ranking.

An RFM cell is the collection of the three values for each customer. Companies can average these values together, then sort their customers from highest to lowest to identify the value of each.

Using this scale, each customer can have a score from 111 to 555, with a total of 64 possible combinations, or 64 customer personas from just three points of data.

The scaling systems used in different companies that perform an RFM analysis will differ. Some will use a scale of 1-4, while others may elongate it to 1-10.

Examples of Personas Based on Their RFM Scores

Given the numerous customer personas that businesses can uncover after performing an RDM analysis, there are several key personas they ought to understand. These personas have critical consequences for businesses.

The following lists several major customer personas that an RFM segmentation brings to light, along with the most appropriate marketing campaign to target them with:

The Brand Champion (R=5, F=5, M=5)

This persona represents the ideal customer, as it exhibits the highest possible RFM cell, which is a representation of the 3 scores. When customers are correctly nurtured, they can become brand champions, spreading positive feedback about a business, thereby bringing more customers to a business themselves.

Marketing campaigns for this persona: exclusive offers, pre-purchase of new products, premium customer support, refer-a-friend bonus

The Loyal Customer (R=4, F=4, M=3)

Also a top-tier customer, as this persona visits or engages with a business frequently and has recently bought from them. Although their monetary value is in the mid-range, they can become a loyal customer — with the proper offers. There are several things marketers can do to increase their customer lifetime value or CLV.

Marketing campaigns for this persona: Loyalty campaigns, volume discounts, brand messaging showing the effectiveness of a product

The Possibly Alienated Customer (R=1/2, F=3/4)

This customer has been a regular at some point but has stopped buying recently, revealing a possible alienation. Their needs may have changed or they may have had a poor customer experience. Brands should nurture them back into becoming regulars, as a low recency score can quickly affect their frequency permanently.

Marketing campaigns for this persona: Customer satisfaction surveys, welcome back offers, more ads on their typical products/ services

The New Customer (R=4, F=1)

This persona has recently discovered a business and has engaged or purchased from it. They may also have been customers at some point, but stopped doing business for an interim. Businesses should foster relationship-building with this kind of customer, as they are new or possibly made a one-off purchase after an interim of no purchases/engagement.

Marketing campaigns for this persona: Email list sign-ups, introductory offers, hints, tips, useful content, social media offers

The One-Off Big Spender (R=1, F=1, M=4)

This kind of persona spends a lot of money on a one-time purchase, but then doesn’t return to the business, or does very rarely. This points to a specific need at a specific time, as they made a significant purchase, but only once. Marketers can target this persona by sending them messaging that is hyper-focused on their needs and interests.

Marketing campaigns for this persona: Upgrade and maintenance offers, new promotions, content based on their interests, surveys

The Expired Lead (R=1, F=1, M=1)

The lowest-scoring customers and least viable kinds of customers, they don’t have a significant purchase history with a business and also score low on recent interactions. Businesses should not focus marketing campaigns on this kind of customer, as they are unlikely to bring any value to the company. These are also the weakest to turn into semi-regular customers.

Marketing campaigns for this persona: Awareness-stage messaging, content marketing, automated emails, along with some of the ads used for more valuable customers.

How to Conduct an RFM Analysis with Survey Research

When it comes to performing such an analysis, survey research is not a secondary task. It is a crucial part of identifying each customer via the RFM model. This is because surveys allow market researchers to ask their target market virtually any question.

The key is having access to an online survey platform that offers deployment across all geographical areas in which your customers reside, and ensuring that only the targeted population takes part in the survey.

Given that the RFM model only uses three data points, the bulk of the survey is going to be the three questions on those measures. When conducting such a survey, businesses can also execute competitive research — by asking these questions in relation to their competitors.

This can also help obtain a general idea of how customers shop. Researchers can do so by asking their customers about recency, frequency and monetary habits in the general sense, that is, without mentioning their brand.

As such, they can also ask supporting questions to better understand each of the RFM data points.

The following lists major and supporting question examples for an RFM analysis in the general sense:

RECENCY: When was the last time you bought shoes?
1. Supporting questions:
2. When do you intend on buying shoes again?
3. Are you looking to buy shoes anytime soon?

FREQUENCY: How often do you buy shoes?
1. Supporting questions:
2. How often do you buy shoes in the winter?
3. Do you intend to buy more shoes in the coming month?
4. Is there a specific retailer or brand you prefer, or do you buy from several?

MONETARY VALUE: How much do you typically spend on shoes?
1. Supporting questions:
2. Are you willing to pay other amounts for different kinds of shoes?
3. Which brands do you typically buy from?
4. Is price an important factor when picking out different shoes?

Surveys provide a practical means of asking all of these questions and more. With advanced skip logic, brands can route respondents to follow-up questions based on the answer a respondent gave to a preliminary question.

Finding the Most Valuable Customers

An RFM analysis helps you to define some critical customer personas based on three major customer behaviors. But without an online survey platform, performing such an analysis becomes an almost impossible feat.

The correct online survey platform will enable businesses to reach a wide network of customers in their target market, ask them any type of questions and use artificial intelligence to stamp out low-quality answers and survey fraud.

It will also help market researchers hone in on their RFM-based customer personas with additional data. Thus, businesses ought to choose the proper online survey platform to conduct an effective RFM analysis.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How Surveys Influence Customer Buying Behavior

All businesses must examine their customer buying behavior in order to survive, not least if they seek to flourish. This is notably due to the direct effect this behavior has on patronage, such as sales, site visits, in-store visits, intent to purchase, customer loyalty and more.

Thus, all businesses ought to keep a close eye on their customers’ buying behaviors. There are a number of ways to do this. Market research techniques offer the most data-driven approach to understand these behaviors and a business’s target market at large.

Surveys, in particular, offer quick access into the minds of consumers, allowing businesses to study them at their whim and procure intelligence on their many facets, such as their sentiments, opinions and buying behavior.

But did you know, aside from studying customer buying behavior, surveys can also influence it? In this way, the surveys themselves act as marketing and advertising vehicles that allure customers to specific brands.

This article explores the concept of customer buying behavior, its importance, its four types and more, along with how surveys alone can influence it.

Understanding Customer Buying Behavior

As its name implies, this is a kind of customer behavior, one that is especially concerned with how customers buy, along with the actions and behaviors they take part in before purchasing.

Customer buying behavior refers to the ways in which a target market, the customers most likely to purchase from a business, acts when shopping for a product. Customer buying behavior takes into account the entire customer journey — from discovery, to nurturing, to browsing, to purchasing and possibly repurchasing.

This “behavior,” or rather, set of behaviors is shaped by personal and aided factors, along with external and environmental factors such as social climates, issues and occurrences. All of these play a role in driving customer perceptions of a brand, thereby driving their buying decisions, whether they are rational or irrational.

Buying behaviors take place both on and offline before customers make a purchase.

Given that customer buying behavior encompasses a wide breadth of interactions, such as searching for a product on a search engine and discovering a brand that sells it (SEO and SEM), engaging with a brand’s social media or reading marketing collateral, marketers have plenty of environments to observe their customer buying behaviors.

As such, marketers and market researchers study customer buying behavior to better produce marketing initiatives that influence customers to make purchases.

The Importance of Customer Buying Behavior for Businesses

This phenomenon is critical for businesses to study and especially to influence. When a brand has enough sway over its target market, it will generate more revenue, customer loyalty and a longer customer lifetime value (CLV).

When businesses fully grasp the customer buying behavior of their target market, they can intelligently conceive and carry out different marketing campaigns. In this way, understanding customer buying behavior not only guides marketing efforts, but helps avoid missteps, errors and wasting time and resources.

It is critical to examine buying behaviors, as they are not stagnant. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 48.7% of customers changed their buying behaviors, switching their purchasing preferences to the digital space. That is because they replaced products that they regularly bought at physical stores with competitors' online shops.

Additionally, in the wake of COVID-19 click and collect sales grew in the US by 60.4%, attesting to the popularity of buying items on the internet, however merging internet purchases with physical pick-ups, that is, at a store or retail hub location. This comes as a rather

Customers also change their buying behaviors in terms of brand switching. This has been documented during the pandemic, as 36% of consumers tried a new product brand in the midst of COVID, while 25% of customers switched to a private-label brand.

73% of consumers who have switched brands will continue using their products regularly, which means that they will either use the new brands alongside the brands they’ve used before, or completely replace the old brands with the new one(s).

Thus, all businesses should expect their target market to either switch or try their competitors’ products and services at some point. In this way, studying and influencing customer buying behavior largely affects customer retention and loyalty.

When businesses have a solid understanding of their target market’s buying behaviors, they can produce messaging that is better targeted, thus resonating with certain market segments. This helps improve brand equity and will generally leave customers with a better impression of a business.

Additionally, it allows companies to understand when customers typically make purchases so that companies can target their messaging accordingly and reach consumers when they are most likely to shop. For example, some businesses may observe that customers buy during the weekends or on the evenings of weekday nights. Thus, it would be apt to incorporate a new sales banner or social post during those times.

All in all, paying heed to customer shopping behaviors helps businesses on several fronts.

The Key Influences on Customer Buying Behavior

As aforesaid, there are various factors at play when it comes to influencing customer buying behavior. First off, there are the external factors, such as current events, social and political issues and other emotionally evoking happenings.

In 2018, a Harvard professor reported that emotion is one of the biggest drivers of buying behaviors and decisions in general. Thus, brands ought to study their customers’ emotions, particularly their responses to current issues.

Some customer segments may be inclined to buy from socially responsible companies: companies with business models that focus on social change via philanthropic, charitable or activism-based activities. Others may have a buying behavior influenced by such companies.

But there will always be customers who gravitate towards a brand that supports a cause or idea that they too care about. Thus, it is crucial to understand the key influences of customer buying behavior.

Aside from the way companies present themselves in relation to external issues, there are three other key influences on customer buying. The three other key components are:

Rational considerations of the product and service. These include:
1. Price, quality, and convenience
2. Mental or cognitive factors such as product utility and value
Irrational considerations such as feelings and desires. These include:
1. Emotional, aka affective factors such as irrational considerations, which include personal beliefs
Behavioral aspects such as
1. Buying patterns
2. Preferences based on routines and habits

The 4 Main Types of Customer Buying Behaviors

When customers make purchases, their buying behaviors almost always fall into at least one of four categories. These categories classify a wide range of situations that can occur in similar ways based on the behavioral aspects of the scenarios.

The following explains the four main types of customer buying behaviors:

Complex buying behavior
1. The most typical buying behavior
2. This usually occurs when buyers make big purchases, such as a new vehicle or real estate.
3. This type of behavior includes a high level of research and prudence before choosing a product.
4. As such, this kind of behavior involves long considerations before customers make any purchase.
5. This behavior stems from an instance in which a purchase will have a significant impact on a customer’s life, especially when the purchase involves risks.
Habitual buying behavior
1. This refers to customers who buy the same product repeatedly.
2. Such customers manifest a high level of product loyalty.
3. This involves brand loyalty, such as buying from the same bread company during each shopping trip or online visit.
4. Consumers who engage in habitual buying rarely research alternative products of brands.
5. They don’t look for similar brands or products as they are used to buying a particular kind (or kinds). Thus, they exhibit the most customer loyalty.
Variety seeking buying behavior
1. This behavior stands in opposition to habitual buying behavior.
2. Consumers with this buying behavior look for variety because they have yet to find their favorite product.
3. This kind of behavior takes shape when customers seek novelty in their would-be, go-to products.
4. For example, when customers try different hair-dying brands before settling on one.
5. Customers with this buying behavior carry little to no brand loyalty.
Dissonance reducing buying behavior
1. This occurs when customers are afraid to make the wrong buying decisions.
2. This behavior stems from a fear of buyer’s remorse.
3. It is especially prevalent in situations where customers cannot return items should they not be satisfied, or when returning products is too difficult, such as in the case of a faraway store or expensive return shipping.
4. This behavior comes about when customers’ have a bad past experience with a particular product.
5. This often occurs when customers spend more time comparing different aspects of a product rather than comparing different product brands.

How Surveys Influence Customer Buying Behavior

Although there are many ways businesses can study customer buying behavior, they can also take part in activities that influence their customers’ buying habits. There is also a means that offers businesses with a twofold prowess: being able to study customer buying actions and influence customer behavior as well.

The solution that offers this dual prowess is a market research survey. Surveys give businesses and market researchers access into the minds of their target market. There is a vast amount of surveys and broader survey research methods.

Businesses can run survey campaigns for all 6 of the main types of research. As such, businesses can probe their customers’ buying behaviors by deploying surveys to their target market online. They can also send surveys to specific segments of their target market.

Surveys have the ability to reveal major aspects of consumer opinions and sentiments, thereby allowing businesses to examine their buying behaviors. This is because surveys allow businesses to ask their respondents virtually anything, allowing them to better deliver their marketing messaging, images, advertising and other campaigns.

Thus, by studying customer behavior through surveys, businesses can make more informed decisions, the kind that can allow them to produce more effective marketing campaigns.

However, since surveys offer a dual power, their ability also extends to influencing customer buying.

Several years ago, Harvard ran a study to discover how surveys can affect customer behavior. The results of the survey study bear good news for businesses; as it turned out, customers that were surveyed were more than as likely to open new accounts with businesses.

In addition, this study discovered that the customers who were surveyed were less than half as likely to renege on their patronage and were even more profitable than the customers who weren’t surveyed.

This study reveals that surveys have the power to present a brand in a positive light, or at the very least, bring brand awareness to a brand that target customers may otherwise not have heard of.

Thus, businesses that wish to influence their customers’ purchasing behaviors ought to conduct surveys. They must bear in mind that in order to influence their customers via surveying them, the surveys must mention the business by name. Companies must paint their brands in as positive a light as they possibly can. This includes making light of the fact that they support causes that their customers care about.

The more surveys that businesses run to study buying behaviors, the better they can present themselves in upcoming surveys to influence their customers.

Creating the Strongest Behavioral-Influencing Campaigns

Surveys are an excellent approach to reaping intelligence on customer buying behavior, as well as influencing this behavior. However, in order to maximize both efforts, businesses must use the proper online survey platform.

All online survey tools are not built with the same dashboards, capabilities and interfaces. Thus, market researchers should research the available online survey software before deciding on one platform to run all of their market research campaigns.

Given that these platforms offer a primary means of research, they must be chosen carefully. The most convenient online survey platforms will offer various capabilities, ease of use, deployment across a wide network of digital properties, including websites and apps, along with artificial intelligence and machine learning to stave off faulty answers and poor data quality.

Moreover, such a platform should offer global support, so that businesses can rely on experts to guide them with their surveys at any point of the day. A survey platform of this caliber will make it easy to both examine and influence buying behaviors.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving into the eNPS Survey to Improve Employee Engagement and Performance

The eNPS survey, a shortened form of the Employee Engagement Survey, is a practical method for measuring employee engagement and employee satisfaction.

Employee engagement is not merely useful for lifting morale but it also yields positive business outcomes. Not only do engaged employees outperform their non-engaged counterparts, but companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable.

Companies with higher employee engagement also succeed in a number of other fronts. Businesses with higher employee engagement have 18% higher sales productivity and 18% less turnover.

Despite these figures, only 36% of employees are engaged in their workplace. Evidently, there is a disconnect between businesses and employees. Companies can turn this bleak statistic around, by better understanding their employees with the eNPS survey.

This article explains the eNPS survey, its importance, calculation, examples and more.

Understanding the eNPS Survey

This kind of survey is based on the premise of the NPS (Net Promoter Survey), but in relation to employees, hence its name. Designed to measure employee loyalty, this survey is a technique for gauging how willing employees are to recommend their workplace to their friends, family or peers.

While the NPS survey measures customer loyalty, the eNPS survey measures employee loyalty, and does so in the same manner — by way of asking the “ultimate question” and by implementing a scaled response, using a scale of 1-10.

The “ultimate question” is poised in the same way, but rather than focus on the company, the products or services, it focuses the inquiry in relation to the employer. Here is an example of the “ultimate question” for the eNPS survey:

On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend working at your company to a friend or acquaintance?

A few other examples:

On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend your employer to a friend or acquaintance?
On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our organization/company to a friend or acquaintance?
Considering your complete experience, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or acquaintance?

When employees answer this core question of the eNPS survey, their response is then tallied as an eNPS score, which reveals the sentiment and consequences behind the employees’ answers. This kind of survey has various benefits.

The Importance and Benefits of the eNPS Survey

The eNPS survey is critical for businesses of all sizes to conduct and offers various benefits. The foremost importance that this kind of survey carries is that it gives businesses a quick and easy way of obtaining an overview of employee engagement and loyalty.

This survey further reveals how much of an employee pool is content and how much of it isn’t. Therefore, it highlights which employees are happy and which aren’t, along with how to begin implementing changes for a more engaged workplace.

This survey can also be used as a time measurement metric to see how various changes throughout a quarter, year or another period of time affected employee engagement.

The Employee Net Promoter Score Survey has various benefits, such as its short format that requires little to no time from the employees to complete. It can also be expanded with follow-up questions for a more in-depth understanding of the reason behind their score. Thus, this survey allows businesses to understand why employees feel the way they do about their companies and allows them to improve on this front.

It is also simple to create and deploy, though this benefit will depend on the online survey platform businesses use.

The shortness and simplicity of this kind of survey wards off survey fatigue and prevents survey attrition. It is also easy to calculate the results and to use them for actionable insights, along with benchmarking and setting goals to manage employee engagement.

Due to the relative ease of creating this kind of survey, drawing conclusions from its single metric and its ease of participation — it is practical to apply it at continuous intervals.

All in all, the eNPS survey is a succinct and simple way of calculating a critical component of a business: its employee engagement. Understanding the levels of engagement within a workforce allows businesses to understand the reasons behind employee performance, how to improve their engagement and in turn, pave the way for employee loyalty.

How to Calculate the eNPS and its Numerical Significance

As explained in a previous section, the eNPS survey is based on its eponymous eNPS score, which is derived from a scale of 0-10 on the “ultimate question.”

After an employee answers this question based on a number on this scale, their score categorizes them as one of the three eNPS categories: the detractors, passives and promoters.

These categories represent the kinds of employees a business’s employees fall under in terms of their engagement and satisfaction with their company. Each category is based on a rang of scores, rather than just one.

The following explains the three types of eNPS employee categories:

The Detractors

Score from 0-6
Highly dissatisfied employees
Risk spreading negative feedback about a company
Businesses should avoid these the most
Businesses must work the most diligently to improve detractors’ engagement and satisfaction with their business, or else they may burnout, quit and write poor reviews.

The Passives

Score from 7-8
They bear neither negative nor positive feelings towards their employer
Considered mid-range in terms of their feelings towards recommending thor company
They are neither emotionally invested nor disengaged
Passives require a little push to raise their satisfaction and engagement levels. They may leave lukewarm comments about their employer.

The Promoters

Score from 9-10
Highly satisfied and engaged employees
They spread positive feedback about their company
These are the most coveted employees
These employees can become company advocates and improve the reputation of any company.

The eNPS Formula

The eNPS score is never based on one employee. Rather, it is a calculation of all the employees who took part in the survey.

As such, an eNPS score can range from -100 to 100. Scores above zero are considered decent, although company standards will vary. Generally, a score of 10-30 is considered good, and a score of 50 is excellent.

Researchers must first determine the kinds of employees that their survey respondents fall under based on the three categories of detractors, passives and promoters. Then, they can calculate their eNPS based on a particular survey study.

The employee Net Promoter Score uses the following calculation: the number of promoters minus the number of detractors, divided by the total number of respondents, which is thn multiplied by 100.

Ignore the passives, as they are considered neutral.

Therefore the eNPS formula is expressed as:

eNPS= (No. of Promoters – No. of Detractors) / Total Number of Respondents x 100

For example, in a company of 100 employees, 25 rated the company a 9 or 10 (they’re the promoters), 52 rated the company between 0 to 6 (they’re the detractors). Thus, the calculation becomes:

25- 52 = - 27

-27/ 100 = -0.27

-0.27 x 100 = -27%

-27 is a poor score as it is well under 0; businesses should aim to score at 30, or above 0 at the very least.

Using Survey Research to Improve the eNPS Survey Results

Regardless of its eNPS score, a business must look beyond this kind of survey to understand the reasons why employees feel a certain way towards their companies.

To remain in good keeping with employees in general, business owners should conduct an employee feedback survey regularly.

Specifically, they ought to run a pulse survey to understand their employees' sentiments, along with those of their customers and vendors. All of these players are key to sustaining a business, so they must be catered to properly. In order to do that, a business should understand all of their pain points, needs, desires and anything else that relates back to a business.

Survey research provides a strong vehicle for extracting all of these insights and not just on a quantitative basis. Surveys can provide qualitative market research, the kind that provides context and reasoning behind respondents’ answers.

Even in an eNPS survey itself, this survey can provide more than just a means for calculating the eNPS score, as businesses can use it to ask follow-up questions. These include open-ended questions that allow businesses to learn why a respondent answered in a particular way, or provided a particular score of 0-10.

Therefore, other employee surveys, such as those aforementioned, provide keen insight into the minds of employees (and customers). Access to this kind of information enables businesses to make informed decisions and effect critical changes, the kinds that improve employees’ perceptions of their employers/companies and make them more inclined to stay with their company.

In this way, survey research can improve workplaces, cut back on turnover and maintain a positive reputation of a business, especially in terms of its employee relations and general work environment.

Improving Employee Relations and Creating a Positive Work Environment

Data is vital for assessing employee engagement and perceptions at large.

Surveys allow businesses to unearth all kinds of employee perceptions in relation to a company — the kinds they would otherwise not know about. A strong online survey platform can help obtain this kind of information, along with deploying it.

There are virtually no other competent means for obtaining employee feedback in such a quick and anonymous way. One-on-one interviews, for example, are not as useful as surveys, as they strip away the anonymous element, leaving employees unable to answer as honestly as they could. These interviews are also more time-consuming than surveys.

A strong online survey platform offers a powerful solution for creating and administering an eNPS survey and facilitating survey research in general. Such a platform can carry out a vast amount of customer and employee research, allowing businesses access to critical data on many fronts. A strong online survey platform should also include artificial intelligence and quality checks, so that businesses and market researchers only get the finest quality of data.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Why a Business Needs Enterprise Survey Software for Success

When endeavoring the various available market research techniques, a business must rely on enterprise survey software. Given that market research incites business growth and success, businesses ought to channel their growth strategies into a valuable market research tool.

However, many entrepreneurs and businesses forgo the market research process entirely, which leads to business failure. In fact, one of the top reasons that businesses fail is due to the lack of conducting market research.

Therefore, a business must invest into its market research endeavors, as they result in major improvements when it comes to growth and scaling. This is largely due to the fact that this practice involves understanding a target market — the group of customers most likely to buy from a business.

Despite the large swath of free online survey platforms, a business would benefit more from enterprise survey software.

This article explains enterprise survey software and why a business is better-suited with it instead of a basic, free survey tool.

Understanding Enterprise Survey Software

Enterprise survey software is the highest tier of survey software, offering premium functionalities, services and plans. This is to say that this kind of software does not solely refer to survey plans of the enterprise variety, although this is usually one of the options.

However, in regards to its name, it is equipped for large enterprises, although businesses of any size can benefit from it. Unlike a basic survey platform, which offers free services, enterprise survey software provides far greater and powerful survey campaign-building.

Some providers of this kind of software may offer free versions, which are limited iterations of it, meant to give researchers a sample of the software. Others may offer a freemium version, that is, a free version with premium chargers for supplemental features.

Businesses that strongly rely on market research, or intend to gain firsthand insights on their target market or any target population will need to use enterprise survey software. This way, they will have the leeway to tailor their surveys entirely to their likely and send them to the appropriate audiences.

How Enterprise Survey Software Differs from a Basic Online Survey Platform

Enterprise survey software maintains several differences from those of a basic, standard or free online survey platform. All of these differences render enterprise software as the superior option, as each functionality and service carries an advantage in the market research process.

Here are some of the major ways in which this kind of software differs from its free, standard or basic counterparts.

Mobile-first surveys
1. While most companies claim to be mobile-first, most survey software is not ideal for mobile usage, as some question formats are simply not designed for the mobile experience.
2. Enterprise survey software uses a mobile-first approach to ensure easy usage of surveys, the inclusion of the questions you’d see on desktop and more survey incentives offered in native apps (from partner publishers of the platform).
First-Rate Quality checks
1. This kind of software is usually equipped with quality checks to ensure only the highest quality of data is funneled into the surveys’ results.
2. Checks that avoid survey fraud
3. Multiple layers of quality checks to avoid respondents who don’t pay attention to questions.
Random Device Engagement (RDE)
1. A method of randomization and iteration during survey deployment, in which respondents are extracted from their natural digital environments rather than being pre-recruited.
2. River sampling software cannot monitor or track respondents, thus cannot avoid duplicate surveys and other fraudulent activities that skew the data.
3. Provides respondent verification: checks on duplicate respondent IDs via their IP or MAC addresses, Google Advertising and mobile device identifiers.
AI and machine learning
1. Provides automated quality checks, so no post-survey manual labor is required.
2. Quickens the survey sampling process while filtering through and disqualifying sub-par and low-quality data.
3. Removes bots
4. Disqualifies those who don’t complete their surveys or provide gibberish answers, hasty answers or flatlining
A global support network
1. Enterprise survey software providers have global tech support employees working 24 hours, so that researchers are never left without a helping hand.
2. Supports global audiences with round-the-clock assistance and survey available in 46 languages.
An exhaustive survey platform experience
1. The most recognizable and clear-cut distinction between free and enterprise survey software, since the former offers a limited version of what would be a fortified system.
2. Offers a wide variety of questionnaire functionalities: question types, predefined answers, batch answers, advanced skip logic, adding media to questions, recalling information, carrying forward answers
A robust system for all
1. Designed to be used for the democratization of data; all team members should easily access the insights and run surveys
2. Allows you to make your own survey in 3 easy steps
Enhanced dashboard and data visualizations
1. Results are available in various formats: charts, graphs, Excel files, SPSS, crosstabs and more
2. Clearly laid out demographics filters and data pertaining to demographics and screening conditions
SaaS integrations and agile data
1. Integrations with the main dashboard and an external one to reap the capabilities of more than one software provide
2. Provides agile data, a system that ensures smooth collaborations across systems and speed to insights
Data Security and compliance
1. Adhering to all data privacy legislation, including the GDPR
2. Researchers, publishers and respondents can make data requests in regards to personal data, so as to verify that they are comfortable with the data they provide.
3. Specific request types include:
  1. Consent Withdrawal
  2. Access request
  3. Rectification of personal data
  4. Erasure of personal data
  5. Restriction of processing of personal data
  6. Personal data portability request
  7. Objection to the processing of personal data

When to Use Enterprise Survey Software

There are various points at which businesses ought to consult and consolidate with enterprise survey software into their market research endeavors. Whether you begin a new campaign or have gathered secondary research on a topic, it is best to choose enterprise survey software over standard survey platforms.

Why? A business cannot wait to gain results, let alone market research insights to drive such results. A basic survey platform lacks on a multitude of fronts, many of which are divulged in the section describing how this software differs from the enterprise kind.

Additionally, free survey software does not have the capacity to use multiple audiences per survey, nor can it gain a large volume of respondents per survey. This kind of software is therefore far less powerful and this will show in the results.

This is because the results will not offer the same kind of quality in the data, be it from the way respondents are extracted or their responses themselves.

Enterprise-grade software creates enterprise-grade surveys and survey campaigns. Thus, they are far more useful and reliable for any market research campaign, whether you seek to study a particular segment or your target market.

As such, businesses should rely on this kind of software at any point in their market research needs. This breed of software handles the following with ease:

Create a complex system of data based on answers and audience types
Organize complex data into digestible formats
Parse through responses and create test questions to assure respondents are paying attention
Create a robust system of visualizations and analytics
Complete surveys according to all their preset quota in a small window of time

Finding the Correct Online Survey Platform

It has become progressively more important to understand your target market in order to foster customer loyalty and retention. With stiff competition and continuous innovations, businesses must know their customer base inside-out in order to please it.

They can achieve this with the correct online survey platform, so long as it is built on enterprise survey software. This kind of software can level up any research campaign efficiently, reducing the amount of manpower, labor and resources that lower quality software would require.

As such, businesses ought to settle on a single platform in order to centralize their data and create an easy point of reference. This will require them to check just one platform to choose respondents, deploy surveys, create surveys, analyze results and take part in data-driven decision-making or DDM.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Conduct SaaS Market Research Like a Pro

SaaS market research

Conducting SaaS market research is a requisite for business owners, market researchers and marketers who seek business success in the competitive landscape of cloud services.

SaaS remains a booming industry, with upward trends forecasting it to amass $832.1 billion by 2025 in revenue by 2025.

Clearly on the rise, the SaaS industry has surpassed all other cloud services in revenue, including Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS), Cloud Business Process Service (BPaaS) and others.

This is because all sectors are seeing both SaaS innovations and the adoption of SaaS solutions. The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to the dominance and growth of SaaS, as SaaS applications bolster remote working, cutting back on the need to be present in in-person meetings and other work gatherings.

This article explains SaaS market research, allowing professionals of all backgrounds to conduct it to stay well-informed and competitive.

Defining SaaS Market Research

SaaS market research refers to all the market research techniques used to extract up-to-date information on the Software as a Service space, a market of its own.

SaaS does not merely refer to software companies; rather it is a cloud-based service in which applications are run online, eliminating the need to download software onto a desktop or business network. This kind of convenience gave rise to accessibility, operational ease and accessibility, which has largely contributed to its growth and popularity.

To remain in good standing in an increasingly competitive industry, all SaaS companies must conduct market research. However, it is not just the businesses in this market that must conduct SaaS market research.

All businesses that use SaaS products should perform market research on the SaaS market to ensure that they are using the most productive and cost-efficient product.

Market research in this space involves secondary and primary research on the overall industry, along with its changes, trends, target market and key actors — the competitors of a business.

How SaaS Market Research Differs from Technology Market Research

Given that SaaS is a market of its own, it should not be conflated with technology market research, which refers to market research on the overarching tech space. The technology sector is composed of hardware, software and IT services subsectors.

The SaaS market refers to SaaS companies alone, however, they too make up the broader landscape of technology, as they use a kind of technology.

SaaS can run contrary to IT, which can represent hardware and infrastructure, whereas SaaS is solely cloud-based. IT professionals often use SaaS products for a wide range of purposes including governance and operations.

Therefore, IT professionals and providers can benefit from conducting SaaS market research, whereas, SaaS professionals may not need to perform technology market research, as their needs are specifically within the SaaS space.

Secondary Sources for SaaS Market Research

Before conducting primary research, market researchers ought to begin with a general status of the SaaS industry. Secondary research is the ideal means for this, as it covers key information on various aspects of the industry. Best of all, you don’t have to conduct it yourself.

Bear in mind, you should check for research that is as up-to-date as possible, as industries are in a continuous state of change and SaaS is no exception.

If you are not a researcher for a SaaS company, you can still benefit from conducting secondary SaaS research. For example, if you need to justify using a SaaS product for your business, conducting market research can help you do so by providing key stats, figures and facts. These can help you form a business case to purchase a SaaS product for a business you work for.

The following provides critical secondary resources for SaaS market research:

SaaS End User Spending Worldwide Report (2009-2022)
1. A data visualization from Statista on the growth of user spending in the SaaS sector in a 13-year period.
2. A statistical overview of the state of the industry in terms of spending.
50 Biggest Public SaaS Companies in the US
1. Companies presented via tier market cap
2. Updated weekly
3. The page also provides the highlights of the SaaS industry from the previous year.
SaaS Trends and Growth Projections 2021
1. A page rich with various statistics on the trends and changes in the SaaS space.
2. Several stats explain the needs of the industry, invaluable advice for keeping your SaaS afloat. Ex: Half of all SaaS companies rely on user-based pricing for profit.
Marketing Publications Geared towards SaaS
1. Bent on exploring marketing strategies to reach the specific target markets in SaaS.
2. Ex: How SaaS Marketing is Different
3. Ex: Growth Marketing Strategies for SaaS Products
Competitive Analysis
1. Rounding up competitors via keyword searches on SaaS products.
2. News sites that feature press releases from competitors

Primary Sources for SaaS Market Research

While secondary resources provide utility for market analysis, competitive analysis and trends, primary resources allow you to form a deep read of the people who keep your business in business: your target market.

This is because, when you conduct primary research, you are equipped with asking any inquiry you desire, a feat not possible with secondary sources alone. While they are necessary to analyze, they will not answer your specific questions — at least not all of them.

You’ll find that in some instances, you may even study your competitors firsthand.

The following provides critical secondary resources for SaaS market research:

Focus Group
1. Provides s group discussion on topics with moderation from a host
2. Offers an intimate setting, as it involves no more than 6-10 participants
One-on-one interviews
1. The most intimate kind of primary research
2. Can be difficult to find participants, even in the age of Zoom meetings
Direct talks with competitors
1. Via competitors chats, along with emails and phone calls as their prospects
2. Require stealth in order to extract information without revealing yourself as a competitor
Customer Development
1. The mid-section of the lean startup model
2. A structure used to confirm that a product satisfies the needs of a target market.
3. Dictates how startups must form and be managed, to effectively launch a product.
Online surveys
1. Can be deployed to a massive network
2. Allow for respondent anonymity
3. Can be set in a wide variety of manners such as the examples below and many more
4. Allow you to ask both quantitative and qualitative questions in a number of formats

Excelling in the SaaS Space In Spite of Stiff Competition

Whether you work for a startup or a long-established SaaS business, your company can benefit from conducting SaaS market research. This task is designed to be performed periodically, as technology moves at the speed of light, taking its customer needs and overall industry with it.

To stay ahead of the curve and offer a valuable product and customer experience, you should invest in primary and secondary resources alike. As aforementioned, certain secondary sources are free, while others aren’t.

Primary sources are seldom free, unless you manage to land a complimentary interview, or pose as a prospect on chats, emails and phone calls with competitors.

However, they are often the most insightful, as it put the researcher at the reins of the research, allowing them to ask any question they desire for a market research campaign. An online survey tool is one of the most potent means for garnering primary research, as it enables researchers to create various survey types and distribute them to relevant respondents. A proper online survey platform will deploy surveys to a wide network of popular websites and apps, offer random survey sampling methods and a host of other features to facilitate market research.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Reach the Correct Target Market Sample to Understand Your Customers

A target market sample to market research is what a target market is to a business: of critical importance. This is because market researchers must conduct research on the correct sample of the population.

When it comes to business, this sample is largely made up of a business’s target market, i.e., the segment of the population most likely to buy from the business. In order to build effective survey studies and perform valuable market research, you need to specifically examine the target market sample.

Finding this sample can be difficult, let alone contacting it. This article explains the concept of the target market sample, including how to properly determine its members and reach out to them for your market research needs.

Defining a Target Market Sample

A target market sample is a kind of market research sample; this concept denotes a group of people who participate in your study, representing an entire targeted population.

A target market sample is a specific kind of market research sample. As its name implies, it is a sample that represents your target market, as it is made of the people in your target market. If you do not know how to identify your target market, conducting market research is the best way to accurately determine it.

In particular, effective survey studies can help you determine the members of this group. You can further divide the group into specific segments by way of market segmentation. While this practice is a critical subset in marketing, it too can be conducted via market research, including survey research as a primary method.

A target market sample works symbiotically with market research, which is to say that one relies on the other to achieve its best performance. This is due to the fact that you need to be acquainted with this sample, as learning more about it is crucial for your market research.

Concurrently, performing market research correctly will help you define your target market sample, allowing you to cater to this group correctly, which in turn will increase sales and profits.

The Importance of the Target Market Sample in Market Research

As aforementioned, a target market sample and market research share a symbiotic relationship. A target market sample is critical to market research on several other grounds. First off, it is used in both probability and non-probability sampling.

These are the two major sampling sources in survey sampling methods along with other market research methods. For example, you ought to conduct studies on your target market sample during other primary research such as interviews, VoC programs and focus groups, along with secondary research like trade publications, statistics providers and verticalized websites.

This group is not merely applicable to these forms of research; rather it is necessary. Here are several ways that prove the importance of garnering and studying your target market sample.

Before studying your target market, you must ensure that you are reaching the correct people. A target market sample comprises them.
Wasted efforts are too costly and time-consuming, thus, you have to be in touch with your target market.
You need to understand your customer base for all marketing and business endeavors.
Understanding your target market samples assures that you reach the correct people for future research and non-research undertakings.
This sample allows you to form data-backed characteristics about your customer base, as you can safely vouch their representation of your target market.
You can build personas by reaching and studying the correct sample.
You can perform qualitative research along with statistical research
Having access to this sample means you will be able to make informed predictions about your target market.

Determining Your Target Market Sample

Given that one relies on the other, you must conduct market research properly and define your target market sample accurately before proceeding.

To identify your target market, you must first conduct some secondary research. Although this action is best-suited for startups and those new to the business world, long-established businesses can still benefit from this, as consumer interests change.

For example, not too long ago, Facebook was considered a social hub for college students and the younger generation. But in the current year of 2021, 46% of older Americans use Facebook. As a matter of fact, Facebook is the most-used social media platform among seniors.

You’ll find research on your target market and some of its segments in secondary sources such as brand literature (reports, case studies, blog posts, articles), news sites (in your niche) and sites dedicated to market research.

While secondary research is a good starting point, it does allow you to fully capture the makeup of your target market. Therefore secondary research alone is inadequate for obtaining your true target market sample.

Instead, you must learn who comprises your target market sample via primary research. There are various market research tools available, but they are far from equivalence.

In order to form the makeup of your target market sample, that is, before, you reach out to it for concrete marketing campaigns, you must first employ an easy-to-use tool for such a campaign, the kind that allows you to amass their key traits and preferences.

Survey research is a rescuing aid, as you can survey suspected members of your target market (based on previous secondary research) to understand them better. In such a case, you do not need to set up a strict screening portion on demographics, as you are still learning which demographics to use in your sample.

Create these initial surveys to learn more about your suspected target population. Search for trends among ages, geographic location, ethnic groups and cultures, along with lifestyles. This will help you get a feel of who is most interested in your niche and most importantly, your product, service or experience.

During your survey data analysis, segment your respondents based on their opinions, preferences and demographics information. You can disregard the demographics who show little to no interest in your offering.

Continue this process should you require market segmentation, to further organize your target market into smaller segments. Segmenting your customers is critical for providing personalization.

With these actions, you are able to identify who to include in your market research or survey sample.

How to Reach the Correct Target Market Sample

Secondary sources can appear to be arbitrary sources of research, whereas primary sources allow you to wield full control — at least they should, in market research. As such, you should conduct surveys to extract data from the correct target market sample.

Once you’ve identified your target market sample members via secondary and primary research, you can then safely conduct market research on them for a variety of macro-applications.

These include campaigns in the following:

customer development
general marketing
advertising, branding
customer experience (CX)
customer satisfaction

Start small by testing a general portion of your target market. This involves survey participants bound by common demographic categories. You do not need to delve into psychographic and behavioral traits just yet.

Instead, ask the more general population of your target market sample a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions. This will help you map out who they are beyond their general demographics. As such, this can be seen as an extension of determining your sample members, but to a far more precise degree.

When you get a better sense of your target market, you should then conduct more granular surveys to understand their needs. After this, you ought to create quantitative surveys in order to form statistical representations of your target market.

You can switch between quantitative and qualitative surveys, or conduct surveys that include a mesh of both. The more surveys you run on your target market sample, the more meticulously will you be able to define it.

The more accurately-defined your target market sample is, the more accurate and relevant it will be for your market research. Fortifying your market research will lead you to make better business decisions.

Satisfying to Your Customer Base

Satisfying your customer base is no easy feat. Businesses have invested long and hard into marketing. But you cannot deliver a valuable marketing campaign without understanding your target market to a T.

Thus, you need to perform continuous market research on this group of people. To do so, you must understand who constitutes your target market sample, the market research sample of your focus. A strong survey platform will help you achieve this objective.

The correct online survey platform will allow you to painlessly identify your target market sample and deploy surveys to it. After all, if you cannot reach out to your sample and extract data, then it is of no use to your business.

Thus, when you conduct market research on the members who belong in your target market sample, you will avoid useless and inaccurate research, the kind that offers no value to your company. Surveys help you ward off this risk.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

The Importance of Market Research for Any Business

The importance of market research should not be glossed over by businesses, yet not all businesses apply it to their marketing efforts or even to their strategic planning process.

This missed opportunity has grave consequences for companies of all sizes; even large successful companies have lost billions in revenue from failing to conduct market research. Thus, all companies must conduct market research, whether they’re fledgling startups or long-established businesses.

This article expounds on the importance of market research so that businesses and researchers understand its value. It also shows how to conduct this kind of research to reach and maintain various business goals.

Defining Market Research

Market research is a specialized kind of research process; it refers to the organized methods by which an organization collects information about its target market and overall industry to inform its go-to-market gain continual intelligence on its industry at large.

Although used interchangeably with market analysis, they are not the same practice. Market analysis refers to the broader practice of studying a sector, industry or niche. This kind of analysis uses current and historical observations to make forecasts.

Market analysis primarily delves into existing business practices and products to plan for future business endeavors. Using raw data, market analysis gatherers a large supply of impersonal facts and figures. Thus this kind of research is far more general.

Make research, on the other hand, is more specialized in its design and approach, as it primarily focuses on examining a particular target market and its even more specific segments. Thus, it is far more customer-centric than market analysis.

Although the primary focus of market research is on a business’s customer base, it too involves elements of market analysis. Some market analysis projects in market research involve turning to secondary research as a means of understanding the broader environment of a market before narrowing the focus to its customer segments.

Market research can be conducted by amassing secondary resources or by conducting primary research. The latter may include using an in-house research team, which conducts market research techniques entirely on its own such as in field research, in exploratory research, experimental research or other methods.

It may also include an in-house research team that implements syndicated research or custom research. These refer to the external research methods of the receiving company, in which a market research provider conducts primary research for the business. In short, these two forms of research are a kind of outsourcing method for market research, as they represent services that extract customer data.

In syndicated research, a research project is funded by various companies and conducted by a research firm, which owns all the resulting data. Alternatively, custom research is a form of research in which a single business works with a market research provider on a project and funds it entirely on its own. Thus, the resulting data is also proprietary to the business.

The Importance of Market Research

The importance of market research is manifold. It provides various uses and can be used with multiple macro-applications and subsets of marketing, along with business needs as a whole.

The overarching umbrella of importance in market research is the ability to understand customers to the fullest extent, which includes: their needs, desires, opinions, frustrations, aversions, inclinations and other intelligence.

Understanding all of these factors in relation to a target market helps a business attract and retain customers. Both aspects are of utmost importance to a business, but customer retention is especially important, in that existing customers are far more likely to buy from a business.

In fact, the likelihood of selling to existing customers is 60% to 70%. Additionally, retained customers are 50% more likely to buy a business’s new product. Despite these figures which clearly illustrate the weight of customer retention, only 18% of businesses focus on customer acquisition, while 44% of businesses focus on customer retention.

Market research is also crucial for maintaining competitiveness. A business cannot thrive in a competitive landscape when it fails to do the necessary research to adapt to trends, new product/service upgrades and most importantly, customer needs. In fact, 9% of businesses lose their customers to their competitors when they don’t conduct market research to improve their customer loyalty and retention.

Market research helps businesses assess their customer satisfaction, whether they examine the satisfaction of existing customers or all those in their target market. As such, businesses can keep continuous tabs on customer preferences to understand how to better serve them, whether it is via products, services, customer support or digital experience (DX) across all digital channels.

Businesses can also learn customer sentiment in relation to the industry at large. This will help companies grasp their standing within their industries and in relation to their competition.

Moreover, conducting market research does not merely help businesses understand their customers' opinions and preferences. It also helps determine the exact makeup of a business’s target market via target market surveys and market segmentation. The latter identifies the subsets that make up a general target market, allowing brands to create granular messaging and campaigns to both acquire customers and retain them.

Furthermore, market research helps companies on the strategy side of a business, in that by studying their market and niche, they can devise critical documents and strategies to both launch a business, as well as propel it forward. For example, startups can use market research for business, while companies that have been in business for several years ought to use market research for their strategic planning process. The latter helps businesses map out their goals, better understand their ranking and establish practical objectives.

Finally, the customer-specific intelligence that businesses gain with market research helps support a variety of macro applications, from general marketing, to branding campaigns, to advertising projects, along with various studies such as longitudinal studies, cross-sectional studies, retrospective studies, prospective studies and others.

How to Conduct Market Research

There are many ways to conduct market research as there are various market research techniques. The two major classifications of market research are secondary and primary research.

Secondary research involves gathering and analyzing already available sources of customer data and other relevant information about a market. Secondary research can exist in a number of public resources, such as:

Government resources: on government websites and databases
- Examples: The Census Bureau, The U.S. Small Business Administration, The Bureau of Economic Analysis and more
Enterprise sources: trade associations, the Directory of Associations
Research Associations: Composed of research analysts, they provide businesses with reports on specific subsectors of an industry.
- Examples: Forrester, Statista, Gartner, IBISWorldMintel: Market intelligence
Industry blogs and content-oriented Websites: Online publications on the latest updates, trends and breaking news
- Examples: Ars Technica, The Business of Fashion, Grocery Drive, Realtor Magazine
- SEO and SEM Reporting: Tools for SEO (organic rankings efforts) and SEM (paid search)
- Examples: Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc.

Primary research refers to the various methods of amassing self-conducted research. Researchers can obtain primary research in a direct way, that is, by interviewing their target market themselves or by outsourcing.

Primary research methods include:

Phone interviews
In-store and in-person interviews
Field research
Mail-in surveys
Focus groups
Syndicated research
- The market research firm will be the proprietor of the extracted data
An online survey platform
- The business is the sole owner of their extracted data

The following provides the steps that a business should take when conducting market research:

Begin by conducting secondary research, which gives you insights into the broader market and niche. Use any of the above secondary sources, along with others.
Look for information about the customers who belong in your target market.
Find the patterns in your target market through the secondary sources. Keep an eye out for their demographics, psychographics, habits and behaviors.
1. These will help you make hypotheses about your target market and how to best approach it for a number of campaigns.
Next, conduct primary research via your method of choice. To do so, identify your most pressing curiosities from the secondary research you conducted.
Tie your inquiries into a specific campaign or macro application.
1. For example, do you need to conduct a longitudinal study to understand buying habits, or a study to test the effectiveness of ads?
Conduct your primary studies with a set amount of participants.
1. Surveys help you reach thousands of consumers in your target market.
After you’ve gathered a significant amount of relevant information, perform an analysis.
1. This ought to be done by more than one person within a business as different minds interpret data differently and can thus lead to different conclusions and ideas on moving forward.
Then, ask yourself if your study is complete or you need additional data.
1. If you opt for the latter, create another campaign and conduct further primary research.
Analyze your primary data, along with your secondary data.
1. Does the primary data align with the information you gathered from secondary sources? If so, it can point to repetitive behaviors or ongoing occurrences among customers.
2. If not, consider the significance of the changes. Have the customers changed or has the industry changed which has led to the difference in findings.
3. Additionally, primary research may not always align with secondary research, given that the business is at liberty to form its own questions and delve into its own curiosities and priorities.
Draw conclusions and create a plan of action to reach your target market, whether it involves advertising, content strategy or any other campaign or change.

The Importance of a Strong Market Research Platform

In summary, market research is a crucial set of activities that businesses of all sizes and stages must conduct in order to better understand their industries and most importantly, their target market.

It identifies how customers view a business and allows businesses to identify and resolve gaps in customer expectations. As such, implementing a strong market research tool is an absolute must. While there are many market research tools, none are quite as potent in reaching thousands of people in a target market as online surveys.

Thus, a business should choose a robust online survey platform, one which makes it easy to design and deploy surveys, along with distributing surveys across a vast pool of digital properties. This will ensure that businesses have easy access to valuable customer data — the kind that approaches customers naturally in their digital environments, instead of being pre-recruited via email or survey panels.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

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