Diving Into the Customer Retention Survey to Scale Your Business

The customer retention survey is a critical market research survey for business success. As its name implies, it allows businesses to both understand and boost their customer retention.

In today’s mobile-first world, in which experience is king and agile data is on-demand, customer retention takes precedence over customer acquisition — at least it should, in order to scale your business. As another term for growth, “scaling” may conjure up customer acquisition, when in fact, customer retention largely contributes to scaling.

Customer retention is more important as a long-term strategy for numerous reasons. A mere 5% increase in customer retention boosts profits by 25-95%. It costs 16 times more to build a long-term relationship with a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer. Thus, businesses ought to monitor this aspect of their business.

The customer retention survey helps you do just that. This article delves into the customer retention survey, its chief types and illustrates how to create one so that you establish loyal customers to scale your business.

Defining Customer Retention

Customer retention is the process of building relationships with existing customers to ensure that they continue making purchases and patronizing a business.

In opposition with customer acquisition and lead generation, customer retention involves engaging the same group of customers to strengthen business ties with them, as opposed to making efforts to capture new customers (who may not become repeat customers).

As such, customer retention involves strategies that retain the portion of your target market that has converted at least once. It is the driving force behind customer loyalty. As a matter of fact, customer loyalty and customer retention share a symbiotic relationship, as loyal customers will convert more (inciting retention) and customers you’ve retained become more loyal.

In this way, customer retention is also the key factor behind customer lifetime value or CLV, which refers to the total value a customer will contribute to a business during their lifetime relationship with that business.

A business must forge customer retention, as 93% of customers are more likely to be retained by companies with excellent customer service. Customer retention is thus a vehicle for a continuous flow of revenue.

The Importance of Customer Retention for All Businesses

Dovetailing off of the previous section, customer retention is a necessity on several key fronts, such as building customer loyalty, bolstering customer lifetime value and maintaining a steady and sufficient flow of revenue.

If the above section did not provide enough reasoning as to why businesses need customer retention, the following includes several more advantages of maintaining strong customer retention.

It’s cost-effective: The cost of acquiring a new customer is more expensive than retaining an existing one.
1. As aforesaid in the intro, building long-term relationships with new customers is 16 times more expensive than nurturing a relationship with an existing customer.
It’s profitable: Businesses of all sizes can earn higher profits from fostering customer retention.
1. 65% of a business’s sales come from returning customers.
It creates long-term success: Too often, businesses focus their strategy on the here and now, as it forges faster sales. While this may appear profitable for the short term, it is not realistic for the long term.
1. Customer retention results in lasting relationships between companies and their customers, which forecasts continuous business success.
Customers become business advocates: When a business forms sufficient customer retention, its customers go beyond the role of customers. Rather, they funnel their loyalty into marketing endeavors. These include:
1. Writing positive reviews across forums, social media, review sites and more.
2. Word-of-mouth referrals
Retained customers are more forgiving: Although a whopping 17% of customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience, retained customers won’t, as they are more forgiving.
1. Loyal customers are six times more likely to forgive companies for a bad experience.
Your business can experiment more: Whether it’s for innovation of a product or service, or simply a change in branding direction, businesses with higher customer retention are more secure to try new things on their customers.
1. Loyal customers are more willing to explore new offerings from a company it trusts.
A relief for employees: A loss of customers or a decline in retention can take a toll on employees, especially those that deal with customers directly (sales, customer success in a B2B company).
1. With strong customer retention, employees have less to worry about and are more equipped to perform optimally.

Defining the Customer Retention Survey

Retaining customers should be an objective of priority for businesses, as explained in the above sections. But in order to do so, your business needs a solid customer retention strategy. The customer retention survey is the most apt tool to keep track of and achieve strong customer retention.

Specifically, the customer retention survey is a kind of survey that provides customer intelligence so that businesses have a grasp of their own standing in their customer retention.

Additionally, this survey monitors customer sentiment in relation to a business, so it can proactively build customer retention strategies.

Because customer retention involves a variety of factors, from the product, to the customer experience (CX) to customer representative engagement and so much more, there are various ways to construct such a survey. Furthermore, there are several ways to categorize this survey type.

The Three Main Kinds of Customer Retention Surveys

Since there are several key factors and subfactors that form (or break) custom retention, businsineses should be aware that there is no single way to establish a customer retention survey. However, it can be classified into the smaller categories that build up its concept.

The following explains the three main types of customer retention surveys:

The Periodic Customer Satisfaction Survey

Being able to retain customers relies on maintaining their continued satisfaction with your company. As such, businesses ought to use the customer satisfaction survey. This kind of survey helps gauge customer satisfaction with a company at large.

It has various iterations. These include:

1. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey
  1. Allows customers to measure the likelihood of recommending your company to others, on a scale of 1 to 10.
2. The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Survey
  1. Rates a customer’s fulfillment in a particular situation. This is where you can apply this survey to a wide range of applications, such as interactions with a salesperson or with a product feature.
3. The Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey
  1. Measures the amount of effort a customer had to take in an action. It focuses mainly on the process of achieving an end result.
4. Visual Rating Surveys
  1. Permits customers to express their satisfaction with graphics as opposed to word or numbers.

Each of these surveys offers a different way to measure customer satisfaction. As such, they each apply their eponymous metrics, while visual ratings surveys use visual markers to rate satisfaction. These may include stars, hearts and emojis.

As this category of survey dictates by its name, it should be fielded periodically. This is how to keep track of your customers in regard to retention. Since customer needs, opinions and desires tend to change, you need to be aware of these changes so that you always provide services that delight.

The Post-Purchase Evaluation Survey

This kind of survey category involves gathering feedback from customers shortly after they convert. After all, to build customer retention, you need to monitor your customers at various points of their customer journey, even after they reached the bottom of the sales funnel and bought from your business.

Usually, this kind of survey is conducted once a customer has either made a purchase, or received a product or service. Although this kind of survey is typically deployed via a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, there are other ways to launch it.

It can exist in a more stealthy manner, that is, across various websites and mobile apps. By using a screening question that asks whether a site user has recently made a purchase, an online survey tool can deploy this survey to the masses (if it serves a wide network).

The Customer Experience (CX) Survey

As aforesaid, experience is king. Gone are the days in which the product and service alone were the main points of competition among brands. In order to retain your customers, you must keep them regularly satisfied.

A product or service alone won’t cut this, no matter how good your offering is. This is because it is not practical for customers to frequently make purchases, unless you offer products/services for everyday use and at reasonable prices, or, the customer persona is one with little buying pain.

The customer experience (CX) survey is a survey specifically used to obtain feedback on the CX or UX of customers. This can include intelligence on digital customer experience, such as on websites, mobile sites, apps and other digital properties, or physical experiences such as in-store or at an event.

Fomenting Customer Retention With the Best Survey Platform

All brands and small businesses can measure and strengthen their customer retention by way of market research. When you understand your customers’ desires and needs, you are setting your business up for success, as you’ll understand how to serve them.

But to properly monitor and build your customer retention, you need a strong online survey tool, the kind that makes it effortless to create a customer retention survey. Such a survey can explore far beyond customer needs, as it can clearly paint their points of contention and areas of satisfaction that your business provides.

Remember, while new customers increase your sales temporarily, loyal customers will continually frequent your business, giving way to a constant stream of revenue, thereby allowing you to scale. In order to foster customer retention, you need to monitor your customers on a periodic basis. To do this successfully, you need to use a reliable online survey platform.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Understanding Causal Research & Why It's Important for Your Business

Causal research is one of the foremost kinds of research used with survey research. As such, it is employed across various verticals and can be implemented for any market research project.

Logically following correlational research and by following suit to it, it seeks to understand the relationship between variables — but it takes this pursuit further.

This is because causal research is chiefly involved with finding the cause and effect relationships between variables, as opposed to simply scouting their existence. Once researchers establish that a relationship between two variables exists, they ought to move to causal research to discover if and how they affect one another.

This article explains causal research in full detail, from what it is, to its importance, which surveys are most apt for it and more.

Defining Causal Research

Also called causal-comparative research, causal research seeks to find causal relationships, that is, cause and effect relationships between two or more variables.

Causal research is the latter form of an overall research process, as it follows after correlational research in the sequence of exploratory, descriptive and correlational research. This is because these research methods establish the details and aspects of the research process that lead up to causal research.

Although correlational research finds and explains the relationships between two variables, it does not prove that either of those variables causes the other to behave in some way or vice versa.

Causal research, on the other hand, has the capacity to determine whether one variable affects another variable.

As such, causal research carries two objectives, both of which are concerned with a possible causal relationship:

Discovering which variables constitute the cause and which the effect.
Establishing the relationship of the causal variables and their ensuing effect.

The Key Aspects of Causal Research

There are various characteristics that form causal research in addition to its two main objectives. Understanding these is key to deciding whether you need to perform this research, along with how to go about it.

The following enumerates the critical aspects of this kind of research:

It entails discovering the existence of cause and effect relationships between two or more variables, via conducting experiments or testing markets in a controlled setting.
It’s more scientific than exploratory and descriptive research.
Market researchers conduct experiments, or test markets, in a controlled setting.
Involves going beyond simply finding an association or correlation between the variables.
Studies how a dependent variable is affected by independent variables.
To convey causality, the variable relationship is framed as: If A happens, then B will take place/ happen.
It uses a directional hypothesis, in which one (or a set of) independent variables affect another set of variables, known as dependent variables, in a particular manner.
The studies help researchers understand both the course of the relationship of the variables and its forecasted effects.
It produces quantitative research and is methodically planned, designed, and formatted,
It yields statistically conclusive data. The objective of causal research is to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships

Why Your Business Needs Causal Research

With causal research, market researchers can predict hypothetical occurrences and outcomes. This allows a business to create a business plan most beneficial to the company.

Causal research offers an advantage for businesses in that, learning how one variable impacts another helps predict the effects of all kinds of business matters in cause and effect relationships.

This allows companies to inspect and analyze a business strategy before launching it. As such, understanding the causal relationships before enacting this strategy ensures that companies avoid ineffective and costly campaigns.

Additionally, it helps companies discover the variable relationships with favorable outcomes for businesses, empowering them to make educated changes.

Causal research is necessary, as it uses pre-existing data to unearth relationships. This helps find causative variables from a period of time. For example, brands can look into how weather patterns affected in-store versus online shopping from several months ago. They can then compare it to current weather conditions and behaviors.

This particular study helps establish a forecast on how similar weather situations will affect the two forms of shopping.

The causal relationships discovered in this study show businesses how to prepare for certain weather conditions and which form of shopping — digital versus in-store is most auspicious for revenue and which one tends to lag.

Understanding the causal relationships in this scenario allows businesses to better plan for each situation, along with avoiding certain efforts in response.

There are many other independent or predictor variables that can take hold on dependent, aka, response variables in the business realm. In this sector specifically, these are some of the key independent and dependent variables:

Key Independent Variables

Prices
Digital user experience (DX) such as new site features
Advertisements
Marketing activity (SEO, SEM, social media announcements, retargeting, etc.)
Season
Inventory (new products or upgrades)
Interactions with sales agents

Key Dependent variables (which businesses depend on to be in their favor):

Sales
Demand
VoC feedback (whether positive or negative)
Site traffic
In-store visits
Revenue
Time spent on a website, bounce rates, etc.

An Example of Causal Research for Business

The previous section included an example of how a business can use causal research to their advantage. There are plenty of other instances that require conducting causal research. The following is another example of causal research in business.

For example, to consolidate its fashion market research, an apparel brand considers studying its own business. Specifically, it seeks to determine and measure the impact of changing the color of a signature product.

Let’s say, the brand carries a signature black faux leather jacket and wants to measure the impact of changing its color to beige. The research obtained in this causal study would prove whether or not changing the color on a major product would affect its sales.

Other forms of businesses, including B2B businesses, can follow suit in their causal research, studying any of the independent variables aforementioned and how they affect the dependent variables.

Causal Research Survey Examples

There are various types of surveys you can use in causal research, however, surveys themselves do not prove causality. Causal research is largely dependent on conducting experiments. It is through these experiments that the research can deduce a cause and effect.

Nonetheless, here are some of the survey types to include in your research campaign.

To really connect the dots between cause and effect, we needed to create an experiment. This would include different renditions of the marketing collaterals, different markets, customers at different stages in the purchase cycle, and actions taken by competitors.

The quantitative survey
1. Discovers the aspects of statistical significance within variables.
2. Helpful in that causal research is quantitative in essence.
The retrospective survey
1. Delves into past events, occurrences and attitudes in regards to the variables.
2. Shows whether the variables changed and how so.
The prospective survey
1. Can find causative elements between variables over a period of time.
2. Useful for studying variables to form predictions and understand outcomes.
The customer experience survey
1. Helps businesses zero in on variables that contribute to or result from certain kinds of customer experiences.
2. Allows businesses to test CX in relation to the responses from this survey.
The pulse survey
1. Measures various matters critical in a business or organization; surveys employees.
2. Deployed more frequently, so variables can always be continually tracked.
The customer satisfaction survey
1. Especially useful when bringing new products/services into the market to compare them with previous ones.
2. Features 4 subtypes of unique surveys.

How Causal Research Differs from Correlational, Exploratory and Experimental Research

Causal research shares some similarities with some of the other major forms of research, most notably, with correlational and experimental research; however, it is significantly disparate.

Regarding its comparisons to correlational research, while both forms of research study the relationships between variables, causal research goes beyond finding the relationships between variables. It involves uncovering which variable serves as the causal agent (the independent variable) while which is the one being affected (the dependent one).

As such, it involves conducting experiments that manipulate variables in a controlled environment. On the contrary, correlational research does not apply any alterations or conditioning to variables. Instead, it is a purely observational research method.

It detects whether there is a correlation between only 2 variables, whereas causal research can study several at a time. Correlational research can determine that there is no correlation, a positive one or a negative one, yet these relationships do not mean that one variable affects another.

Exploratory research is vastly different from correlational research, as it forms the very foundation of a research problem and establishes a hypothesis for further research. As such, it is conducted as the very first kind of research around a new topic and does not fixate on variables.

Descriptive research, like exploratory research and unlike causal research is conducted early on in the entire research process, following exploratory research. Like exploratory research, it seeks to paint a picture of a problem or phenomenon, as it zeros in an already-established issue and delves further, in pursuit of all the details and conditions surrounding it.

Descriptive research, unlike causal research, only observes; as such, it does not manipulate variables or involve using a control group. It is also not as focused on variables as is causal research; it can be used to inspect and understand various components of research issues.

Experimental research, despite its comparisons with causal research, varies significantly from it. This form of research is propelled by way of a hypothesis, which is used to convey an expected relation between 2 more variables. It implements a scientific research design in which variables are measured, calculated and then compared.

Some research designs employ no manipulation of independent variables and these are used after the effect is uncovered.

While it is primarily concerned with an experiment to confirm a hypothesis, causal research seeks to find whether one variable affects another and how so.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Causal Research

Causal research offers several benefits for researchers and businesses. However, as with all other research methods, it too carries a few disadvantages that researchers should understand.

The Advantages

Allows researchers to determine whether the statistical relationship between the two variables found in correlational research has a cause and effect connection
The ability to delve into more than 2 variables and make predictions.
Can identify the reasons behind various processes.
The ability to assess the impacts of changes on existing occurrences, processes, phenomena, etc.
Can prove or disprove a hypothesis as well as drive the research needed for broadly experimental research.
Carries the advantages of replication if it is necessary for the studies.
The systematic selection of subjects gives way to greater levels of internal validation.
Avoids confusion, as it requires testing all the variables that may be influencing the dependent variables to derive accurate results.
Finds the causes behind relationships in variables, which attains the gap in correlational research.
It is considered conclusive research, thus requiring little to no follow-up research or experimentation.

The Disadvantages

It can fall prey to coincidences, in which similar such relationships and results don’t occur again.
It takes a while to complete and can be expensive.
It is difficult to find conclusions due to the impact of a wide scope of factors and variables present in a particular environment.
Casuality can be inferred, but cannot be proved with 100% certainty.
It is subject to contamination (influences from variables that are not studied).

How to Conduct Causal Research

Causal research is often the final form of research conducted in the research process and is considered conclusive research. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to plan the research with strict parameters and objectives.

You must clearly lay out what you are trying to prove to avoid bias and dubiousness. Use the findings in exploratory, descriptive and correlational research to enter into the causal research stage.

The objective in this form of research is to unveil the variable that is causing a behavior or phenomenon — the cause, along with the ensuing behavior/phenomenon itself — the effect.

This research reveals which variable is which, along with the direction of the relationship between the variables and their predicted effects.

Here are the steps in conducting causal research:

1. Find the purpose of the study.
2. Ask a question to guide the study.
3. Lay down a hypothesis, i.e., the outcome you expect.
4. Find the support of the hypothesis.
5. You can gather this conclusion as the following: if one thing happens, another will occur as a result. This requires three critical things to occur.
  1. Temporal Sequence: The cause must take place before the effect. NOt all correlations will clearly point to this, as the suspected effect may occur before the cause and thereby be unrelated to a cause and effect relationship.
  2. Concomitant Variation: When the cause changes, there should also be a change in the effect. Ex: If a brand’s ad spend is cut and sales plummet, you can expect the cause behind reduced sales comes from the reduction in ad spending.
  3. Ending Spurious Correlations: Refers to a common misinterpretation of cause and effect and happens when something thought to be the cause of an effect is actually caused by another variable (unconsidered).
6. Conduct the experiment in a controlled setting.
7. Manipulate the independent variable(s) to find their effect on the suspected dependent variables.
8. Use a control, an independent variable that you don’t manipulate to use as a point of comparison between manipulated and non-manipulated variables.
9. Jot down all changes you find within the manipulated and controlled variables, along with the changes in relation to the dependent variables.
10. Conduct surveys to add more depth to your research, as they can find certain causes and effects or confirm the findings in your experiment.

Using Causal Research and Going Further

To summarise, causal research allows businesses to understand how current actions and behaviors now will affect it in the future by identifying the cause and effect relationship between variables. This is extremely beneficial for a variety of matters in the business world.

This research can determine the effectiveness of various marketing initiatives, campaigns and collaterals, along with virtually all other changes in a business, such as address change, introducing a new product, offering different promotions and more.

Given the prowess of forming predictions that causal research offers, businesses can use the insights beyond understanding cause and effect. It can form future marketing and advertising strategies, along with testing new ideas that relate or involve the variables from the research.

Although surveys don’t make up the entirety or even the majority of causal research, they can bolster any hypothesis or suspected course of action. As a business, you ought to employ them via a strong online survey platform that allows you to set up numerous surveys and survey campaigns.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving Into the Brand Equity Survey for Branding and Building Loyalty

The brand equity survey is a kind of survey that helps brands make sense of a difficult marketing concept to quantify, that of brand equity. Despite its murky identification, it is crucial for business success.

This marketing concept hinges on the sway a brand has over its market — not just its target market, but all the consumers in a particular market. As such, this concept alludes to the influence a brand has, particularly the kind that elevates its status and yields success.

While not all brands can be leaders in their space, they should all strive to achieve some degree of brand equity, as 59% of consumer prefer to buy from familiar brands, even in the case of purchasing new products.

This article explains brand equity, how to measure it, achieve it and how a brand equity survey can be of great use.

Defining Brand Equity

Brand equity is a marketing term that describes the value that a brand produces from having a recognizable name, anchored in the idea that well-known and reputable brands garner greater success.

Brand equity refers to recognizability — and all that it encompasses, such as the volume of sway a brand carries in the minds of its target market and all consumers making up a particular market.

The notion of brand equity renders the value of a brand, specifically the perceived value a brand has, one that makes consumers favor it over that of another. As such, brand equity is also used to contrast brands with a positive brand equity against those that produce generic name products.

Although this term is intangible, it is the driver of the financial success of companies, as it derives more than just recognition for a brand, but rather an additional layer of value due to a renowned name.

The Importance of Brand Equity

Brand equity carries a great deal of weight in the success of a company. To piggyback off of the section above, the following explains why brand equity is of chief importance for a brand, despite being intangible and difficult to fully identify within a brand.

Brand equity is important because it is far more than just a good product, service or experience. It is the added value of having a well-known name, particularly, one with a good reputation.

When a brand has positive brand equity, it easily distinguishes itself from generic name products and services. The marketing importance of this is evidently clear, given that brands should always attempt to theirs apart from others.

But there’s an even greater benefit from achieving brand equity: brands with brand equity can charge more for their products and services than can the generic products or other competitors.

Customers willingly pay more for higher-priced products if they are from a brand with positive brand equity. This benefit alone justifies the need for brand equity, as many customers base their purchases on reducing their pain of paying. This concept dictates that consumers prefer to pay less, especially when offered the same types of products.

When a brand can liberally charge more, given that customers will prefer it over brands with little to no brand equity, sales figures also increase. Thus, it builds higher profits along with more sales.

A higher degree of brand equity also yields higher influence for a company. This can lead to more viable partnerships, as big-name companies would much rather work with other well-renowned brands and have the monetary means to do so.

A rather unexpected benefit of high brand equity is the ability to recruit talent much more easily, as a brand’s recognition plays a major role in how job seekers assess a possible near-future job. Aside from the trust that brand equity builds from its familiarity, it also affects the pride of the people that associate with it — the job seekers, in this case.

When a brand has high brand equity, job seekers will naturally want to associate with it, thereby gravitating towards working at such a brand over another.

In short, brand equity is the key objective of branding market research and general branding efforts.

It is also a key goal for marketing as a goal. Although the highest achievement of marketing is achieving customer loyalty and retention, brand equity is a key factor in this objective as well. This is because brand equity, as aforesaid incites consumers to gravitate towards a particular brand, a key pillar of maintaining customer loyalty.

Defining the Brand Equity Survey

The brand equity survey is the primary source of measuring brand equity. While this concept may appear to be abstract and impossible to quantify, using this type of survey helps brings things into focus.

Largely a quantitative survey, the brand equity survey allows you to measure the key sentiment your target market has in relation to understanding your brand.

It allows market researchers to discover the degree of their own brand equity in a direct way. It also helps them better understand their competitors, particularly those that exceed them in brand equity.

A brand equity survey can be used alongside a brand awareness survey, as the latter measures awareness, one of the two major pillars of brand equity. On the contrary, brand equity also measures another key aspect — thus, its survey follows suit.

Additionally, aside from asking respondents whether they’re familiar with a brand and the degree of their familiarity, a brand equity survey inquires respondents what they think and feel about a brand.

Before creating a brand equity survey, you should understand its foundation, along with the two pillars that make it up.

The Two Pillars of Brand Equity

Although a seemingly amendable characteristic, given that multiple factors can create a positive brand equity, it is largely composed of two pillars. Fulfilling the needs of these pillars will also help with other concepts of marketing, those that will shape a brand to be its finest.

The two major pillars of brand equity are as follows:

Brand Awareness:

Brand awareness is a concept defined by how well customers can correctly identify a brand and its offerings. In order to solidify brand awareness, it needs to have a set of messaging and images unique to your brand, something that makes customers easily conjure up your brand when they see it.

For imaging that resonates, consider the golden arches of McDonald’s or the checkmark of Nike. These clearly summon these to major brands to mind. Or, for messaging, consider the slogans that have helped brands with high equity, such Goldfish, with “the snack that smiles back.”

As for long-form content (blogs, website resources) and the wording you use in advertisements, think of the kinds of ideas and values you want your target market to associate with your brand.

Your marketing efforts should infuse those ideas and values, so that customers can think of your brand upon seeing them, even if they are not part of your marketing campaigns.

Customer Experience:

Customer experience denotes the combination of all the feelings customers form of a brand throughout their interactions with it, from their awareness stage, to speaking with representatives, to browsing a website, making a purchase and beyond.

Since brands are no longer competing on their products alone, experience plays a major role in their overall view of a brand. Satisfying experiences will bring customers back to a particular brand, while poor experiences will create negative connotations with your brand, thus soiling its brand equity.

How to Achieve a Positive Brand Equity

In order to achieve brand equity, a company must first differentiate itself to establish recognition. If it is indistinguishable, there is nothing that will justify customers’ recognition of it on different occasions in their customer journey.

Thus, your brand won’t be forgettable. As this ties into the tenet of brand awareness, brands ought to consider ramping up their advertising and marketing efforts, as these will help spread the word of a brand.

As far as the customer experience tenet goes, companies can improve on this front by creating remarkable experiences that attract customers to their brand, thus securing it within their minds.

This will help them recall a brand even when they deal with other brands, serving as a critical point of comparison, in that, although the customers may be interacting with another brand, if the experience is lackluster, it will appear as the opposite of yours, which was positive.

Thus, when an experience has left a positive impression on your customers’ minds, they will associate such experiences with your brand, even when they are exposed to others.

Companies can also create brand equity for their products by making the products themselves memorable, easy to recognize and of superior quality, one that can be proven when compared with competitors’ offerings.

How to Create a Brand Equity Survey

To create a brand equity survey, use an online survey tool to screen your target market so that only qualified respondents can take place in your survey. Then, create a questionnaire with the appropriate questions for the topic of brand equity.

These should allow you to clearly evaluate your brand on the basis of its awareness and customer experience. There are four crucial ways to set up your questions:

Unaided awareness
1. Question example: “Name the first two or three electronics brands that come to mind when you think of microwaves.”
  1. Open-ended slots question
2. Did the respondents list your brand? If so, what percentage? If not, you ought to amp up your marketing efforts.
Aided awareness
1. Question example: “Which of the following electronics brands have you heard from?”
  1. Multiple-selection answers
Word Associations
1. Question example: “What words or ideas come to mind when you see our line of electronics?
  1. Open-ended question
  2. Multiple choice question with multiple selections
Views/ Opinions
1. Question example: “Based on your phone call with our rep, rate your experience form 1 to 10.”
  1. Ranking scale question

Continuously Measuring and Achieving Brand Equity

Brand equity surveys not only measure their namesake concept, but they do so on a continuous basis. When you send such surveys at regular intervals, you’ll be able to monitor how your other marketing efforts have affected your brand equity.

The same idea goes for achieving a positive brand equity. There is no stronger method to test whether you’re making any progress than through a survey. What’s more is that there are other surveys that can complement this effort.

The closest such survey is the brand tracking survey, which measures your brand’s health and the effects of your brand-building campaigns. There are also other surveys you can implement into your brand equity campaigns, such as those that deal with the other critical concept making up brand equity, that of customer experience.

You can use other similar concepts, such as user testing, general branding surveys and more. The key to gaining value from these surveys is by way of a strong online survey platform, one that can streamline the entire market research process.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How Surveys Help Reduce the 4 Types of Sampling Errors in Market Research

sampling errors

Market researchers must learn how to grapple with the different types of sampling errors. As one of the major manifestations of the flaws in market research, researchers should be well-aware of what they are and the consequences they carry for market research campaigns.

Although damaging to the effectiveness of your research, the four types of sampling errors aren’t ineradicable. When you are well-versed in their meanings and ramifications, you can better track them. Surveys can help you reduce them, so that your output consists of effective survey studies.

This article explains the four types of sampling errors and how surveys can put them at bay so that you yield the most accurate and quality data.

Understanding Sampling Errors

Sampling errors denote the deviations in the sampling pool data from the data that would actually result from the true population. They occur from the phenomenon in which the sample used is not a genuine representation of a certain population.

Essentially, these errors are the difference between the real values of a population and the values taken from a sampling of the population.

The origin of the errors lies in the collection of data, which then renders the results as invalid.

These are categorized into four types of sampling errors. You can minimize these four types of errors through a number of ways. Using surveys can alleviate these types of sampling errors when used correctly. This is to say that each type of error has its own reduction requirements to be used with surveys.

The Four Types of Sampling Errors

There are four types of sampling errors. The problem with these errors is that they invalidate the results of a survey. In such instances market researchers should calculate the margin of error, as sampling errors are not specific calculations.

Instead, they rely on the margin of error as a measurement of the maximum likely size of your sampling errors. You can use this metric if you use random survey sampling methods.

The following explains each of the four types of sampling errors present in market research.

Selection Error

This error comes about when the survey participation is selected by the respondents themselves, meaning that only those who are interested take part in the survey. A common example of this kind of error is a survey that uses a small portion of respondents who partake immediately.

If a business or the market researchers thereof follow up with the respondents who didn’t initially respond to the survey, the results are bound to see some change. Also, if the researchers overlook the respondents who don’t respond immediately, this too will not reflect the views of the entire target market.

Population Specification Error

This error transpires when market researchers do not know who exactly to include in their sampling. This error emerges when certain niches and more specifically — products, do not have specific members of a target market. For example, sandwich consumers can span across generations and ethnicities.

When the population specification error occurs, it is also due to sampling the wrong population. For example, a company may be launching a new line of handbags, aimed at the younger generation. However, this population may not have the required purchasing power to be consumers. Thus, the company targets slightly older targets. Although they have a higher purchasing power, they have no interest in the handbags.

In this error, the wrong respondents are targeted from a lack of knowing which group(s) would most precisely be of use to survey.

Sample Frame Error

The sample frame error relates to surveying the wrong population in the way that a sample has been selected. Survey biases occur from this error, in that market researchers in this case do not foresee that only certain kinds of respondents would be in their sampling pool, thereby excluding critical members of a target population.

This error includes targeting the wrong segments, or missing out on certain demographics within the correct segments. A few examples of this error include when researchers do not target respondents who:

use a particular device (iPhone vs Android)
live in a certain region
are of a certain income group

By missing the key people in a survey study, it results in sampling a group who does not fully fit or complete a target market or population of a study.

Non-Response Error

This error refers to the issue that results from failing to obtain a useful response in the surveys, in regards to the groups of respondents who take them. This occurs when a common group of people disproportionately partake in a company’s survey studies, instead of all relevant groups, therefore skewing its results.

In the case of this error, other groups who pertain to a survey’s study, such as other target market segments miss the opportunity to offer their data and insights. It can spring from a refusal to complete a survey or take it in the first place.

How the Four Types of Sampling Errors Differ from Non-Sampling Errors

Aside from the four types of sampling errors, other types of errors exist in market research. These are commonly associated with errors that don’t occur due to sampling itself, thereby landing them the name of non-sampling errors.

Non-sampling errors are deviations of estimates from their true values, ones that are not a part of the function of a chosen sample, which includes both random and systematic errors.

Non-sampling errors can spring up in the case of samples and censuses, i.e., when an entire targeted population is surveyed.

Non-sampling errors can also arise within a representative sample, e.g., a national survey, or during total enumeration, e.g., via an employee feedback survey.

survey sampling errors

The below explains the ways in which various types of sampling errors differ from non-sampling errors.

Sampling errors can emerge even when there is no apparent mistake, while non-sampling errors come up due to a mistake.
Sampling errors dictate a sample that is not representative of a universal truth of a target population, whereas non-sampling errors are particular to a study design.
You can reduce sampling errors by increasing the sampling size, but non-sampling errors require methodical practices for reduction.
Internal factors usually cause sampling errors; on the other hand, non-sampling errors occur from external factors not entirely related to a survey, study, or census.

How Surveys Reduce the 4 Types of Sampling Errors

Surveys as a market research mechanism may often be embroiled in the different types of sampling errors. However, when used correctly, they can greatly reduce them. It predominantly depends on the online survey platform you use. The following explains how surveys help reduce the four types of sampling errors.

Selection Error: You can reduce it by encouraging participation.
1. The call-out of a survey can help grab res[ondents’ attention and interest.
2. A survey’s setup can also help. For example, if site and app users find a survey, they are obviously more likely to take it than those who don’t see it.
  1. This will depend on the online survey platform you use, along with where you set it up.
3. Survey incentives are known to drive up respondent interest in taking a survey.
Population Specification Error: You can avoid it by having a deep knowledge of your target market and its makeup of sectors.
1. Surveys help you to both identify and study your target market, via market segmentation.
2. You can learn more about the proper segments for your various market research and marketing campaigns via the target market survey.
3. Survey research also completes secondary market research on your target market.
Sample Frame Error: The proper online survey platform will allow you to not merely identify all the correct members of your target market, but reach them as well.
1. It should be set up in a way that makes it nearly impossible to miss the crucial members of your target population.
2. Various demographic, psychographic and geographic filters should allow you to include (or include) your intended respondents.
3. A survey platform must allow you to target any group, while seeing how various groups are divide, e.g., by device type, operating system, location, etc.
Non-Response Error: The makeup of the survey and the way it is deployed can cut back on this error.
1. A strong online survey tool can ensure potential respondents that the survey is short.
2. Such a platform can make surveys more engaging by including various question types so that respondents do not get bored and complete their surveys.
3. You can also add multimedia files to weed out boredom.
4. Incentives also help net those who are not inclined to take surveys.

Warding off the Four Types of Sampling Errors in all Your Endeavors

Market researchers should always expect the presence of different types of sampling errors; no study can fully encapsulate the opinions and other data of all the members of a target market.

These errors even arise when no mistake is present, making them inevitable.

However, market researchers and general research ought not to fret, because there are ways in which you can significantly minimize these errors. Surveys themselves can help you keep these errors to a minimum.

The effectiveness of using surveys as a method of lessening the four main types of sampling errors depends on both the online survey platform you use and the different best practices you take to ensure their reduction. As such, you should choose platforms that offer relentless quality.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving Into the Brand Awareness Survey to Excel in Branding

The brand awareness survey is an essential tool to gauge how well members of your target market and others recognize your brand.

It is often a starting point in the practice of branding, a key marketing concept that involves shaping how the public views your brand and what they associate it with.

Brand awareness initiatives are immensely important, as building brand awareness across platforms can raise revenue by 23%. However, consumers won’t immediately remember a brand; it takes consumers 5-7 impressions to remember a brand.

This article explains the brand awareness survey, its utility in the major types of brand awareness, along with how to create one and its overall role in branding market research.

Defining Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the extent to which a brand is recognized by consumers in its target market and is associated correctly with its offerings.

Brand awareness cannot be measured with a single metric; rather it deals with two major concepts (see the section on types) that can be assessed in several ways.

Brand awareness deals with product/ service recognition with the correct brand in numerous scenarios. For example, one of the concerns marketers face is the question of whether their brand is the first that comes to the minds of consumers when they need to buy something.

If yes, then such a brand has a strong brand awareness. This ties into the idea of visibility; when consumers are keenly aware of brands and constantly have them on their mind. Brand awareness campaigns help foster visibility via various presentation efforts. A consistent brand awareness increases revenue by 33% through presentation.

Defining the Brand Awareness Survey

A brand awareness survey is one of the most potent tools marketers can use to get a sense of their brand awareness. Since brand awareness cannot be clearly defined by individual metrics, this kind of survey is especially useful, as it crunches the numbers on the magnitude of a business’s brand awareness.

This is because the kind of tool is largely a quantitative survey, given that it measures awareness through yes or no questions, along with multiple-selection and single-selection multiple-choice questions.

The function of this kind of survey is to quantify a variety of awareness-related factors, including:

who knows about your brand
1. particular segments of your target market, which you can use for market segmentation
what they know about your brand
how much they know
how they have heard about you
what your brand is associated with
1. This is especially important for brand-building as it makes consumers replace common nouns with a particular brand. Ex: Google for searches, Poland Spring for water.

Unlike other brand awareness measurement tools and methods, surveys have the unique edge of capturing demographic the information of participants. With this data on hand, you’ll understand which segments of your target market your brand resonates with the most.

Additionally, you’ll have a more comprehensive analysis of how well your customer base knows your brand and how you can improve your positioning in your niche.

The Importance of the Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is important on several fronts. Firstly, when someone is aware of your brand, they are already set within your sales funnel — at the earliest stage — but at the sales funnel nonetheless.

This means that when you’ve garnered a healthy brand awareness, many customers in your target market have already begun their buying journey.

Brand awareness is a must to push potential customers further down the funnel to reach the coveted purchase stage. Before customers convert, the various other stages fuel their decision-making. Without brand awareness, it is impossible to drive interest, evaluation and intent to buy.

The following explains the other key points of the importance of building brand awareness:

It enables your brand to be recognizable under different circumstances and conditions.
It creates associations between your brand and everyday matters such as:
1. Actions
2. Products
3. Things
It allows you to target different segments accordingly when you know their brand awareness levels.
It lets you prioritize your marketing and market research needs.
It informs you how to allocate marketing resources and funds based on the level of awareness among different groups.
It is responsible for keeping your brand on top of your target market’s minds.
It drives performance-marketing goals, including leads and sales.
1. Ex: Boxed.com, an ecommerce site, increased its brand awareness through an earned media partnership, which raised its conversion rate by 3.18%.

The Two Types of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness occurs in two main forms: brand recognition and brand recall. It is crucial to understand both, as being able to do so will allow you to build effective survey studies for brand awareness.

This is because these two concepts are the chief makeup of brand awareness and in order to tackle this campaign effectively, it is crucial to be able to understand the two categories. In addition, the categories allow you to better organize your efforts.

Brand Recognition (Aided Research)

This refers to the ability of customers to recognize your brand when they also view others, including your competitors.

The brand recognition aspect of awareness is crucial when customers are presented with a variety of product choices at once, for example, when they are at a store or at an online marketplace that sells the same products from various brands.

In this instance, it is ideal for your brand to have a “top of mind” selection status. Customers are more likely to buy a brand they already know, unless they’ve had a terrible experience with it. When customers have a level of familiarity with your brand, they will be more inclined to purchase from it when presented with the same or even similar products from other brands.

Newer companies who have not established their brand in their markets ought to focus their brand awareness efforts on brand recognition, as people are generally more comfortable with choosing something they already know, rather than opting for uncharted territory.

Brand Recall (Unaided Research)

Brand recall refers to the studies that measure the ability of customers to bring the name of your brand to mind without seeing it on a list first.

When it comes to brand awareness surveys, this means you need to use open-ended questions, particularly those with the “other” option. For example, let’s say you ask if the respondent knows any of the brands in a list, thereby using a multiple-selection question.

If your brand has high brand recall levels, the respondents will choose “other” and type in the name of your brand in the open-ended field.

This method grants you higher quality data in that these kinds of questions have a higher “hurdle” than do aided research questions. This is also because an unaided study yields higher consumer preference than an aided study.

How to Create a Brand Awareness Survey

In order to create a brand awareness survey, you ought to first narrow down your needs. To do so, consider this: do you need to measure brand awareness to gain a general sense of your brand awareness, or to measure it in conjunction with another campaign (ex: advertising).

If you need to measure brand awareness in the general sense: choose whether to begin with a brand recall or brand recognition survey. Or, merge both into one survey. This will differ from brand to brand; as aforesaid, newer brands may want to invest in brand recognition studies.

Incorporate the following questions into a brand recall survey:

When you think about [insert industry/niche], which brands come to mind first?
1. List up to 5 open-ended field questions
When you think of [product], what brand or brands come to your mind?
1. Open-ended question field
Which brands do you know the most about/
1. List up to 5 open-ended field questions
How open would you be to trying new brands in [industry/niche/product category]?
1. Use a Matrix scale or scaled multiple choice answers
Name your 5 go-to brands for [product/service/industry category].
1. List up to 5 open-ended field questions

Incorporate the following questions into a brand recognition survey:

Which of the following brands of [product/service type] have you heard of?
1. The answers should be names of such brands listed in either a single-selection answer or multiple-selection answer.
Have you heard of [brand name]?
How familiar are you with [brand name]?
When was the first time you heard about [brand name]?
1. Multiple-choice, with an open-ended “other” option
Where have you seen/ heard about [brand] recently? (Select all that apply)
1. Multiple-selection answers

If you need to measure brand awareness with another marketing or market research campaign: choose whether to begin with a survey on your campaign separately from a brand awareness survey, in conjunction with one or to merge the two concepts into one survey.

Then choose whether you need to measure brand recognition or brand recall. Use the above questions together, or in separate surveys for your joint survey study. Make sure to ask questions that deal with specific actions you’ve taken in your other campaign to see how they have contributed to your brand awareness levels.

Brand Awareness Questions for Joint Campaigns:

Have you seen this ad? (Include media file with the ad)
1. Yes or no
Does this ad make you want to buy from [brand]?
1. Scaled answers (Ex: I’m not sure, I’d like to learn more)
Does this brand remind you of any others? (for competitive analysis)
1. Yes or no
2. List up to 5 open-ended field questions if yes
Does this quote remind you of any brands?
1. Yes or no
2. List up to 5 open-ended field questions if yes
If this commercial didn’t convince you, what may strike your interest/memories with this brand?
1. Open-ended field

The Need for the Brand Awareness Survey in Branding

It’s important to invest in brand awareness, as it associates actions and products with specific brands. This incites members of your target market to replace common words with branded ones subconsciously.

In turn, the customers naturally search for particular brands when completing their shopping needs and buy from those brands. The brand awareness survey is a critical tool for helping brands reach this level of customer consciousness by measuring the degree of brand awareness.

Given that researchers can ask virtually any question, they can form a questionnaire that reaps insights on both brand recall and brand recognition, guiding the studies of both.

Furthermore, brands can run these surveys continually, from the inception of their business to implementing market research techniques, to running experimentations and surveys that deal with other key business aspects such as advertising and product testing. The most critical component of running these survey campaigns is a viable online survey platform. Such a platform should facilitate survey creation, launches and analyses, along with making it easy to screen respondents and create the relevant question types for measuring brand awareness.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Do Market Research for a Business Plan Successfully

The entrepreneurial-minded folks may long have wondered how to do market research for a business plan.

After all, a business plan lays out the foundation, purpose and expectations of a new business venture. Given that the risks of starting a new business are manifold, entrepreneurs must conduct market research.

20% of American businesses fail after only their first year of operation, a dismal reality that climbs to 30% after two years.

Newfound entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs alike should therefore carefully commit to and execute a business plan.

While market research applies to a wide breadth of applications that cover various business cycles and processes, including opening and operating a new business, it too can be used for producing a

This article expounds upon how to do market research for a business plan — and succeed in your venture.

Defining A Business Plan and Its Needs

Before you set out to formulate a business plan, it is vital to fully understand all that it entails. Usually created for startups, it is necessary for all businesses to implement.

A business plan is a written document that summarizes the main aspects of starting up and managing a business, making it the foundation for your business.

A business plan specifically details a business’s objectives, along with its financial, marketing and operational needs and a roadmap thereof.

It is created to guide a business through each stage in its establishment and management. As such, it allows business owners to lay out their needs and goals and track them as the business grows.

A business plan must be updated at regular intervals, as priorities and goals are subject to change. Additionally, when an established business moves in a different direction, it needs a new or completely updated business plan.

The Importance of a Business Plan

A business plan is an important document and not merely for the purpose of monitoring your business as it develops. This is because this document is also needed to obtain investment, especially in the early stages of the business, in which it does not have an evidential track record.

Thus, a business plan shows investors whether your business is on the right course and is worth investing their funds into. Lenders will require proof of a business plan when they deliberate the approval of a loan.

Here are several other reasons as to why creating and updating a business plan is important:

Making important decisions. It allows you to answer difficult questions at the onset, before they emerge. Understanding these decisions helps you understand how they fit into your overall strategy.
Addressing key issues to avoid future problems. These include pricing, competition evaluation, market demand, capital and team members.
Proving the viability of your business. Planning your vision into a full-fledged business bridges the gap between an idea and reality. Market research is essential for this point, as it helps you find key insights on various aspects of your industry, including your competitors and customers.
Communicating objectives with team members and all those involved. This is important for larger teams, particularly for assistance when you are too busy to relay information or guidance to your team members. This may also help investors or partners who cannot reach you, as it lays out objectives and criteria.
Standardizing and carrying out key objectives. Placing your objectives, criteria and other needs gives them more weight and attention. If they aren’t in your business plan, thereby, in writing, they can easily fall by the wayside. A business plan helps avoid this, standardizing key objectives and benchmarks.
Guiding consultants, freelancers and other workers. When employing freelancers and contractors, you can turn to specific sections of a business plan to guide these workers, to ensure they understand your vision, goal and other key business aspects.
Obtaining financial support. Whether it is via borrowing from a bank, turning to venture capitalists or putting your business up for an acquisition, a business plan makes your business and its viability clear for these key financial players.
Acclimating to market changes. Updating your business plan can help you during periods of critical change in your market. These changes include: changes in customer needs, new regulations, trends or updates in your industry.

Defining Market Research

Market Research is a wide-encompassing practice that involves gathering information to bolster knowledge about a business’s industry, niche and target market.

It involves the systematic process of amassing, analyzing and interpreting data and information around the state of a business’s industry and its key actors. The key actors entail a business’s target market, competitors and the movers and shakers within its industry.

As such, it involves gathering research around the niche, trends and industry as a whole.

This involves gathering secondary research, research that has already been conducted and made available, along with primary research, the kind that requires you to conduct yourself. These main types of research gathering involve various means, techniques and tools that researchers can use.

Market research largely deals with evaluating the viability of a new product or service, although this aspect is primarily referred to as customer development. By conducting market research, you can therefore gather information on virtually all areas of your business.

Why a Business Plan Needs Market Research

A potent document, one that properly lays out the 7 components of a business plan, from the executive summary, to the market analysis, to the strategy, financial plan and all other in-betweens, most use market research to develop it.

Market research provides the key data, information and nuances your business plan needs. Although a new business or business idea is born on intuition, a business plan must be backed up with data to prove its viability and positioning in its industry.

As such, market research must be performed in the early stages of the business plan, as it is the phase in which you learn all about your niche, its trends and the demands of your target market (including the makeup of your target market via market segmentation).

Only after analyzing all of your market research results, will you be able to populate the business plan within key areas such as market analysis, financial projections, strategy and implementation, marketing endeavors, pricing and location.

A business plan must be comprehensive, another way in which market research is of utmost importance, in that there are various methods and tools you can use to conduct it. By consolidating all of the different market research techniques, you are establishing an exhaustive business plan, the kind that leaves no key consideration out.

The following presents the key data and information of a business plan that market research can extract:

Demand: Does your product/service have enough market potential to justify a new business?
Pricing: How will you determine the pricing of your offerings?
Target Market: Who makes up your target market? Do they have enough spending power to buy your product or service?
Location: Does your business require opening a physical store or can it effectively reach its target market via ecommerce? Perhaps it needs both?
Historic data on your product/ service: How have the products and services in your niche performed over time? How do they perform currently?
Marketing and Market Entry: How will you form an explanation on how you’ll enter the market? How will you promote your products/services to solidify your entry?
Labor Requirements: Do you have enough manpower to form a business? How many employees and contractors will your business require?
Financial Plan: Do you have the financial means to cover all operations?

How to Conduct Market Research for a Business Plan

Since a business plan ought to include concrete information to pave the way for business success, it requires thorough market research. Given that market research encompasses so many modes and forms, it can be overwhelming and even intimidating to begin to conduct it for your business plan.

The following provides a step-by-step guide on how to do market research for a business plan, so you can craft your plan in an informed manner, equipped with critical market research.

Set a preliminary budget. This will allow you to make well-informed expenditures on market research.
1. First, search the secondary sources available; while some are free, there will be many that aren’t.
Identify all that you’ll need to know about your market. Set objectives and start from a high level of needed information.
1. Then, narrow it down to a specific niche, with suspected market segments.
2. Focus your research via secondary sources on your market. Look at trade publications, new sites dedicated to your market, industry reports, local reports, statistics websites, blogs on the startups in your niche, including their stories of success and failure and other secondary resources.
Prioritize the findings in Step 1.
1. Conduct further secondary research on your priorities.
2. Then, switch to primary research methods to zero in on your most critical research subjects.
Get acquainted with your target market: You’ll need to know who makes up your target market first.
1. You can achieve this by conducting secondary research on your target market.
2. Use primary research to understand your target market on your own terms.
  1. Use an online survey, a focus group or a survey panel.
  2. Segment your target market further and start building personas from the shared characteristics they exhibit.
Conduct product/service research via secondary and primary means.
1. Be sure to find similar offerings available to identify your competitors.
2. Survey your target market on their needs and feelings towards similar products/services, along with their aversions and desires for updates.
Research the costs associated with operating your business in relation to the products, supplies, services and maintenance it will require.
1. This will help you understand how to set up your prices as well.
2. Research the costs of marketing and publicizing the launch of your business.
3. Compare all costs and establish a preliminary business budget.
Study your competitors further.
1. Jot down their strengths and weaknesses.
2. Compare your offering to theirs, does it fill any gaps or voids? Is it better price-wise?
Analyze your research.
1. Break this down from high to low levels of research. Ex: From the general industry to the exact niche, from a large target market, to specific segments, to specific personas.
2. Adjust your budget, goals and plans.
Filter your research into the seven components of a research plan. These include:
1. The executive summary, company description, products and services, market analysis, strategy and implementation, organization and management, financial plan and projections.
Read and refine your business plan.
1. Assure that everything makes sense. If there are gaps in the information you have outlined, consider conducting more research.
2. Highlight areas of opportunity, along with areas of risk.
3. Edit your business plan as needed.

Empowering Your Market Research-Powered Business Plan

Market research is a wide-reaching practice that blends consumer behavior and economic trends to help you validate and improve a business idea. It can also help you change the course or style of an already established business.

Thus, it is not solely for startups. Market research can be difficult to conduct and manage, as there are so many business aspects you’ll need to consider to lower your risk of failure. Concurrently, there is so many kinds of market research you can stand to conduct.

Even with the steps listed above, navigating through the jungle of market research can be a laborious and difficult task. While you can’t control secondary resources, you can wield control of your primary research endeavors via an online survey platform.

This kind of market research tool allows you to take the reigns in every aspect: from asking the exact questions you seek answers to, to targeting a specific market segment, to deploying your surveys across the most-frequented websites and apps.

A potent survey platform will complete all of these crucial tasks, making primary research an easy task. The trick is to find an online survey platform that can handle all of these tasks, along with making it easy to analyze the data.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Do Away with Typos With the Edit Questionnaire Feature

When forming the questionnaire — the heart of the survey — even the most diligent market researchers are bound to come upon errors. At Pollfish, we’ve created a solution that can nip this issue in the bud without needing to slow down the survey process.

Pollfish has released a new feature that allows researchers to quickly remove typos and correct any text-based errors in all surveys.

With the new Edit Questionnaire feature, researchers can edit their typos and other text if need be, in any survey they choose, regardless if the survey is still running or complete. This creates a much more smooth survey experience for the researchers, as they don’t have to stop a running survey, or even pause it to adjust textual errors.

This article explains how to use the Edit Questionnaire feature and how any market research campaign can benefit from it.

Understanding the Edit Questionnaire Feature

Market researchers have likely caught a typo error in a running survey in the results of a completed survey. Researchers now have the ability to correct typos and edit all text fields regardless of the survey status, thanks to the Pollfish Edit Questionnaire feature.

This includes making the corrections and other textual edits in questions, answers, statements, scale points, concepts, etc.)

This new feature is available to all researchers under all of our plans.

The Edit Questionnaire does not require researchers to make any status changes to the survey they are editing. As such, researchers don’t need to pause, stop or resume any survey they use this feature with.

The Usefulness of the Edit Questionnaire Feature

This feature is useful for virtually any survey research campaign, as it equips market researchers with a handy and practical way of fixing typos without halting or pausing a survey. Typos can occur even among the most meticulous researchers. It isn’t practical to stop a survey or change its status, as this delays the survey process.

The Edit Questionnaire feature is the solution to this pesky issue, as researchers can now fix typos within their running studies and share them with their peers. They can do so without stopping a running survey or duplicating it to launch a copy. They can edit any text while the platform is deploying surveys and extracting responses.

This is useful as it helps researchers make changes as soon as they find them, allowing them to edit their questions as they please.

How to Use the Edit Questionnaire Feature

In line with the Pollfish commitment to user-friendliness, this new feature offers ease of use and efficiency. The following explains how to use the Edit Questionnaire feature on the Pollfish platform.

On the Pollfish dashboard, go to the surveys and hover over the survey you would like to edit.
1. Here, you’ll find the three-dot button that grants you options on changing the survey status and using a feature.
Click on the three-dot button on the right of the survey you would like to edit.
1. A dropdown menu will appear.
Click on “Edit Questionnaire” and you will be taken to the questionnaire of the survey you clicked on, which you can then edit.
1. The ‘’Audience’’ & ‘’Checkout’’ pages will be grayed out.
Here, you can also apply changes to the ‘’recall information’’ option. The rest of the options at the left panel are grayed out (carry forward, skip logic, etc).
1. However, you can review (only) the ‘’apply logic’’ rules per question.
Select “save changes’’ in the questionnaire page to save any changes you made.
1. After clicking on ‘’save changes’, these changes will be reflected on the results page.
2. Please bear in mind that there is no ‘’auto-save’’ button.
3. When the survey’s status is ‘’Under edit’’ (Edit Audience), the option ‘’Edit Questionnaire’’ is also available.
4. If you want to discard your changes, click back and confirm the action.

Creating Quality Surveys

In summary, researchers can improve the quality of their surveys as their surveys are running. They can ward off both their own typos along with those of their respondents. After hitting “save,” the changes become instantly available to respondents and the results.

Thus, using this feature is effective and friction-free.

Remember, as our surveys are running, our online survey platform uses AI and machine learning along with random device engagement (RDE) sampling to ensure the highest quality of responses.

Machine learning performs quality checks that disqualify gibberish and other low-quality answers, those using a VPN. RDE sampling engages digital users across a wide net of digital properties, without pre-recruiting them to take a survey.

The Pollfish platform is, therefore, best equipped to extract and deliver the best results.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Lower Bounce Rate with Surveys

How to lower bounce rate is a common contemplation among marketers, market researchers and business owners. As one of the main issues across digital marketing, the omnipresent bounce rate is a constant concern.

While the average bounce rate sits at a range between 26% and 70%, an acceptable bounce rate range is far lower. Many brands struggle with lowering their bounce rate to a more acceptable industry range.

There are various digital marketing methods to lower the bounce rate; some pertain to specific industries, while others are more generalized. A seldom but potent way to reduce your bounce rates is by way of conducting effective survey studies.

This article delves into how to lower bounce rate with surveys, so that you can improve your website and apps’ digital performance. This will allow you to elongate digital journeys, the time spent on your site and the interest surrounding your content.

Understanding the Bounce Rate

Before tackling how to lower bounce rate, you should have a concrete understanding of what it is. Bounce rate is a negative metric, that is, it measures the rate of an action that marketers ought to mitigate.

Specifically, bounce rate is the percentage of website (or app) visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. There are certain circumstances that constitute leaving a page: this can occur via closing a tab, closing a browser, hitting the back button, typing in another domain in the URL on clicking an external link.

This metric is undesirable on several accounts: first off, it reduces web traffic. It also reduces the time spent on a website, as browsing several pages often results in a longer time spent on a website.

But most importantly, the bounce rate is an unfavorable metric as it shows that your landing pages do not appeal to your visitors. First impressions are critical — even in the digital space. As such, a high bounce rate points to disinterest, boredom or lack of satisfaction with a page.

Perhaps your visitors didn’t find the information they were looking for, or perhaps they were routed to a landing page via social media and upon entry, they lost interest. As such, high bounce rates occur when landing pages (or any web pages) fail to engage.

Market research, particularly surveys can help the lower bounce rate.

Bounce Rate Calculation

The calculation for this rate is rather simple.

Divide the total number of one-page visits by the total number of website visits. Then multiple the quotient (the result of the division) by 100 to get the percentage.

For example: A website receives 50 single-page visits and 180 total website visits.

50/180 = 0.2777777
0.2777777 x 100 = 27.777 or 27.78%
Bounce rate = 27.78%

Although you can calculate the bounce rate whenever you need to, a good rule of thumb is to pay particular attention to it whenever you release new content. For example, say you created a new resource page or added new marketing collateral to an existing page.

In these instances, you ought to compute the bounce rate to understand their performance. You can also compare it to the more stagnant pages on your website.

What Makes a Good and Bad Bounce Rate

As an undesirable metric, your bounce rate ought to be kept on the lower end of the spectrum. Lower bounce rates indicate higher levels of website engagement, which is critical for a number of business purposes: from branding to building customer loyalty.

To control your bounce rate, you first must understand which range indicates a “bad” bounce rate, that is, one that's too high, which constitutes a “good” or healthy bounce rate and which is considered average. The following breaks up the bounce rate into three categories based on reports of average bounce rates.

	Exceptional	Average / Mid-Range	Poor
Ideal bounce rates	26 - 40%	41 - 55%	70%
Most bounce rates (lowest-highest)	1%- 26%	45 - 49%	90.2%

When this rate reaches 70 percent and above, you ought to strategize on how to lower it, as it represents a deficiency in both content quality and UX. A rate this high is going to trickle down to fewer conversions.

However, a high bounce rate is only dismaying for content aside from blogs, news, events, and anything that requires a significant amount of reading — which introduces a new aspect of bounces.

Are All Bounces Terrible?

This aspect points to the fact that not all bounces are bad. As such, it is essential to factor in the context of your bounce rate. Take the following scenarios:

If you have a high bounce rate on a product page, in which the visitor leaves without purchasing or signing up for, say, a newsletter, then it is evidently a bad thing. If your visitor were to visit several such pages, thus, avoiding a bounce and lowering your bounce rate, it is good, even if they don’t convert.

This is because avoiding a bounce in this scenario shows that the visitor is interested in browsing your products. In the former scenario, a bounce on a product page shows that they are not interested in exploring your other products or site, and bouncing to a competitor site is a major possibility.

As such, bounces on product pages, landing pages and all others that require taking an action (converting) is a bad incidence.

However, some pages with high bounce rates do not necessarily connote a bad sign. Consider content-heavy pages, especially those with no CTA for further action, such as downloading a report or signing up for email notifications.

For example, let’s say a visitor is consuming a long blog post, report, article or news content. They may then bounce. Regardless, the page they consumed was engaging enough for them to read through the whole thing, thus contributing to longer times spent on the site.

Additionally, after reading the content, the visitor may have deemed your content authoritative, fostering future site visits. Or, it may have nurtured a lead further down the sales funnel. This is far more valuable than a site visitor who travels across various site pages (thus avoiding bounces) without reading or paying attention to the content and elements.

Bounce Rates Benchmarks Across Industries

Bounce rates fluctuate from brand to brand and the same oscillation applies to different industries. This occurs from a number of different factors such as:

The nature of the industry
The average UX efforts and updates made on digital platforms across industries
The content-heavy nature of industries
Type of website

Bounce Rate Benchmarks by Website Type and Page Type:

The following presents data on benchmarks based on the type of website and webpage from Custom Media Labs.

Type	Bounce Rate
E-commerce and retail websites	20% – 45%
B2B websites	25% – 55%
Lead generation websites	30% – 55%
Non-ecommerce content websites	35% – 60%
Landing pages	60% – 90% for
Blogs, news sites, dictionaries, portals	65% – 90%

Bounce Rate Benchmarks by Industry:

The following presents data on benchmarks across different industries in late 2020 by a report from SimilarWeb and others.

Type	Bounce Rate
E-commerce and retail websites	35.8%
Financial Services	28.3%
Publishers (Radio, TV, press via apps)	51.3%
Cosmetics	55.86%
Grocery	40.2%

How to Lower Bounce Rate with Surveys

You may have pondered how to lower the bounce rate through a practical route. While you cannot extinguish the bounce rate, you can lessen it by improving your website in a number of ways. Most marketing websites will provide you with advice on lowering your bounce rate in the following two ways:

Improving your user experience (UX)
Fleshing out your content offerings

On the contrary and far less conventional, you ought to use surveys to reduce your bounce rate. Although slashing this rate may seem to be a feat, surveys help in that they find the disconnect between your visitors’ (and customers’) expectations from your webpages and what your webpages actually provide.

Businesses can use surveys to minimize the bounce rate for both B2C and B2B businesses. You can achieve the latter by implementing B2B surveys. If one of your biggest concerns around your bounce rate involves your content performance, you can deploy surveys for a content marketing strategy.

What to Ask in the Survey to Lower Bounce Rate

First off, you can ask respondents specifically what they look for in a particular landing page, product page, etc. In such a case, it is best to use multiple-selection multiple-choice questions, that is, questions that allow respondents to tick off more than just one answer.

This is especially useful if you deploy surveys across digital channels as part of an online survey platform. In this case, these surveys will be on websites (and apps) that are not yours, thus, you ought to ask for their specific needs.

You should also ask questions with visual elements (images, GIFs, etc) displaying your own digital elements. This way, respondents can see the makeup of your page and divulge their opinions of it. This question is especially viable when you use it to inquire about pages with the highest bounce rates.

Incorporating direct questions is another way to survey respondents to lower your bounce rate. For example, you can ask specifically what would make the respondents bounce. Piggybacking off of this concept, you ought to include questions that ask respondents to choose between a set of visuals, which represent pages or page elements.

They should choose the best and worst kinds from a set of images. You can also ask them to rate these pages/elements via a rating scale question or a Matrix question.

Setting Reasonable Expectations

The bounce rate is a metric you will often contend with. While bounces are not necessarily a grave issue on all site pages, certain pages, such as landing pages and product pages can do without high bounce rates.

Although known mainly as market research tools, surveys can provide the ultimate remedy on how to lower bounce rate. This is because surveys allow you to question your respondents on virtually anything, thus gaining you access into their psyche and needs from landing pages, etc.

When using survey research to crack down on your bounce rates, the key is finding the most apt online survey tool to house your surveys. Such as tool should make it easy to not merely set up and deploy your surveys, but make them hyper-targeted, so that only your target market and desired respondents can take part in it.

It should also automate quality checks to rein in survey bias and low-quality data. When you’re equipped with the correct online survey platform, you’re set to tackle lowering your bounce rates.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

The 6 Main Types of Survey Questions to Power Multiple Applications

Survey questions are the core of any questionnaire and survey at large. It is the questions that drive the extraction of key data, insights and other information about your target market (for market research) or target population (for general research).

There are a wide variety of survey questions to implement into your survey campaign, whether it is for market research or other forms of research. There are also many ways to categorize questions.

This article expounds on the 7 main types of survey questions, namely market research questions, including examples and fitting applications, so that you can produce effective survey studies for your research campaign.

Close-Ended Questions

These questions are one of the most chief types of survey questions. They serve as the parent category in virtually every question type you’ll come upon in this guide and all others — except for open-ended questions, their antithesis.

Close-ended questions refer to any question that can be answered by selecting from a limited amount of answer options. These options can exist in various forms; these forms are the basis of the various offshoots, subtypes or child categories of close-ended questions (listed in the sections following the next).

Usually, these exist as multiple-choice questions, in which a respondent can select one answer, or choose several, i.e., all that apply to a situation.

Close-ended questions can draw simple, one-word answers, such as yes or no, or full sentence answers.

Additionally, these questions can be presented in a rating scale, such as “Are you satisfied with your experience with our company?" To which, the responses would exist in a scale: Very much so, mostly, yes, not sure, not really, no, not at all.

Close-ended questions are used to conduct quantitative research, in which data is collected to form statistics and discover patterns.

Although they give limited information, they are useful for several applications in the business world and virtually all others. They should be used when searching for trends and quantifiable behaviors and making generalizations.

Additionally, they provide quick insights into both general and specific topics, including important issues, such as that of trust:

“Do you find our website trustworthy to gather [niche] information?” This can be answered via a simple yes, no or not sure or as a rating scale question, e.g., from “not at all” to “very much so.”

Here are some of the most fitting surveys and applications for close-ended questions:

Quantitative surveys
Consumer surveys
Cross-sectional surveys
The NPS Survey and all other customer satisfaction surveys such as the CSAT and CES surveys
Brand awareness surveys
All customer experience (CX) surveys
Business surveys

Examples of Close-Ended Questions:

Did you find what you were looking for on our website?
Which products do you look for/enjoy using the most? (Check all that apply).
What times of the year do you usually plan a trip? [Multiple choice, multiple selection]
Would you recommend our product/service?
Which locations would you go to?
What aspects of your life do you find most stressful?
What kinds of services do you seek to help you through a difficult time?

Open-Ended Questions

The opposite of close-ended questions, these types of questions cannot be answered via a simple yes or no answer, nor can they be answered with single or multiple-selection multiple choice answers.

Rather, they allow the respondents full control over their responses. As such, open-ended answers can be short, consisting of a few words, to a sentence, to a paraph and beyond.

As their name suggests, the responses for these kinds of questions are limitless, save for the character count. These questions are used to extract in-depth responses to better probe into a topic. Additionally, open-ended questions can be used as follow-up questions to close-ended answers.

For example, if you asked the close-ended question: Which of the following brands do you feel is this best for your needs?

You can follow this up with an open-ended question that asks respondents to explain why they chose their answer.

Open-ended questions provide feedback in the customers’ own words, rather than with fill-in options that have been preselected. Open-ended questions form the core of qualitative research.

They help you draw more context around actions, opinions and explore the reasoning behind satisfaction and dissatisfaction with their customer experience (CX).

Here are some of the most fitting surveys and applications for open-ended questions:

Qualitative surveys
Retrospective surveys: they require these questions to express and compare feelings and opinions of the present with the past.
Exploratory research: qualitative in nature, used in order to form hypotheses, define goals etc.
Consumer surveys
Employee feedback surveys, job satisfaction surveys
Event evaluation surveys
Prospective research

Examples of Open-Ended Questions:

What was it like living in this neighborhood in New York?
Please describe a time where you found our digital marketplace helped you make essential purchases.
Why did you select [the previous question’s choice]?
How do you typically deal with stressful situations?
What would make you use our product/service again?
Why do you choose this particular product over the others?
Is there anything else we can do to improve your experience with our company?

Rating Scale Questions

Also referred to as ordinal questions, these questions use a scale of answer options, as opposed to answers with words and sentences that denote separate objects and concerns.

As its name suggests, a rating scale question asks respondents to rate a sentence from a scale that uses numbers, emoticons, emojis or words. The words of the scale usually denote levels of either low to high intensity or go from negativity to positivity.

Respondents choose the number, word or emoji that best represents their answer.

Rating scale questions can be used for a number of applications. They are essential for questions that require far more nuance and precision than a yes or no answer. They are also ideal for a market researcher to understand their customers' exact feelings, attitudes and beliefs towards a number of business inquiries.

WIth rating scale questions, market researchers can further segment their target market by way of their opinions, which allows them to tinker their products, services or experiences more precisely.

Here are some of the most fitting surveys and applications for rating scale questions:

NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) surveys
CET (Customer Effort Score) surveys
Likert Scale surveys
Visual ratings surveys (ones that use hearts, stars, emojis or other visual ratings as scaled questions).

Examples of Rating Scale Questions:

How likely are you to recommend this company to a colleague or friend, on a scale of 1-10? (NPS)
Rate the following statement. Using the site navigation was extremely easy to do. (CES, a scale of extremely disagree to extremely agree).
Overall, how satisfied are you with our company? (CSAT, a scale of extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied).
The number of items in your online store overwhelms me. (Likert Scale, a scale of 7 options, strongly disagree to strongly agree).
How would you rate your experience with our tech specialist? (Visual ratings scale, answers can use any emoji)

Matrix Questions

A Matrix question is a kind of close-ended question that asks respondents to provide an answer to one or more row questions using the same set of column answer choices. In this way, researchers do not have to create different answer types for each Matrix question, as each one can be answered in the same way.

It is similar to rating scale questions in that these questions ask respondents to rate or evaluate a number of services, occurrences of matters.

Like rating scale questions, each answer in a Matrix question carries a different amount of weight or intensity, from strong disagreements to strong agreements and other negative to positive responses.

The design of Matrix questions appears to be a chart, which makes it easy to identify and create.

Matrix questions are fundamental to use when your questions require nuance or you want to understand your customers’ precise sentiment in regard to your question.

While they can make it easy to interpret your customers’ answers, be wary when using them on mobile. Very long Matrices don’t fit mobile screens, which tend to be far greater in length than in width. They are not recommended for mobile.

Here are some of the most fitting surveys and applications for Matrix questions:

Employee satisfaction surveys
Descriptive research
Customer loyalty surveys
Evaluating advertisements and advertising campaigns
Product satisfaction surveys

Examples of Matrix Questions:

Rate the following: The customer support rep helped me resolve my issue. (Matrix from strongly agree to strongly disagree)
How was your experience at our trade show? (Matrix from highly unenjoyable to highly enjoyable).
How would you assess our webinar? (Matrix from very uninformative to very informative)
How likely are you to make ongoing purchases from our online store? (Matrix from highly unlikely to highly likely).
How many times will you make purchases from us in a year (Matrix from once to several times, such as more than five times).

Rank Order Questions

Also called Ranking questions, rank order questions ask respondents to compare items and rank them according to their liking. As such, respondents order the answer options by way of their preference.

It allows them to rearrange multiple choice answer options in the order of their choice, based on the opinions and attitudes they hold. Using rank order questions as opposed to other multiple-choice questions or rating scale questions is beneficial, as it lets researchers instantly understand their customers' preference of one item over another.

That is because the rankings are in each question, and unlike the Matrix scale, in which questions/ statements are on each row and answers are in each column, rank order questions feature the studied topics in each row and their ranking in each column. As such, a single question is set up in a Matrix-esque manner. As such, you the items and their ratings one after the other in one box.

This is also more convenient than other multiple-choice questions, in which respondents select multiple items without rating them or rating them but on an individual question basis.

Here are some of the most fitting surveys and applications for Rank Order questions:

Product surveys
All customer experience (CX) surveys
Causal research and correlational research (in part but not in whole)
Lowering the customer churn rate by understanding which products/ items need improvement

Examples of Rank Order Questions:

Please rank the following pizza toppings. (Ranking depends on the number of items, ex if there are 4, rate them from 1-4).
How would you rank the following seasonal fashion collections from worst to best?
How was your experience with the following companies at the event? (Rate from I didn’t enjoy it to I highly enjoyed it).
Rank the following accessories from our latest collection. (Ranking depends on the number of items).

Nominal Questions

Also called naming questions, or the categorical variable scale, nominal questions label variables into distinct categories. Unlike the various rating questions and rank order questions, nominal questions ask for answers with no quantitative value or weight of positivity, intensity, etc.

As such, these questions require no calculations of their answers, as each answer names a different category or type that has no quantitative relation to the other answer options. When numbers are assigned to nominal question answers, it is only for labeling or division.

The answers to nominal questions have no order; instead, they are meant to carry significance for variable labels only.

These kinds of questions are apt for initial research, such as exploratory, when researchers are trying to gather all the different variables present in their issue or situation.

They are also perfect to use when inquiring into the specifics of something, whether it is an occurrence, a preference or specific products, rather than rate them against one another.

Here are some of the most fitting surveys and applications for Nominal questions:

Exploratory research
Descriptive research
Product satisfaction survey questions
Cohort studies
Advertising market research

Examples of Nominal Questions:

Which brand of laptops from our store do you prefer? (Answers: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Acer, Samsung, Asos)
Where do you live?
Which vacation destination do you want to visit the most?
Which of the following ads have you seen?
Which of the following ads would make you want to buy from us the most?

Making Every Question Count

While the 6 questions described in this guide are crucial for your market research endeavors, there are far more question types you can use to power your survey research. While this may sound daunting, the larger variety of question types helps keep your research quality high and fresh, giving you more types of data analysis to choose from and interpret.

Some questions you may come upon fall under one or more of the question types in this article, while others may be more unique. The most important thing to keep in mind is to not overwhelm your respondents with surveys and survey questions.

Keep your questionnaires relatively short and send your surveys to a random sampling pool. This will ensure that your respondents are not the same exact people every time — yet they still make up your target market/population. You can achieve this effortlessly with a strong online survey platform.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

What is Correlational Research and How to Conduct it for Business Success

What is Correlational Research and How Do You Conduct it for Business Success

correlational research

Correlational research is a critical form of research that researchers ought to deploy in the mid-late stages of the entire research process. It is especially necessary if it concerns a new topic.

Sequentially following descriptive research, which follows exploratory research, correlational research studies the relationship between two variables. This is important when attempting to make sense out of the variables discovered from exploratory and descriptive research.

Although correlation does not equal causation, understanding the correlation between two variables is crucial to see how similar such relationships may occur and how they behave within an existing occurrence, problem or phenomenon.

This article explains correlational research in-depth, including why it is important to conduct for business research, how to conduct it and more.

Defining Correlational Research

One of the chief forms of research, correlational research depicts and explains the relationship between two variables. This form of research is non-experimental, thus the researcher exerts little to no efforts to control or manipulate the variables.

The variables studied in this kind of research can be either quantitative or categorical.

Correlational research aims to find unknown or suspected relationships between variables, as this can point to similar behaviors or occurrences in other variables. If not, this kind of research is still powerful, as it paints a clearer picture of an issue or phenomenon that had been discovered in exploratory or descriptive research.

In correlational research, researchers measure the relationship between two variables, without controlling either one. The point of this kind of study is to discover:

Positive correlation: Occurs when variables exhibit changes in the same way. Ex: As purchases increase, store traffic increases.
Negative correlation: Describes variables that change in contrasting ways. Ex: Increase in employee burnout and a decrease in production.
Zero correlation: When there is no relationship between the variables. Ex: Seeing employees in the office does not increase signed contracts with B2B partners.

The Key Aspects of Correlational Research

This form of research has several defining characteristics that researchers ought to consider. These aspects help identify this form of research, helping them use it for the future or to contrast it with causal or experimental research.

The following enumerates the key features of this research:

As nonexperimental research, researchers do not need to manipulate variables to either agree or disagree with a hypothesis.
It involves measuring and observing the relationship between the variables, with no external conditioning or alterations of any kind.
It incorporates retrospective elements, as it looks back at past events and data of the variables, as a means to find and calculate historical patterns between them.
It is conducted when there is some prior knowledge present from either exploratory or descriptive research so that at least one of the factors will relate to the predicted outcome.
Although it may show a certain kind of correlation between variables, e.g. a positive one, it may not remain as such, as it can change in the future.
Variables can be observed in a closed environment or via field research, i.e., a public space.
It is used when the variables are too complex to be studied via the experimental method and controlled manipulation.
It simultaneously measures variables and their relationships in realistic settings.
It is executed when a relationship is suspected to be causal, but the researcher can’t manipulate the independent variable due to difficulty, impossibility or legal constraints.
It is applied when one or a set of objectives requires gathering some degree of prediction.

Why Your Business Needs Correlational Research

Businesses benefit from conducting correlational research in a number of ways. Firstly, this research zeros in on previously murky or uncovered aspects from the entire research process, that of relationships between variables.

This research can confirm or refute these relationships, the hypothesis of their existence, along with the hypothesis of how they relate to the subject matter at large.

Secondly, when a business forms a clear understanding of the relationships between certain variables — whether they are good, bad or nonexistent, it is effectively equipped with the knowledge on how to move forward. For example, a correlational study may require further correlational research, causal research or experimental research.

Or, it may require fewer studies while presenting actionable insights on how to proceed with the studied variables and their environments.

Moreover, it helps researchers understand their studied variables in relation to the past, as it compares present behaviors and other attributes of the variables with retrospective ones. Piggybacking off of this concept, correlational research also helps businesses form predictions.

These predictions pertain to other similar variables, or the same variables and can have a bearing on the near and later futures. Correlational predictions are particularly useful for detecting patterns.

Example of Correlational Research for Business

While there are many different verticals in the sciences and scientific offshoots (ex: psychology, medicine) that appear to require this research, it may not often be so clear as to how it can help businesses.

However, as expounded on above, correlational research is crucial for business and market research. Here is an example of how a business used correlational research in their overall research campaign:

A business noticed the reduction of sales when conducting exploratory research. They noticed that in correlational research, there were particular items that were especially plunging in sales.

Thus, they performed correlational research and discovered that there are two variables that may have a correlation: the rise in kitchen appliances and the decrease in sales of those appliances.

Accordingly, the business deployed surveys to their target market and loyal customers to understand whether in fact, there was a negative correlation present. The surveys proved that this was indeed the case. With this knowledge in tow, the business offered a discount on the appliances, also having considered lowering the prices after some time.

Correlational Research Survey Examples

The qualitative survey
1. Helps understand variables in greater depth.
2. Can explain variable behaviors in relation to their environment/context.
The retrospective survey
1. Delves into past events, occurrences and attitudes in regards to the variables.
2. Shows whether the variables changed and how so.
The prospective survey
1. Can find associations between variables over a period of time.
2. Useful for studying variables to form predictions and understand outcomes.
The customer loyalty survey
1. Great for comparing loyal customers against those who don’t buy from you but are in your target market.
2. Measures the variable of continuous purchases.
The employee satisfaction survey
1. Measures relationships between employee satisfaction and workplace or company policy occurrences.
2. Helps compare happy and dissatisfied employees.

How Correlational Research Differs from Causal, Exploratory and Experimental Research

Correlational research differs significantly from the other main types of research methods such as exploratory, descriptive and experimental research.

However, causal research is often conflated with causal research. While both kinds of research concern studying the relationships between variables and are conducted in the mid-late stages of research, they study very different aspects. As such, they follow different approaches and measure different things.

Whereas correlational research simply aims to understand how two variables relate to one another, causal research attempts to find a cause and effect relationship between two variables. This research type is more involved in making comparisons.

Exploratory research stands in complete contrast with correlational research, as it provides the very basis of a research problem and forms a hypothesis for later research, without involving variables.

Descriptive research delves into describing something already established, discovered or suspected in exploratory research. Therefore, it is composed after exploratory research in the overall process. It is still an early part of the entire research process.

Unlike correlational research, it attempts to describe what exploratory research had already established in greater detail, with new aspects emerging. It is not concerned with examining variables.

Experimental research contrasts with correlational research, in that it involves manipulating and controlling variables, whereas correlational research exerts absolutely no control or alterations to the studied variables.

As its name suggests, experimental research forms experiments on the variables as a means to discover cause-and-effect relationships. Using a scientific research design, this research involves a controlled environment, one in which the variables can be measured, calculated and then compared.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Correlational Research

Correlational research offers several benefits for researchers and businesses. However, as with all other research methods, there are a few setbacks to this type of research.

The Advantages

Allows researchers to determine the statistical relationship between two variables.
An inexpensive and effective (not time-consuming) research method.
Grants the research to understand a variable unaltered, existing in its natural state to fully understand it.
Variables in their natural state are more applicable to everyday situations.
Although it can’t prove causation, a large amount of collected and analyzed correlational data can support a causal hypothesis.
Enables researchers to understand the duration and strength of the relationship.
Using the correlation coefficient to measure a relationship’s strength (ranging from 1.00 to -1.00), the results are easy to classify.
Provides the most ideal transition to conducting causal or experimental research.
Provides insight into the way variables operate and exist with each other that other methods cannot find.
Can occur through quick research such as via surveys or observations.

The Disadvantages

It is limited, as it can only glean the statistical information from no more than two variables.
Does not take cause and effect relationships into account, as it doesn’t find which of the 2 variables creates the statistical pattern.
Does not show which variable wields the most influence.
Cannot be fully depended on for further research, as it employs past statistical patterns to determine the relationship.

How to Conduct Correlational Research

A comparatively simple and quick way to conduct research, correlational research can be conducted using field research, i.e., via natural observations, through surveys and via secondary research. Here is how to execute this research using all of these techniques.

Surveys: Allow researchers to get quick and easy to garner feedback (via an online survey platform).
1. Ask questions about the variables. Use both open-ended and close-ended questions. The former is better for understanding the variables at a greater depth.
2. Then, statistically analyze the answers.
Field Research: Observe the variables in their natural environment.
1. Study customers and passersby in physical shops, use a session replay tool in online shops.
2. Record behaviors as they relate to the variables.
Conduct secondary research: Find all the applicable literature and sources made available.
1. These depend on your vertical and subject of study.
2. Put them together and compare them to your own findings.

Mastering Correlational Research

Correlational research, although in the mid-stages of research, forms the very onset of relationship research into variables. Like descriptive research, correlational research describes variables, going a step further, as it tracks how one relates with the other.

It is essential to conduct this research to understand the kinds of relationships that exist between two variables before performing any testing on them, whether it’s for comparisons in causal research, or for experimentation in experimental research.

A strong online survey tool makes this possible and practical to carry out. As aforementioned, there are various surveys relevant to use for correlational research. An adept online survey provider will make it feasible to implement all forms in your research, along with sending them to their intended sampling pool.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Pollfish Marketing Team

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