The first rule in marketing probably should be: “Remember, You Are Not Your Customer!”

It is both easy and expensive to get in the way of what works based on your own biases and assumptions about your customers and what you think they want.  Often when faced with different advertising options or marketing approaches a business owner will say “I would never call on an advertisement like that” or “I wouldn’t read something that long” or “That doesn’t fit our image”.

This can be a big mistake.  A research study of advertising executives “guessing” what people thought vs. what the people really thought showed that the advertising executives were wrong by as much as 72% on various questions.

Making assumptions about your customer can be very costly.  If you don’t know how your customer will react then you need to quit guessing and find out more about your customer through actual surveys and testing.

The more you know about your customer, the more customers you will have.

Conducting surveys to assess customer satisfaction and understand your customers needs can be an effective way to learn the truth about your customers.

Using a fully integrated CRM program will enable you to design a survey, send it automatically by email, measure the responses and take actions based on the analysis.

You can also assess customer satisfaction with every support ticket.  Send an email when a ticket is closed to solicit feedback on the customer experience with the  ticket.

In addition, you can use surveys to determine and optimize your marketing strategy by sending a survey to a select panel of customers/advisers, to determine their views on product direction or product positioning.

You can also conduct surveys to understand email and media preferences and run campaigns targeted at those who are most likely to respond.

Technorati Tags: customer research, customer survey