If you’re designing a survey to discover your customers’ pains and desires. If you want to learn about their journey with your product or service. Then it’s time you got comfy with asking open-ended questions.
It’s the only way you’ll ever hear their feelings expressed in their own words.
And those are the only words worth noting. (Particularly if your goal is to inform your future copy and messaging.)
But if your entire survey is multiple choice and yes/no questions, you won’t get what you’re after. You’ll only catch broad trends (likely influenced by the choice of options provided).
You won’t get any little nuggets of sticky copy to use in your next landing page or email sequence. You won’t get a sense of how your ideal customers actually talk about the problem you’re on a mission to solve.
Not to say that you can’t use any simple-answer questions. In fact, I like to start surveys off with a couple to give people a sense of accomplishment.
And then pepper the rest of the survey with open-ended questions. Such as the most useful customer interview question I know.
At minimum, you want to give your audience a chance to write freely (in more than a single-line box) about:
- their pains and desires before your solution came into your life,
- when they knew your solution was what they were looking for, and
- how life is after your solution helped solve their problem.
Get 25-100 of these kinds of answers, and you’ll be swimming in sticky copy. Eww.
Tactically Tuesday,
James
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