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Steal My Annual Survey Strategy
If you’ve never sent an annual survey before, this episode is for you. Annual surveys are one of my FAVORITE ways to improve my marketing each year – because they’re incredibly helpful and easy to do.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear more about how I use annual surveys, how to get people to actually take your survey, what to ask, the emails to send, and how you can potentially make money from your survey.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business? Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives. Each week I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5-minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time. Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or 1:1 services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays! You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YT – @mrsamandawarfield or by heading to amandawarfield.com/youtube/ – I hope to see you Monday!
- This week’s action step: Put a date on the calendar for your own Annual Survey
- This week’s book recommendation: Chasing Simple Marketing by Amanda Warfield
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
If you’ve never sent an annual survey before, this episode is for you. Annual surveys are one of my favorite ways to improve my marketing each year because they’re incredibly helpful and easy to do. In today’s episode, you’ll hear more about how I use annual surveys. How do you get people to actually take your survey?
What to ask, the emails to send, and how you can potentially make money from your annual survey? You’re listening to episode 212 of The Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own@amandawarfield.com / book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome, friend. This is Chasing Simple, where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients such as the Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.
If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business?
Love the Chasing Simple Podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4pm Pacific Time, 7pm Eastern Time for my weekly YouTube lives. Each week, I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5 minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time.
Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or one on one services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays. You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YouTube, at Mrs. Amanda Warfield, or by heading to amandawarfield. com / YouTube.
I hope to see you Monday! So an annual survey is one of my favorite ways to improve my marketing each and every year. And this is because not only do you have really simple ways to pull out content ideas, right? Because the people taking the survey, your audience, they’re telling you exactly what questions you have.
So it’s really easy to go, okay, here’s the question. Here’s my answer. I’m going to turn that answer into content. You’ve got tons of content ideas. It also will give you really great ideas for offers that your people actually want and need. There’s no more let me pull an offer out of thin air. It’s, oh, this is something I saw over and over again.
I’ve got a really easy offer that can help with that. And then it also helps with your messaging. So you can pull directly from responses and the way that things are phrased and the problems that they’re saying they have. And use that in your messaging, in your sales pages, in your emails. And this makes it so much more likely to resonate when someone’s looking at that sales page because you know exactly how they’re thinking about the problem and the different Objections you need to overcome and different things like that So this is one of my favorite things to do every year to improve my marketing I make sure all of my clients have one in their own marketing calendar as well because it’s so helpful So what does it look like first you create?
The form, I use a Google form. It’s really simple. And I just duplicate it every year. You create the form. I’m going to share the questions in a moment. You create the form and then you market it, which we’ll talk about the emails I send in a minute as well. Once you’ve got your dates done, you set a couple of days and you say, okay, by the end of this day, if you haven’t submitted.
You can’t be entered to win, you draw the winner, you email the winner, you email the people that didn’t win, and then you analyze the results, or send your results to a marketing strategist, and they can analyze them for you. So, how does it work? How do you make people take the time to do this? One, you keep it short and sweet, but two, You give them something that is actually enticing.
So I’ve tried so many different things. Some things have worked, some haven’t. One year I gave away some of my favorite candles because I personally loved them. They weren’t as exciting for people. This year I did an Amazon gift card. People loved that. I also often will suggest for clients who are wanting to fill their client roster, suggest that they give away.
Give away a mini offer that will lead into their client roster. Or if you have digital products, you can give away a seat in your digital products or give away a coupon or something like that. So there’s a lot of different things that you can do depending on what your overall goals are. But let’s say for the sake of this example, that you’re going to do a mini offer.
So maybe there’s a small part of your one on one that you can pull out and create a mini offer for. And it’s something that once they get a taste, they’re going to say, Oh, yes, I want to take the next step. Now, the goal for the annual survey is not to upsell people, but it doesn’t hurt to attempt to upsell people.
The goal is to get as many people to take the survey as possible. That’s what you really want to focus on. But as you’re creating this offering, you’re trying to get people into it, It’s always worth having that upsell in your back pocket. So for example, you may have a mini offer and one person can win it.
You draw the winner after you’ve closed the survey and you’ve gotten all the names, you draw the winner, you email the winner and you say, Hey, you won this mini offer. Here’s how you get it. You do the mini offer for them. And then at the end of the mini offer, you say, I’d love to keep working with you. If they’re a good, ideal client, right?
I’d love to keep working with you. Here’s how we can continue working together. They may decide to work with you. But, that’s only one person. What about all the other people? Well, there’s two things you can do. You could do an upsell or a downsell, essentially. So you could, that’s not really what a downsell is, but for the sake of this example, you could say, hey, I want to work with you.
You didn’t win this thing that I was giving away, but here’s how you could get it at a discount. And so you say, okay, my mini offer is normally 147. You can get it for 97 for the next couple of days. Or you could say, hey, you didn’t win. I wish I could do this for everyone. Here’s X amount off of a lower ticket offer that I have.
Maybe it’s a digital product instead of a one on one service. You know, there, there are a couple of different options you can use there. And then same thing though, if you upsell them into that mini service, You can then upsell them potentially into your one on one service. So again, that’s not really the point of the annual survey, but it’s worth doing and having in mind as you’re going about creating it.
Now, what do we ask? What questions do we ask? I like to keep my annual survey so short and sweet because frankly that’s really one of the only ways to get people to do it. So everyone has to put in their email address and their first name because otherwise you’ll have no way to actually contact them, but email address and first name and then I do five questions.
The first one is always, which of the following best describes you? Check all that apply, and this one depends on how well you know your audience. You may be using it to try to get to know your audience. You may be trying to determine what phase of business they’re in. You may be trying to determine how many kids they have, what phase of life.
That’s gonna vary so much by who you are and who you cater to, but let’s say that you You teach parents how to potty train. Well, you’re gonna be trying to figure out are you a parent yet? Are you wanting to be a parent? Are you a first time mom? Are you a You know, you have six kids. You’re trying to figure out where in parenthood they are.
For someone that is business to business, they be They may be trying to figure out whether their audience mostly sells one on one services, if they have digital products, if they’re an influencer, so on and so forth. Then, the second question I like to ask is, when you aren’t in the room, what do you hope your friends are saying about you and your business or your parenting or whatever?
This is actually a question that I got from Christina Scalera. I was working with her at one point and she was helping me really Tweak my annual surveys and this was one of the questions that I took away from what she was teaching me that I really liked This year I asked when you aren’t in the room What do you hope your friends are saying about you and that was helpful to an extent But I’ve tweaked it even further for clients and taking it to you and whatever Just so that it gets a little more specific to whatever it is that you’re talking about because I got a lot of I hope They say that I’m hopeful.
I hope they say this and I feel like those were all answers that I already knew, but maybe you’ll get things that you don’t, but that’s why I added and your business or you and your parenting or you and whatever it is that you focus on. The third question. Now, this one again, I’ll have like a blank in here.
What is your biggest struggle right now when it comes to blank, please be as specific and detailed as possible. This is going to depend on, On one, what you do, but also specifically what you’re trying to create more content around. So this year I just said, what’s your biggest struggle when it comes to marketing?
But in the past I’ve asked, what’s your biggest struggle when it comes to launching? What’s your biggest role when it comes to creating content? And I’ve asked specifically so I could help create content around a specific offer. So I could help with my sales pages. This year I just went more general. The next question I ask is if you could get one blank question answered without paying 200 an hour for it, what would you ask?
You can change this up depending on how much you charge an hour, and then you can also, again, you can get specific or not specific based on what it is that you’re needing this year. I just said if you were to get one marketing strategy or launch question asked, what would it be? But you may want to get really, really specific about a certain thing, and you may not.
And then the final question I ask is, is there anything else you think that I should know or that you’d like to see more of in the future? And that’s it. So it’s five questions plus name and email, so really seven, less than 10 questions. It should take less than five minutes to answer. None of these are really long answers.
They’re one sentence type answers or they’re multiple choice or check all that apply. So it, it helps to actually get people to finish it that way. So those are the questions that I ask, the questions that I give clients when they need help with theirs. And it’s been very helpful over the last few years to get what I actually need.
I’ve tried a ton of different questions. If you’ve taken my surveys in the past, I’ve had long ones, I’ve had short ones. These are the five that I’ve really nailed down as far as what tends to be the most helpful for me as a marketing strategist, both for myself and for my clients. Now, how do I get people to take it?
Here are the emails I send. So, the, uh, I tend to have it open for about four to five days. The day that the annual survey opens, quote unquote, I send my typical newsletter that I would that day. I always open it on a Tuesday with the day that I normally send my newsletter. And then I have a little PS at the bottom.
Then, the next day, I will send an email that talks about the survey. If I’m offering one of my own offers, I’ll talk about the offer itself and really get them excited about that offer. Then two days later I’ll send one that just says, Hey, in case you missed it, would you please fill out this survey?
Enter to win, blah, blah, blah. And then on the last day, it’s a, Hey, last call. I would really love for you to be entered to win this thing. This one’s short and sweet. Here’s the annual survey. If you fill it out, you’re in it to win. And so I only send, I send three emails specifically about it, and then I also have that first one with the PS.
But that’s it. And that tends to get plenty of traction, and I don’t have to send tons of emails or really long emails, and I’m able to focus more on what they get out of it versus What it is that I need them to do. So that is my entire Annual survey strategy. If you still have questions, come join me on YouTube next Monday for one of my lives.
I go live on Mondays at 4 p. m. Pacific Time or 7 p. m. Eastern Time and That’s a great opportunity for you to be able to ask questions So I highly encourage if you still have questions about your annual survey strategy or anything marketing related Come join me and I would love to chat Your action step for this week is to put a date on the calendar For your annual survey because if it’s not on the calendar, you’re not gonna get to it And then your book recommendation i’m gonna do a selfish plug this week and share about my own book chasing simple marketing A crash course in content marketing for showing up saving time and growing your business If you have not read the book yet, make sure you go do so.
You can head to amandawarfield. com slash book to learn more about how you can snag it for yourself or just head to Amazon. Search my name, search Chasing Symbol Marketing. You can get it in all of the different formats. There’s paperback, hardback, Kindle. By the time you listen to this, the audio book may be out, which also if you buy a hardcover or a paperback or the Kindle version, You can get the audio book for free right now, just saying.
But that is your book recommendation for this week. Selfish plug and until next time, I hope the you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over@amandawarfield.com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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