Why Most Surveys Suck and How to find Quality Consumer Insights
A lot of the time, brands want to find consumer insights without directly asking them about their preferences.
And that’s pretty normal.
To achieve this goal, some companies do their own market research; others hire companies to do this for them. Some other folks opt to rely on paid survey data.
But the question is — are survey data reliable enough?
Well, not really. Here is why.
“Your opinion is really important to us…”
“Please complete a survey. It won’t take more than 10 minutes.”
Looks so common, right? We all get similar cold emails pretty much every month if not weekly. Do we answer them? Not very often! In fact, the average email survey response rate is 30%. Not bad, considering that the typical telephone survey response rates fell to 7% and 6% in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
What’s wrong with telephone polling?
Traditional surveys seem to be not that interesting for people anymore. Survey response rates are thus falling.
Among the factors affecting the decrease in telephone polling rates is the increased number of automated telemarketing calls, mainly to cellphones. In recent years only, the number of robocalls has increased rapidly, reaching 3+ billion calls per month.
People have got their reasons for hating these calls. Some of the reasons being the following:
- Concerns over intrusion on their time and personal lives
- Lack of interest in responding to survey questions in general
Thus, a lot of people simply don’t pick up calls from unknown numbers.
And what’s wrong with paid polls?
Paid polls can be a great way of making some pocket money as a student. Usually, they work like this — the more questions you answer, the more money you get. Don’t you sense something strange in this formula as someone who might be interested in getting paid poll survey data?
The biggest concern with paid poll survey data is that they are very often filled out in a hurry just to unlock some cash. Are thus consumer insights gathered through this type of polling reliable? Think twice before you answer.
Some other reasons why paid polls suck:
- People answering the polls are not necessarily your customers. In other words, panelists do not equal to consumers.
- Long surveys are often too boring for the pollsters to fill out with attention and care
What to do to eventually get quality consumer insights?
Well, getting quality data can be either time or money consuming. It can be rough. But at TruePublic, we have given it a thought, and we have created a unique methodology of gathering insights.
We don’t pay our users.
We don’t spam them with hundreds of surveys.
We don’t beg them for answers, either.
People simply come to TruePublic to answer questions. Just because they are curious about things. And unlike other services, we do not treat our users like information-providers. We gather data, and we share the data with them too. It works pretty straightforward — people come to TruePublic, they create anonymous accounts by merely providing generic demographic data such as age, gender, political leaning, etc. and they start answering questions and instantly seeing insights about how they compare with the rest of the app users.
It turns out; we incentivize our users to answer questions by leveraging their inner desire to express their opinions and their natural curiosity to learn about what others think.
Wrapping up
We believe in honest opinion sharing, and we think that carefully collected consumer insights can help businesses make informed decisions and provide better service to customers. Being data-driven is not a nice-to-have anymore. It’s a MUST. And we can help meet the challenges of being more consumer-centric.
Originally published at https://blog.truepublic.com on November 5, 2019.
Read more by TruePublic:
