Let’s begin with a highly important lesson: deeply understand a customer’s pain points (what they don’t like, what is bothering them) and understand their desires. You need to do this to address those pains and desires of your customer in the ads you are sending out.
1. Step: Create A Survey.
A good tool that you can use is Google Forms (https://docs.google.com/forms/), and it is even free. Create a blank survey and name it in the subject line with the topic that your survey is about. Very important: By default, the message has a content line included. Change this message into something more exciting that will benefit the person, so that people are more likely to open emails. This could be: “Hi Sarah, I’m creating a new recipe for you and I’d love your feedback.” Or “Hey Jill, Can I (try to) solve your problem as a retail agent?” Once you get into the heart of your survey, use questions to find out more about the problems of your customer and the solutions they desire. Examples can be:
What is your biggest problem with …?
Why would it make a difference in your life to find a solution for your need?
How difficult has it been for you to find a good answer for the above to date?
At the final part of the survey, ask for the email to contact the person.
If you have not built up an email list so far, think about your contacts that you have on your email account already or on LinkedIn. Use the Exporting Connection function to download a list and go through those email addresses.
If you really don’t want to use any email address of your contacts, there are always more options to get responses for your survey. Go to Facebook and search for groups that are within your topic. Join the group and check out the group rules first to make sure you will not get banned from the administrator for posting your survey. The similar approach is to go to LinkedIn and post your survey there.
Lastly, you can go to Google and search for a forum of your specific topic. Forums are another great way to get responses for your survey. Users there are already in communication about the topic and should be willing to participate. So either way you go, there will be people to answer your survey.
2. Step: Analyze Your Survey.
If you used Google Forms to create your survey, it is easy to go ahead and see a summary of the responses in Google Forms. Wait a few days until the responses are coming in. I recommend analyzing the responses in an Excel Sheet, and Google Forms offers you that view in one click. The most important data to analyze is to see what is the biggest problem and why is it important to them that the problem gets resolved? Frame the problem and imagine you want to make a headline of an article out of it. Now look at their answer to why they want to resolve the problem. Think of a solution for them. What will benefit them?
