Most of the small businesses and entrepreneurs can find many prospects (or leads) in their own backyard -their past customers. They often forget the customers once the sale is made, payment is processed and product / service is delivered. While the profit margins may not support pampering of the customers and engaging them on constant basis (as done by few large customer centric businesses), tapping their shoulders once in a while in this virtual world is not a cost-prohibitive exercise.

Starter: Email Marketing

The moment “customer engagement” is mentioned, many of us jump to the conclusion that newsletter communications with Email Marketing is the only cost effective way. While there is no denying that email marketing is a great tool in the hands of customer engagement managers, we have to remember that email marketing is an one way street. Information is fed by the marketing organization to the customers. Email Marketing Campaign Analytics data does provide an insight into the customers’ interest and engagement. Metrics such as email open rates, click rates and unsubscription rates helps to understand whether the customers are reading the email communications and the level of interest.

High Pedestal: Social Networking Media

However there is no way to have a conversation with them. Social Networking and Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums and Blogs stand taller than email marketing in the conversation aspect. You can hear their feedback, comments, opinions and complaints by listening to the customers’ conversations in the social media, if you have a good presence in these communities. With a plethora of social networking media crowding the current market place, it is often difficult to catch the conversations in all corners of the Web 2.0.

Direct Dialog: Online Surveys

Remember that we are talking about your past customers, not some unknown, futuristic consumers or generation X or Y crowd. You have all the information about these customers in your database, you had positive experience in dealing with them, you made money out of their purchases, and you have their permission to talk to them – or to tap their shoulders. Then, why do you need spys in the social networking communities or use one way communications? In fact, most of your customers would love to interact with you.

Enter Online Survey solutions and Customer Feedback Management systems. You can reach directly speak with them and request them to provide their feedback. You can segment the customers based on their profile (already available with you) and ask the right questions – relevant to them.  Online survey planning, survey questionnaire design, data collection and results analysis takes only few minutes! And it costs (almost) nothing!

Interacting with customers with online survey tool takes many names:

• Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• Patient Satisfaction Surveys
• Website Usage Feedback Surveys
• Online Shopping Experience Surveys
• Incident Response Satisfaction Surveys
• Employee Performance Feedback Surveys
• Product Satisfaction Surveys
• Warranty Service Experience Surveys
• What Else Can We Do For You Serveys

By whatever name you call it, it all means the same – getting feedback from your customers, engaging them with product updates, and preparing them for the next sale!

The surveys can be made of simple one question poll, or 5 question quick survey or 30 question deep conversation. It depends on the customer segment, purpose of survey, relevancy of the survey, and customers’ interest in taking up the survey.

Don’t Over Do It

This rule applies for any marketing strategy – whether it is the (hated) telemarketing, email marketing, social networking posts or online surveys. Make sure that the right sized surveys are sent to right customer segment (target), at right time with right content. Do it right, the customers will keep coming back to you.

Voice of the Customers

Surveys (or reserach?) show that surveys are the most preferred medium / source to obtain information from the market. Here is some statistics from the 2009 Voice of the Customer Survey conducted by 1 to 1 Media:

Satisfaction Surveys – 44%

Focus Groups – 14%

Call Recording from Contact Center – 11%

Customer Advisory Board – 11%

Pulse Surveys – 4%

Net Promoter – 3%

Branded Online Community – 1%

Social Media Sites – 1%

Other Sources – 10%

Go ahead and leverage the online surveys to hear the voice of your customers and make some more money! Online Survey solutions come in all sizes, shapes and colors nowadays. You do not need any software to install or get trained. Go online, subscribe to a survey solution and design and deploy a survey in few minutes. Do spend sometime in analyzing your customer lists and suitable survey topics before hitting the go button. The software solutions provide real time survey data analysis and reporting for you to see the results as soon as your customer clicks the ‘Done’ button.

We all know that the most difficult aspect of Lead Management process is keeping the prospect engaged, especially when the sales cycle is long. In B2B (Business to Business) scenarios, keeping the leads’ interest in your products or services over a period of time consumes lot of efforts and resources for the businesses small and big. Obviously, the most effective way is for the field sales person keeping in touch with the prospect’s primary contact either in person or using telephone and email. However it may not be the most prudent way of utilizing the sales resources as these in high demand in terms of cost and time perspective.

Email Marketing

In B2C (Business to Consumer) scenarios, though the sales cycles are smaller, most of the lead followup and management processes are handled online. Allocating time and resources to engage the leads on an going basis is not easy for marketing professionals, small businesses and entrepreneurs. Here is where the practice of email marketing comes into use as a lead nurturing tool. Done right, email marketing can be a great tool in the hands of the marketer to inform, educate and engage the prospective customers. The cost of email marketing is significantly less when compared with modes of traditional marketing such as direct mails, telephone calls and in-person visits.

However, most of the internet / online marketers tend to overdo the email marketing and end up losing the prospects totally by poking the subscribers often. The leads will simply opt-out from the subscription list and terminate the relationship prematurely, even if they have genuine interest in your products or services. Remember the three Rs: Right Message, Right Frequency / Timing, Right Target Audience! If you don’t figure this out correctly, you will end up losing the leads, though your intentions are good!

Step into Web Surveys

Marketers are finding out that online survey is a great addition to the online marketing toolbox. Web based surveys can be used not only to inform the prospects, but also to seek opinions / feedback from them. Hence this is a great two way communication tool between you as a marketer and your lead, as the potential consumer of your offer.

Again, this is closely tied to email marketing, as the surveys are administered and taken via the internet. The survey invitations also delivered through email invites. Hence, exercise caution while deciding the audience, deciding the survey subject, designing the survey questionnaire and delivering invites.

As mentioned above, you can learn a lot from the survey responses and fine tune your services accordingly. Online surveys can be a great method as a special purpose tool for Lead Nurturing.

Integrated Lead Management Tool

LeadPro, a leading lead tracking and management software tool, has developed and integrated an Online Survey tool with its Lead Management and Email Marketing suite of marketing automation solutions. The major advantage of using an integrated solution is that you don’t need to keep importing and exporting lead data among several tools. The email list management feature is used for survey panel / target audience list management. The same lead lists in the database can be used for sending out survey invitations.

Targeting specific segments of prospects is a breeze with advanced filtering. For example, leads at a specific lead stage / activity can be targeted to deliver concise surveys.

Drip Email messages can be used to automatically deliver Survey Invitations as the leads move through the sales process.

The Survey Analytics, which provides access to summary level reports and individual responses, can become a lessons learned knowledge base for improving the products and services.

Web based, online Survey tools can be a valuable addition for marketers and lead administrators, if used judiciously and executed properly.