Sounding Line has consistently stressed Web site interactivity with its visitors. While brochure sites definitely have their place, there isn't much incentive for visitors to return to your site unless it offers something they can use or do. Polls and surveys can incorporate interactivity into your site. Designed and executed properly, they can provide insight and an "excuse" for follow-up marketing activities. Short polls with only a few questions can be serious or light-hearted. A longer survey can be a useful tool for generating user feedback about their experience with your agency and your Web site.
Try posting a short poll on your home page where visitors will quickly see it. Change it regularly to generate more frequent site usage as well as collect customer data. Use a poll that allows the visitor to answer one or two quick questions and then immediately see the responses of other visitors. Excite.com and other sites run a different poll every day and some let you go back and look at previous polls. People seem to enjoy finding out how their answers compare with those of others.
Maximize response
When developing a poll or survey, make sure your questions are clever, interesting, and inviting; that way, you'll likely get more participation. Also, devise ways to steer people to your online polls and surveys. For example, ask those who call your agency to visit your Web site and click on the homepage graphic or text link that directs visitors to the poll. Or, send an e-mail and or a postcard to your clients and invite them to your Web site to take the poll. Periodically, as you collect poll results, publicize them in any regular correspondence you have with your clients, such as your agency newsletter.
What's more, depending on how you set up your poll or survey, you can collect contact information from people who take the survey. Collecting that kind of information could be put to good use in future marketing activities. Also, if you know who is taking the survey, you can provide incentives for their response. For example, you could send an e-mail letting them know that survey results have been posted. You might even send them an informational brochure or a specialty item with your agency's name and phone number. The point? Reward survey participants and build a relationship with them — as well as keep your agency's name in front of customers, which will pay dividends at renewal time.
Additionally, you'll probably get more responses if you let people know why you are taking the survey, approximately how long it will take to complete, and what you'll do with the responses. For example, you might say "Please help us improve our Web site by answering these five questions about online services we are thinking about offering. It should only take you two or three minutes to complete this survey. We'll use the responses to add features to our site and will post the results next month. Thanks for your input."
How complicated does this need to be?
It's possible to create a survey or poll simply by creating a form on your Web site to collect information. And, just like any other form, you would direct the e-mail responses to an e-mail box (set up a separate e-mail box to keep the responses organized) on your server and then look at the results. If you add some scripting for a cookie, you can make sure people don't take the survey more than once and artificially skew the results. Then you can gather the responses and publish the results later on your Web site. So why would you want to make it any more complicated than that?
If you want to give your visitors instant feedback and avoid the manual work of sorting through hundreds of responses, consider using polling or survey software that does the work for you.
In deciding to add a survey to last month's issue of Sounding Line and subsequently add it to the Sounding Line Web site, I researched nearly 30 Web sites (see Sound Links) that offer surveys or polls.
Polling software is available from online sources in a number of different forms. Surveys can be developed online or off, hosted on your server or a host, and can be analyzed by you or by survey experts. Some surveys are accessible only from a particular page on your site, while others can be sent to potential respondents via a combination of e-mail, "snail" mail, and online options. Costs vary widely from free for a simple poll with a limited number of questions and responses to extremely expensive from companies that specialize in creating and analyzing surveys and doing high-end market research.
Of the various survey tools I looked at, these are the basic categories they fall into:
Let's just get started
After testing numerous survey programs, I selected csPoller (www.cgiscript.net). This program is the one we used for the Agency Web Site Survey currently running on the Sounding Line site. The csPoller Web site explains how the program works and includes screen shots. Because there is no free trial period (as some companies offer), the developers advise you to make sure the program will meet your needs before you purchase it.
You'll receive the components via e-mail and will need to install them on your Web server. Depending on your host, the files go in a script directory or the cbi-bin directory. You configure a few lines in the program to point to the appropriate file names in your directories, set up password access, use your browser to log in to the management section of the program (safeguarded with a required username and password), and immediately start to create your survey.
The program is intuitive and easy to use and allows you to preview the survey as often as you'd like while you're creating it. It's also easy to organize your surveys if you want to have more than one running at a time. You can prepare surveys in advance and specify the dates they'll be available online if you want to cycle surveys on your site. You can also specify whether you'll allow visitors to take the survey more than once and appropriate cookie code is written for you.
The interface allows you to type questions and responses directly into the program in separate fields. However, you might want to prepare all of your questions in a word processing program first so that you can spell check and see questions in their entirety to make sure you are asking what you intend. I created the survey in Word and then copied and pasted the questions and responses one by one into the appropriate fields. There was one small problem with that, however. Some of the characters (e.g., apostrophes and quote marks) showed up as question marks. Next time, I'll copy my questions into a text file before pasting them into csPoller.
After your survey is complete, you use the Links Wizard to generate the link you'll need to incorporate into your Web page to direct visitors to the survey.
Web pages (html files) are created for each survey. You can download those files to your computer, open them in an html editor, and customize them to look like the rest of your Web site (I added a logo and some additional instructional verbiage). After you're satisfied with the appearance of the pages, upload them to the appropriate directory on your server.
After your visitor takes the survey, they can immediately view the responses. Questions and responses are shown, along with the number (plus a bar graph) and percentage of people who chose each response. They can come back later and view the results as more accumulate. The responses are saved in a data file on the server, and you, as the survey creator, can use the same management interface to view the results in your browser. You can also import the results into a spreadsheet for further analysis.
The responses are limited to option buttons, check boxes, and drop-down lists. No free-form text responses can be entered. But despite that limitation, I found csPoller to be an excellent choice for our purposes, and a terrific bargain at only $49. I did need some advice on configuration, and the read me file and technical support via e-mail were excellent. (The vendor will even set up the script for you for a small fee if you don't feel comfortable doing that yourself.)
How you can benefit
With a little bit of imagination, you'll discover many possibilities for learning about your customers' experience with your agency and its Web site. A series of short polls could collect those answers over time, or you could plunge right in with a detailed survey about your services, products, carriers, etc.
Additionally, a short poll can be used as an educational tool. You could introduce insurance concepts and products with leading questions, and then direct the visitor to a Web page with more information once they've voted and seen the poll results. Change the poll regularly and you'll have a good reason to contact your customers and invite them to see something new on the site.
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