As third-party cookies come to an end, brands are focusing on collecting more zero-party data directly from their customers and prospects so they can better understand their needs and wants.
Although larger surveys will play a role in that process, most brands will gain insights a few answers at a time through signup forms, profile pages, polls, and other forms of progressive profiling.
It sounds simple, but writing a good question and collecting reliable answers is harder than it seems. Things can go wrong...
- Before you write a question
- When writing the question
- When writing answer choices
- Around the timing
- When analyzing the responses
- When repeating data collection
Let's talk about best-practices and things to look out for during each of those six steps.
1. Before You Write a Question
It's possible to go entirely wrong before you even begin with your progressive profiling efforts. Consider the following two things.
Always start by understanding exactly what you want to learn from your audience
What's your objective? Why do you want a certain piece of information from them? How are you going to use or operationalize that data point? Does that data give you the insights you want?
That last question gets at a disconnect that many brands struggle with. The goal isn't to collect data. Not really. It's to gain insights you can use to drive the desired outcome. Yes, you need data to get insights, but the two aren't the same thing.
My favorite example of data vs. insight is from B2C marketers who ask customers about their gender. Most of the time that data is used to personalize message content about products for men or women. However, a person's gender doesn't tell you what kind of products they want to buy, because they could be buying primarily for someone else or they could be interested in products for the opposite gender or both genders.
So, the better question is the more direct one: Are you interested in products for men, women, or both?
Don't ask questions you won't act on
Simply asking a question sets an expectation that you'll use that information to make the customer experience better in some way—even if you're just sharing it out with the community.
If you don't do anything with it, however, that can lead to disappointment. And it can lead to lower response rates for future progressive profiling efforts.
Also, gone are the days when you'd collect information because you might need it in the future... at some point... maybe. You don't want the liability of retaining data you're not using, so don't collect it in the first place.
2. When Writing the Question
Once you're clear on your objective, then it's time to craft your questions. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Craft questions that are universally understood
To the degree that it's appropriate, avoid jargon or technical language. If it's needed, consider providing quick definitions in parentheticals.
If your audience is international, think about non-native speakers, who might struggle to understand some long words, colloquialisms, and cultural references.
And finally, use unambiguous time windows, such as saying the past 12 months instead of the past year, which some might interpret as the previous calendar year.
Provide any needed context before the question
The primary concern here is that some people, once they've read a question, will skip to the answer choices because they're in a hurry. (And everyone's in a hurry.)
Another reason is that in the absence of immediate context, people bring their own context to questions, which forces your post-question context to work harder to override the respondent's initial thinking.
Avoid context and introductory statements that might impose a bias on answers
For example, you shouldn't ask, Given the current state of the economy, do you think now is a good time to change supply chain management software providers? You'll get more accurate answers without that introductory clause.
Ask judgment-free questions
Marketers are great at asking leading questions in marketing copy, but you don't want to do that in polls and surveys if you want meaningful results.
Sometimes that means you need an introductory statement or clause that gives the respondent cover to answer truthfully about something that might otherwise make them look or feel bad.
For example, you might preface a question with a clause like Recognizing that you don't have full control over your program... to make it easier for respondents to answer truthfully.
Recognize that people are bad at remembering past behavior
People provide the most reliable answers about now and the recent past. When you're asking about the actions of their organization, things can get even hazier, because the respondent may be relatively new to their company. Consider asking about actions or behaviors from the previous 12 months, at most.
Avoid redundant questions
The more questions you ask, the lower your completion rate will be. So try to ask as few questions as necessary. For example, I saw a recent B2B lead-gen form that asked for both the person's country and world region. If you get the person's country, you can figure out the region of the world, so that question was completely unnecessary.
3. When Writing the Answer Choices
Most likely, the vast majority of the polling or surveying you'll be doing will involve answer choices rather than open-ended questions. So consider the following when crafting those answer choices.
Make answering easy
While this has a lot to do with the questions you ask, the answer choices you provide also have a major impact on how easy a question is to answer.
For example, here's a recurring question I've asked marketers:
What percentage of your company's email marketing revenue is generated by automated and transactional emails?
- Less than 20%
- 20% to 50%
- More than 50%
- Not sure
Ranges make answering the question much easier, because the chances of knowing the exact percentage is low—and you absolutely don't want people to go hunting for information, because they probably won't come back.
Five- and three-point rating scales (e.g., Always, Sometimes, Rarely) generally produce the best results while keeping things easy.
Be careful when using subjective measures
Sometimes, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Other times, it's not. For instance, some people think that an email deliverability rate of 50% is good, but it's actually horrible.