Free Tools To Survey Your Community And Improve Your Business

We recently sent a survey to some of our users asking for their feedback regarding their experiences using WhichDateWorks.com. Prior to last week we had never sent out a survey, nor had we used a newsletter email service. Our goal was to generate feedback to improve our web application. We were not sure which tools we would use to accomplish our goal, but here is what happened:

We were looking for the following:

1. Free (we always prefer free!)

2. Robust (usually not associated with free…)

3. User friendly (for both the newsletter service for us and the survey service for our users)

We looked at all the major services but ended up choosing MailChimp.com for our email service and Survey.io for our survey platform.

Why MailChimp.com?

MailChimp has a solid reputation, a user friendly interface and a great freemium model. It was an easy decision since we do not need a recurring monthly service (right now), but we are very comfortable with the features and pricing available to us as we grow and communicate more frequently with our increasing user base.

What did our free account give us?

- 3,000 emails per month

- Multiple lists of contacts (500 subscriber limit per campaign)

- Email template creator

- Analytics

- And tons more, click here for all of the features: http://www.mailchimp.com/features/full_list

The feature set is VERY robust. We could not have been happier!

The free account only let us send 500 emails at a time. Instead of simply sending back to back campaigns, we used this as an opportunity to test various day and time combinations to see which one yields the highest open rate.

Emails successfully went out on schedule so we were very happy with MailChimp’s reliability. For our next campaign, we will search around and see if there is a feature that sends out an email alerting us that the campaign went out successfully. It would have been nice to just get an email on the Blackberry letting us know everything is going well so we don’t have to check the website.

Go to www.MailChimp.com for more information.

Why Survey.io?

We found Survey.io through a blog called Startup-Marketing.com. The author of this blog, Sean Ellis, was one of the co-founders of survey.io along with Neil Patel’s company, KISS Metrics.

We looked at a number of survey web applications, as well as open-source solutions that would be hosted on our servers. In the end we chose Survey.io because they have an incredibly simple and effective product (and it’s free!).

One of our concerns going into this survey was asking the wrong questions or asking questions that did not generate responses that helped us make the product better. When we originally signed up for Survey.io we were prepared to create our own survey from scratch.  So we were surprised (and initially turned off) when we could not edit or create our own questions. However, the more we thought about it the more we realized it was for our own good! The questions were exactly what we should be asking, users can skip any they did not want to answer and the results are neatly summarized for us in our dashboard. Unlike other survey services, this was completely free no matter how many users respond.

Here are the 8 simple, but effective questions that came pre-populated in our web application survey:

1. How did you discover WhichDateWorks.com?
2. How would you feel if you could no longer use WhichDateWorks.com?
3. What would you likely use as an alternative if WhichDateWorks.com were no longer available?
4. What is the primary benefit that you have received from WhichDateWorks.com?
5. Have you recommended WhichDateWorks.com to anyone?
6. What type of person do you think would benefit most from WhichDateWorks.com?
7. How can we improve WhichDateWorks.com to better meet your needs?
8. Would it be okay if we followed up by email to request a clarification to one or more of your responses?

The interface informed users that they will be answering 8 questions and how long it has taken other participants to complete the survey. It is a small, but very important feature that we feel is important. Your users are taking time out of their day to help you. Out of respect for their valuable time, they should know exactly what is being asked of them and how long it will take.

Overall we had fantastic results. Our users were very generous with their time and opinions and we could not be more grateful! Their help will make WhichDateWorks.com even better for everyone.