If you’ve ever had to create a quick survey for the office, it’s likely that you’ve used SurveyMonkey. User-friendly, straightforward, and free to start, this online platform has been used by millions of people around the globe to create surveys with ease. But under that friendly brand name and logo is a robust market research tool that B2B and B2C companies can put to work to drive change and make informed business decisions.

Primary research is our playground

Ntara’s most successful client engagements begin with primary market research—specifically, a customer segmentation study.

Our goal: uncover deep insights about our clients’ audiences and use those learnings to create informed digital solutions. But the value doesn’t stop at digital. Our clients use customer segmentation data to inform major business decisions—which products and applications to pursue next, how to restructure their checkout process, how to word something in their next advertising campaign, and more.

Many businesses make assumptions and hypotheses about their customers. They’ve known them for years, they’ve done business a certain way for those years, but they may not be sure how to make improvements. They may believe they’re the best in the business, or they may think they’re in a losing battle with their competition. Sometimes these anecdotal “truths” are accepted as fact. Our customer segmentation process helps validate, clarify, and sometimes completely dispel such hypotheses.

With the results of a customer segmentation study, our clients are empowered with the cold hard truth, backed by data. So, whether they use it to win over their executive team for big digital investment or to reposition their brand, they’re armed to make their case with strong, compelling customer data.

Samara Bolling – VP of Strategic Services

Audience segmentation + SurveyMonkey

Like any agency worth its salt, we conduct a thorough analysis of the industry and competitive landscape at large to inform our digital solutions. That research is instrumental in informing our customer segmentation study strategies. Through these surveys, we focus on learning about the real people who purchase our clients’ goods and services.

We get down to the nitty-gritty data—the customer data. We dive deep into customers’ needs, attitudes, and behaviors to create highly detailed personas and customer journey maps. What motivates them? What keeps them up at night? How can our client solve their everyday problems? SurveyMonkey is a foundational piece of this process.

An infographic on using Survey Monkey for Customer Data.

As a power user of SurveyMonkey, we leverage the SurveyMonkey Enterprise tier as well as the SurveyMonkey Audience service.

Some of our favorite features and benefits of the platform include:

Easy email creation, sending, and tracking

You can create your own templates or import a branded email design right into the platform and send directly to your contacts. Tracking the campaigns are easy, and you can even schedule automatic reminders to users who haven’t opened or finished their surveys.

User-friendly interface

There are a variety of different question styles that can be used in a survey. They’re easy to learn about and test. So, while you may be a beginner, SurveyMonkey’s easy-to-use interface is best-in-class when it comes to onboarding new users.

HIPAA and GDPR compliance

Many of our clients are in healthcare or operate in the EU, so while surveying their audience is crucial, protecting their privacy is vital. SurveyMonkey Enterprise offers encryption, SSO, SSAE-16 SOC II compliant data centers. AKA, our clients can sleep at night knowing they aren’t collecting or using customer data improperly.

Quick and cost-effective market research

Not only is the tool easy to use, it’s also easy to collect responses from a specific group of people. By using SurveyMonkey Audience, you can launch your survey to a targeted audience and see responses almost immediately. You purchase the responses separately, but the value you gain in saving time with Audience is more than worth it.

Segmentation and flexible analysis

After we conduct a survey, we analyze the resulting data for days. (Seriously, we don’t want to miss one ounce of insight.) This in-depth analysis gets us to the juicy stuff—the true segmentation that our clients need to differentiate their audiences and their brand. SurveyMonkey makes our lives easier by providing insights that help us make segmentation recommendations based on the questions we ask for our clients.

For me, the advantage of using SurveyMonkey for customer segmentation is the ability to pivot entire surveys on a single question during data analysis. This allows me to quickly view segmented data and identify trends.

Brett Scarborough – Business Analyst

Results that lead to improvements

With customer segmentation, we are on a mission to identify the truth about our clients’ customers. And survey data doesn’t lie.

During a recent customer segmentation study with a commercial flooring manufacturer, we surveyed over 2,000 customers and contacts. For this client, we had three main goals. First, we wanted to discover what influences customers to purchase their brand over others. Second, we wanted to get a statistically significant read on brand affinity. Third, we wanted to understand the barriers to a sale and identify opportunities to accelerate sales throughout the customer journey.

The insights from the survey results revealed some core issues and opportunities:

  • Clients wanted to be contacted by their sales person; this engagement was the most influential in their purchase process but weren’t satisfied.
  • Longstanding clients (5+ years) were most satisfied with their experience, and more recent clients (1-3 years or less) were the most disgruntled.
  • Clients also desired a more streamlined way of ordering samples; the current state was too convoluted.

Based on the study results, we helped them streamline their product data for more efficient ordering. We also rebuilt their website from the ground up, with a UX strategy that allowed users to more efficiently explore an array of products, quickly place orders, and easily find contact information. In its first full month alone, the updated site saw a 61.7% increase in ‘Add to cart’ clicks, indicating a deeper pull of users into the site’s sales funnel.

But the segmentation of their clients didn’t stop at the survey. We also integrated helpful forms and interactive content from the website and set in place a robust analytics strategy. Now, our client will continue to learn about their segments’ preferences and patterns and will be able to leverage robust marketing automation strategies to help shorten sales cycles and win new customers faster.

That’s a win we can stand behind—and it all began with primary research.

Partnering with a data powerhouse

We are staunch believers in making informed, strategic decisions, and SurveyMonkey is our data collection tool of choice. Time and time again, it has proven to be one of our most valuable tools in the agency, helping our clients unlock their people data and ultimately achieve digital transformation.

Learn more about our partnership with SurveyMonkey through this customer story on their website. And if you’re ready to conduct some primary research and start making data-driven decisions for your business, let’s talk.

Aside from the benefits to our clients, we love SurveyMonkey because of what they stand for: They power the curious. After participating in an interview with their team, and interviewing them for this blog post, it became obvious that our organizations share a passion for listening to customers, and we’re committed to taking action based on those insights.

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