How to Use Online Polls to Improve Your Business

Adding an online poll to your website is an easy way to gain insight into your visitors. There are numerous options out there to help companies add polls to their websites. Sites like addpoll.com, pollcode.com and booroo.com provide tools for companies to create their own online polls. If you are using a content management solution, there might be polling plugins you can simply add.

Learn More About Your Customers Through Online Polls

The first reason for using an online poll is to gather important information from your customers regarding satisfaction, desire for new features or new products, and popularity of certain items. The second is to create a positive image for your company. By taking a poll you say to your customers that you care enough about them to find out more about what they want. The third is to gather customer contact information and metrics for marketing purposes, and the fourth reason is to create an environment of customer participation.

The most basic online polls simply gather information about whether a customer is satisfied, and these have become quite common as a pop-up option during a Web session, or as a request for participation after an in-store experience. From a customer service perspective, satisfaction surveys can be quite useful in gathering information about what works and what needs improvement.

Create Participation on Your Website

Adding a poll to your website is inviting visitors to participate. While they don’t collect any real data, adding a poll that is about a humorous topic can increase customer interaction on your site. Online polls transform the customer into a part of the company in some ways, giving them an opportunity to provide feedback. Online customers especially have become accustomed to a more participatory experience beyond the basic transaction, and the online poll provides that.

Polls Provide Marketing Opportunities

Online polls can create a positive image for your company. Consumers love to be able to contribute either advice or complaints, and appreciate the opportunity when it is offered. When business requests participation after an in-store experience, the online polls will bring additional traffic to the business Web site as well. When a visitor returns to the website to complete the poll, it provides companies another opportunity for cross selling and promoting their marketing messages.

With some online polls it is possible to collect email addresses and contact information that can be used to deliver further marketing messages on an opt-in basis. Online polls can also gather metrics that can be used for market analysis—such as the customer’s age, sex, occupation, income bracket, and geographic location.

Whether for fun or for gaining information about your customers’ experience, polls provide a way for your customers to interact on the site.