In the last chapter, we talked about surveying your members using the ask method to establish the core challenges and needs of your target market. However, surveying can be used to collect other important information about your members.
One of the best times to survey your members is immediately after they join. I recommend that you include some form of a short survey in your new member onboarding process. The key is to position your survey within your onboarding content strategically. With surveys, you are asking for something so ideally, you want to give something (value) first. It's like giving someone favour before you ask for a favour back so you may give them an unexpected gift or a piece of useful content before saying.
PS - Since you're just getting started with us we would greatly appreciate if you could take a minute to go through our new member survey - Here. Thanks in advance!
When a new customer joins our business, they receive a survey after they join, which helps us collect important information that helps us better understand our ideal customer and target market.
Here are the questions we ask
- What nearly stopped you buying from us?
- This allows us to identify things that might prevent a sale with other prospects. This can be an eye-opening experience because you can discover things you weren't even aware of that is potentially stopping people from moving forward.
- What persuaded you to buy from us?
- This helps us understand what triggers people to buy. If a lot of people mention the same thing, we can ensure that we highlight that trigger in all of our marketing efforts.
- Which other options did you consider before choosing us?
- This helps us understand our competitors. Combined with the previous questions, it also helps us determine why a customer choose our services over those of our competitors. This helps us understand our unique selling proposition which is vital for our marketing message.
- What was your biggest challenge, frustration or problem in finding the solution?
- This helps us understand where our marketing might be weak. For example, they might say, we looked up an industry suppliers directory, and we couldn't find what we were looking for. We had to do a lot of google searches to find you.
The questions above provide us with a tonne of useful information that helps us better understand our ideal customer and target market so we can continue to tune our messaging.
I encourage you to come up with your own questions and program it into your new member onboarding process. You are welcome to copy the questions above or at least use them as a model to work from.
The leaving survey (cancellation survey)
Another time to consider surveying members is after they cancel their membership.
This can provide you with some useful insights into what caused the person to cancel their membership so you can improve your retention processes and avoid preventable attrition in the future.
Here is a sample cancellation survey email.
Hi John,
I wanted to thank you for being a member here at Melbourne Fitness Centre.
Although we are sad to see you leave, we enjoyed having you and would welcome you back at any time in the future.
We understand that sometimes life can get in the way and you need a breakaway.
I hope you had an enjoyable experience during your time here at the club.
We pride ourselves on the quality of our facility as well as the service and support we give to our members. If for whatever reasons we have not met your expectations in any way I would love to share how we missed the mark.
You can leave your feedback for improvement or suggestions by clicking the link below.
Alternatively, if you would like to speak to me personally, you can reach me at any time on 1300 999 999
Thanks again for being a member at Melbourne Fitness Centre
Kind regards,
Manage name
Club Manager
The link should ideally have a single question with an open text box so leaving members are free to write what they please.
The information collected via this process is sure to provide you with some insights that you would not receive by failing to have a member cancellation survey in place.
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