Low-Cost Survey Alternatives

Survey research is an important part of understanding a business. By running customer satisfaction surveys, the company can find out how the customers are currently feeling about things like products and service and hopefully, over time, find new ways to improve the positive feelings, reduce customer defection, and improve purchasing power.

But the economy is struggling, and survey research can be costly to undertake. It’s not uncommon for companies to find that the act of performing survey research is expensive enough that it could put other programs on hold that may also benefit long term revenue streams. When the company is worried about the price of running a survey, perhaps they should look at another option – finding a way to share the costs.

Your company is unlikely to be the only company that is trying to research their customers. Other companies need to do research as well, and are unwilling to spend the money or unable to get the right customer base. One option to help you pay for your survey is to contact these other companies and see if they would like to pay for some of the costs of the survey in exchange for adding their own research questions and getting their hands on the results.

Doing so will allow your company to not bear all of the responsibility of running a survey, and may also allow you to afford to reach more people and perform more analysis when the survey is completed. There is even the possibility that you can have companies pay you to advertise their products in the form of leading questions at the end of a survey (although this is not necessarily a wise research move), or that you can direct people to a website after the survey is over that contains information on a product.

Survey research is too important a strategy to ignore, and when you can’t afford to run a survey, you’re potentially losing out on a great deal of revenue that can come from your research. Luckily, there are other ways to help save money on the costs of survey research for your company, including the ability to add questions for other companies as a way of sharing the research load. Running a survey is better than not running a survey, and while there are downsides to adding questions for other companies, at least you will have some research to use.