Unless you have the widespread customer base of major national companies like Wal-Mart or Starbucks for your business, it may be a challenge to accurately survey those who visit your store. You likely won’t get very many qualified respondents by sending out a questionnaire to the general population.
Don’t give up there, though! By partnering with a survey market research company, you can efficiently reach visitors and obtain high-quality data to support your business decisions and marketing efforts.
In this post, I will cover three effective approaches for surveying visitors of a regional or local retail business. This will help you decide which may be the best fit for your needs.
Wondering what your options are for surveying visitors to your store? Here are three methodologies sure to create value.
1. Intercept Surveys
As the traditional methodology for “in-the-moment” surveys, intercept surveys are a proven and trusted approach to researching visitors of retail locations. Here is how the process of an intercept survey project works for retail locations.
An intercept survey company writes, designs, and programs a survey on a tablet or clipboard. A trained interviewer is then situated near the desired store with the survey and asks visitors to offer their feedback. This can be done to any scale with as many interviewers and locations as needed.
The main benefits of this approach are the certainty that respondents were physically at the store and high quality data as a result of the interviewer’s presence. However, downsides to consider include a higher cost associated with staffing each location and a lack of real-time data.
Learn more about conducting intercept surveys at a retail location.
2. Facebook Targeting
Another way to reach people who visit your stores is through their mobile phones. With the prevalence of location tracking on smartphones and millions of Facebook users, researchers have the ability to show ads to these social media users based on where they went earlier that day.
If Facebook users click on the ad in their feed or as a banner ad, for example, they would be directed to an online survey that screens respondents to make sure they visited the store recently. If they qualify, they can answer a series of questions about their visit or participate in a next round of research such as a focus group or phone survey.
These ads can target Facebook users down to a 1-mile radius around almost any address in the world. This creates a much higher incidence of people who have visited one of your stores than just attempting to survey the general population.
Here are 5 reasons to consider using Facebook for online surveys.
3. Geofencing Surveys
Looking to target store visitors more accurately? Geofencing surveys also use the power of location targeting, but can identify respondents who cross a virtual boundary as small as several feet around an individual store.
The trade-off compared to direct Facebook targeting is a narrower pool of potential respondents who qualify to take your survey. In a typical geofencing survey, respondents are existing members of a national market research panel who regularly participate in online surveys pushed to their smartphone. Because this is a smaller population to sample respondents, geofencing surveys have the most success with several locations across a regional or national level.
When it is a good fit for a project, geofencing may be one of the most cost-effective approaches for surveying visitors of a store. You’ll spend less time and money by putting your survey in front of the right respondents.
Drive Research is a national retail market research company located in New York. Our team has experience surveying recent visitors to a store using various targeting capabilities.
Interested in receiving a proposal or estimate for a retail market research study? Reach out through any of the four ways below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
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- Text us at 315-303-2040