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Collecting customer insights provides feedback on your recent event and is also important for delivering future events. These insights can also help direct content planning and updates to products and services, and, for us, the direction of different business divisions that we’re building out at DustSafetyScience.
Sending a post-event survey provides a concluding touch point for your audience.
In building, promoting and delivering your conference, you had touch points throughout. You did the sales, they attended the event, you interacted there, you had a great time. It’s good just to have this followup point of contact.
Not only will you receive feedback on how they perceived the event, but this last communication with attendees will also provide insights into the lives and challenges of your audience. If you structure your survey the right way, you’re able to collect what their challenges are, what they might want further training on, what was missing from the conference. These are all ideas that you can use to create products and services in the future for your business.
Whereas in-person events often share slips of paper with a few questions for attendees, online events have the benefit of digital survey software that will collect and aggregate responses for you. For the Digital Dust Safety Conference, we used SurveyMonkey. This software offers both free and paid tiers for your survey. Both levels provide survey templates and suggestions based on your subject.
So in terms of what questions to put in your survey, we did an eight part survey. And again, the goal was to find out, A, how we did, B, how many people might attend a similar event next year, and C, to generate these insights about our customers that we could use then in the further services and products and memberships that we’re developing at DustSafetyScience.com.
The 8 questions we asked our audience:
- How likely is it that you would recommend this event to a friend or a colleague?
This question is following the Net Promoter Score System available in SurveyMonkey as a default option to rank an event. Responses are ranked with those who choose “extremely likely” as promoters down to who choose “extremely unlikely” as detractors. This question demonstrates satisfaction as well as giving us insight into our audience’s willingness to share our event with their network.
– - How organized was the event?
This multiple-choice question allowed respondents to choose extremely organized, very organized, somewhat organized, not so organized, and not at all organized. While we, as event organizers, felt frantic and anxious through our planning and delivery, this question allowed us to see the event from the participant’s viewpoint.
– - Was the event too long, too short, or about right?
Another multiple-choice with too long, too short, and about right. This question will give us insight into audience satisfaction, insights into the time they’re willing to commit as well as helping with future planning.
– - What did you like about the event?
This question offered a blank field for free entry. This allowed our audience to share their thoughts in their own words, providing insights into their values and satisfaction.
– - What did you dislike about the event?
Another blank field for free entry, again offering our audience the opportunity to share feedback in their own words.
– - Are you likely to participate in a similar event next year?
This multiple-choice provided respondents with the options of yes, no, or not sure as being the possible options. And this question is really all around engagement and future events, indicating how likely success will be from a sales perspective.
– - What is your biggest challenge in industrial safety and industries handling combustible dust?
This question reflected a specific topic of the conference. This was what the four days were all about. This blank field for free entry gave respondents space to share the challenges they are experiencing in this topic. We also used to determine future content and training sessions moving forward.
– - What would you like more training on through the DustSafetyAcademy?
Another free-form open field question to gather insights about what your audience wants help with and what they are willing to pay for if you started creating material in that area, creating products and services in that area today.
Of course, the accuracy of your survey results will improve the more respondents who answer. You’ll notice these questions are quick and easy to answer. It won’t take the audience very long to participate, and the responses shouldn’t require any mental gymnastics.
And, of course, some of the responses won’t be what you want to hear. The most common complaint we received after the DigitalDustSafetyConference was timing: not offering enough breaks and, in some time zones, where it ran at night. With this feedback, we’ll definitely include more breaks as well as more time for Q and A next year.
If you have any other questions about running your online conference or even about your online business, being an expert or being an academic and running an online business, you can go to GradBlogger.com/ask, and you can ask them there. We’ll actually email you back, or we’ll even include that and feature it as a question on the podcast, which we’ve done in the past, and answer it right here.
You can also give me an email at Chris@GradBlogger.com, or reach out to GradBlogger on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media channels.
To recap our Marketing Your Online Conference series thus far:
- In episode 44 of the GradBlogger podcast, we cover getting your sales sequence right.
- In episode 45, we talked about how to market your newsletter.
- In episode 58, we covered a review of the newsletter marketing analytics
- In episode 59, we discussed Marketing Channel Analytics.
