Lead Generation Surveys: The Complete Guide

Lead generation surveys are a brilliant tool for B2B businesses. They can work wonders if you use the right set of strategies.

This kind of survey helps you gain insights into what your prospective customers actually need, so you can align your business to better serve their needs.

In this article, we are going to:

• Give a brief intro on lead generation, and what happens if you don’t have one in place.
• Explore what you can accomplish with lead generation surveys.
• Increase the responses on your lead generation survey with a few tried-and-true techniques

Click to skip ahead to the section that interests you.

What is Lead Generation?

It is the process of capturing the interest of your target audience so that you can nurture them until they are ready to buy from you.

HubSpot’s State of Marketing report says that more than 61% of marketers consider generating traffic and leads to be their biggest challenge.

What’s more, the average cost of a B2B sales lead ranges from $31 to $60. So you need to be extra careful about the steps that you take next to convert them into paying customers.

One of the most basic things that you need to do at this stage is to nurture them with content and information that will help their business.

Why is Lead Generation Important for Your Business?

Without lead generation, you will not require a sales team. The marketing team will only be looking over their shoulders, not at their KPIs. You might as well stop developing your product and call it a day. That’s what happens when you do not have a lead generation process in place.

Lead generation allows you to go after your target market who are searching for a product or a service that is similar to yours. From having an engaging website to investing in content marketing – there are a variety of ways using which you can generate leads.

In this article, we’ll talk about how surveys can generate leads. To give you an example, here’s a Lead Generation Form template by SurveySparrow.

Think this might be useful? Sign up below. You’ll get the lead form template, a free account, and 14-day access to features that will improve your sales initiatives in the long run. Sweet, right?

What Can You Accomplish Using Lead Generation Surveys?

Like most things, if you do not know how exactly something works, you will get it wrong more often than not. The same is the case with lead generation surveys.

But the best part about customer lead surveys is that you can get responses directly from the horse’s mouth. This helps you eliminate guesswork, and give your customers what they truly need.

1. Use Surveys to Segment Your Leads

New leads most often come from an opt-in page. You can immediately segment them with the help of the questions you frame.

Let’s say you have four products. You can ask in the opt-in form itself which product they want. Based on this, you can send them a particular set of content that will bring them closer to your brand.

Moreover, you can frame the opt-in form as a lead generation chatbot for a more lively experience.

2. Identify Your Most Qualified Leads (MQL)

The objective of lead generation questionnaires is to find prospects who are interested in your product or service. It will save the time of everyone involved when you only go after the ones who are looking forward to having a conversation with you. Going after the wrong prospects is a waste of time, effort, and resources.

Let’s say someone downloads a lead magnet after sharing their information, the next step is to follow up with a survey. In the survey, you can ask them what they are looking for and if they would like to give some feedback so that they could have a better experience.

When you ask them questions about what they are looking for, it is an indicator that you care about their expectations. Using lead generation surveys at this stage will also let you know who is most likely to turn into a customer.

3. Collect Testimonials

During the sales cycle, especially in the decision-making stage, when a prospect is about to choose a product or service among many, showing them testimonials of satisfied customers can push them towards availing your service.

There are few things as powerful as social proof. The testimonials can be in the form of video or text. When a prospect sees positive feedback from your customers, it will help them in your favor. You can send a simple survey form with questions about what exactly they like about your product.

Moreover, collecting feedback from disgruntled customers can also help you in creating better products and services in the future. It will allow you to make amends for your mistakes if any.

4. Ask Questions About the Lead’s Decision-Making Power

When someone downloads a lead magnet and gives you information, most of us think that the lead is someone who will end up turning into a customer.

But there are chances that this person is someone who is in the lower rung of their organization. Maybe all they wanted was to download the ebook that you offered in return for their contact details.

In your B2B lead generation survey, you can include questions such as the following:

• “What is your designation?”
• “Are you responsible to take decisions when it comes to the marketing tools that your organization purchases?”
• “Are you looking for a marketing email automation platform currently?”
• “What are the features that you are looking for in an email automation platform?”

The responses to the above questions will help you understand if the contact can take decisions. Or you can at least ask them to direct you to someone in the upper echelons of the organization.

5. Tweak Your Content Strategy with Surveys

You need to drive B2B leads so that your sales team can close them. Segment your leads and nurture them based on what they prefer.

If you do not know what they prefer, which is usually the case, you can collect information about the kind of content they are expecting from you, which stage of the buying cycle they are in, and the topics that they are looking for.

In your lead generation survey, you can ask simple questions such as the following:

• “Where do you collect industry information from?”
• “What are the different sources that you use to learn more about your business?”
• “What are the industry trends that you want to learn more about?”

If you think that your audience is not mature yet, you can offer them content that you are sending to their peers in the industry.

6. Understand Their Pain Points

When a lead gets in touch, you are not aware of why they have done so in the first place. Only when you find out what are the pressing issues they face will you be able to send them the right solutions.

One of the best ways to help them solve their pain points is by sending them relevant content. Here is where you can use lead generation marketing surveys to understand the areas that your leads have problems with.

Here are some of the questions that you can ask in the lead generation survey to understand their pain points:

• “What is the solution that you are looking for specifically with your email marketing automation platform?”
• “How can we help you create better email campaigns?”
• “What are the goals that you are trying to accomplish?”
• “What are the challenges which you face regularly that stop your business from achieving its goals?”

After you understand your lead’s pain points, you can come up with content that is relevant to this.

7. Offer a Better Brand Experience

Customers these days, B2B eCommerce platform or B2C, want a personalized experience, and are not looking for cookie-cutter solutions. It is possible to provide personalized experiences only when you have a lot of knowledge about your prospects.

You might not be able to get immediate responses from your leads as soon as they get in touch with you. This is when lead nurturing helps.

Establish a relationship with the prospect by sending them relevant content and useful updates. They will slowly warm up to your brand. After there is a rapport between your brand and the prospect, you can send them a survey asking follow-up questions about their expectations and specifications, if any.

After this, you can create content that will bring them closer to your brand.

You can even ask them personal questions such as salary range and other expectations through anonymous surveys. If it is anonymous, they will be more than happy to reveal such details in your lead generation survey.

Related: 20 Cold Email Templates To Increase Lead Generation In 2022

8. Engage Your Audience

A disengaged audience will think a lot before they even buy something from your brand. The only way for you to get their attention whenever you send them a sales email is to keep them engaged with your brand.

Quizzes are a brilliant way to keep your leads engaged. It works especially well on social media platforms. The data that you collect from quiz surveys can be used for market research.

Here are some of the questions that you can use in your lead generation surveys:

• “What kind of content do you want to see from us?”
• “Could you tell us your thoughts about our product?”
• “What is your opinion about the latest research on email marketing automation from the XYZ report 2022?”

With quiz surveys on social media, there is also the possibility that people will share the quiz with their followers/friends. It will increase the reach of your quizzes and might even open you up to a new audience.

9. Qualify Leads

For generating sales through leads, you need to qualify them in the first place. Thankfully, you can use lead generation surveys to qualify whoever sends an inquiry.

Going after every prospective lead is a waste of time, something that we mentioned earlier in the article. Ask a bunch of qualifying questions that will give you an idea about what they want and if they are the right fit for you.

Here are some of the questions that you can ask to qualify leads in your lead generation survey:

• “Have you used an email marketing automation platform earlier?”
• “Do you currently use an email tool?”
• “What is your budget for a single user?”
• “Which of our plans would you be interested in?”
• “What KPIs do you use to measure the success of an email marketing automation tool?”

The data that we gather from the above lead generation survey questions can give you an idea if someone is a reliable fit as a client. If their budget is below a range that you do not accept, then you can easily say no to the client instead of setting up a call with your sales team. You can even embed the lead generation survey in the website to qualify queries that you get there.

10. Measure Customer Satisfaction

Once you have secured a client, you can still make more business from them by upselling and cross-selling. Not to forget that you want them to renew their services at the end of the year or when the contract gets over. The post-purchase experience for your customers, after buying something from you, is also important. Many businesses forget to take that into account.

Measure customer satisfaction with the help of exit surveys. Ask your customers for feedback on their experience. It is a great opportunity for you to correct your mistakes if there are any. The areas that you need to improve can be anything from the website experience, customer support experience, interaction with the sales team, onboarding process, and so on.

Using exit surveys gives you a great impression of a brand. It will also help you in securing increased business from them. Add referrals to the mix, and it will increase your bottom line too. Post-purchase CSAT surveys can help you in multiple ways. You can use them to upsell or cross-sell customers. It can also be used to ask for recommendations.

Make sure that you work on the feedback that your customers or prospects send. If you do not do that consistently, you will only be working on outbound lead generation strategies. You need to have a stream of incoming leads who get in touch with you.

Related: 6 Important Survey Questions to Ask Your Sales Team

How to Increase the Responses of Your Lead Generation Surveys?

Let us look at a few methods using which you can increase the conversions of your lead generation surveys.

1. Make Them Feel Important

One of the easiest ways to make your customers genuinely want to complete your lead generation survey is by expressing your gratitude to them for being a part of this exercise.

Let them know that you value their opinion and share how their responses to your survey will bring a world of difference to your business.

2. Omnichannel Surveys

The best way to make sure that your survey reaches your subscriber is to send them an email, right?

What if they are someone who doesn’t check their emails regularly? Maybe the best way to reach out to them is via a phone call or from a social media handle of yours. Make it possible for them to gain access to you through a variety of channels. Post your surveys on social media, embed them in your landing pages, inform them about it via an automated call, and so on.

When they keep seeing information about your surveys from different channels, they will complete the survey just to see the results. Make sure that you don’t spam with emails. That’s not what we are trying to convey here.

3. Keep Your Surveys Short

Do you want high completion rates? Then keep your surveys as short as possible. Be miserly when you add questions in the survey.

Ask yourself if it is necessary for the objective of your business goal. If the answer to that is ‘Maybe,’ then do not add it. Keeping the survey short will increase the number of responses you receive from your customers.

4. Keep Your Surveys Relevant

If your customers are C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies, you may not want to ask them about parenthood, even if they might be one persona for your business.

Ask different questions for different personas, based on their interests and expectations. Allow the options ‘Does not apply’ or ‘Skip’ so that people are not forced to answer something that is not relevant for them.

5. Use Conditional Branching

Let’s say a particular question is not relevant for your user, then you can send them to a different path where you ask them questions that are for them. This is called conditional branching AKA skip logic.

It saves the time of the respondent and reduces the dropoff rates.

6. Offer Incentives

Even your most loyal customer will give a lot of thought about it and finally say ‘No’ if you want them to spend on a 30-minute survey. “What’s in it for me?” That would be their response.

Even a simple Amazon gift card can work wonders for your survey response rates. There are a variety of rewards that you can choose to give. Anything from access to an exclusive community to a free consultation call, as long as it is something that will inspire your customers to respond.

Conclusion

Lead generation surveys are an incredibly powerful marketing tool that will help you engage with prospects and make them your customers. We have given you a variety of lead generation strategies that will work with the help of surveys. By doing them properly, you will be able to engage prospects who are at different stages in the buying cycle.

If you are looking for the services of an online survey tool, SurveySparrow is one that you could try and achieve your goals with. From anonymous online surveys to conditional branching, every feature that you expect from an online survey is there for you. Use surveys to give the kind of customer experience that your competitors can only dream of.