Celeste Kirby-Brown explains how member surveys can help take your business success to new levels.
In 2006 I attended the annual Fitness New Zealand conference. I was at the Auckland event sitting between Justin Tamsett, Professional Trainer and Coach, and Reece Zondag, CEO Les Mills. We were listening to Richard Beddie CEO of Fitness New Zealand speak about the insights from the annual survey they conducted to clubs across New Zealand.
Justin leaned over and whispered “Ezypay should do that.” What he meant was Ezypay should do a survey of the fitness industry. There was a lack of data and information on the industry and Fitness Australia was not yet in a position to run a major national survey. However Richard Beddie and the Fitness New Zealand team were running a comprehensive industry survey and bringing forward some really great data.
How member surveys were used
In 2007 we ran our first survey. We focused solely on clubs asking owners and operators general information about their business. We launched the results at FILEX in 2008. I think we got something like 195 respondents. The next year we ran it again including New Zealand clubs this time. We achieved 275 respondents and asked almost the same questions. From this we were able to produce a report comparing this year and last year’s data. Not much had changed except club sizes decreased as ladies only clubs rolled out across Australia and New Zealand.
Over the next few years we ran the survey each year. Each year we would change it slightly. The changes included tweaking a few of the questions or focusing on a specific area of interest like sales and marketing. We also included a member survey where we asked members (current and past) across Australia and New Zealand specific questions on their experiences. We also started creating different types of data with the insights we received from respondents. Over the last few years we started developing infographs which are graphical representations of the information. We also created videos with experts and their opinions, as well as reports and trend documents.
Last year we ran the survey and had over 20,000 members and 1,500 clubs respond across Australia and New Zealand. We produced a trend report, five infographs and a comprehensive report. All of these documents are available for free download from our website.
How to use member surveys to improve your business
The aim of a survey is to gain general or specific insights into a topic. There are four key steps in running a survey and making sure it has an impact on your business:
1. Choose a topic or specific area you want to find out more about.
2. Run the survey and promote it to the focus group.
3. Analyse the data which means making sense of it within context.
4. Apply your findings to the issue or topic you wanted to find out more about.
We generally take months to run this survey and it’s a very large undertaking. However we also run other surveys in our business more specifically to Ezypay clients. We recently ran one to gain an insight into buying decisions, perception and experience of Ezypay. We collected the data, analysed the results and produced an infograph for our team to use in our business. I also personally contacted each person who was not satisfied with the quality of their experience at Ezypay. It was a great experience because it gave me the opportunity to really understand the buying motivations and decision making process of our clients. This was important to me because I wanted to make sure we were meeting their initial expectations. I also was able to use their language and words to sell and market our product to our prospects. In addition I picked up a couple of areas where our clients told us we could do better.
This focused information is like gold for our business. By applying the information in our future decisions we are able to really develop our product and make our business decisions based on the needs and expectations of our clients. Each client is valuable to us so it has also given me the opportunity to work with the handful that weren’t satisfied to see if I could resolve their issues and make them satisfied with Ezypay. I am just about to do another communication to these people to find out if we were able to help them and check to see how their experience is now.
Best practice for using member surveys
There are a range of theories about surveys and I am not going to go into them all however I will give you a couple of ideas I hope you will be able to use.
Length
The shorter the survey the more responses you will get. LinkedIn has sent me two surveys in the last four months. Each had one question only. I thought it was an interesting approach and clearly designed to get the highest engagement possible.
Frequency
You are better to do shorter surveys more frequently. Most people are happy to answer the shorter questions more regularly rather than lots of questions once a year.
Analysis
It’s a lot harder to analyse answers from qualitative questions, than quantitative ones. So really think about how much time you have, and the real value of the information when forming your survey.
Marketing
You will need to market your survey. Even if it’s sending not just one but two emails about it you need to promote it like any other marketing piece.
Tools
There are loads of survey tools out there – some are free and some are paid. I would recommend Survey Monkey for a tool that provides excellent value for the price (free). They even have ready-made templates for you to use.
Application
There is little or no point to running a survey if you aren’t going to apply the results to your initial problem. Generally you ask a question because you have an issue and you need information to solve it. So you need to ensure you actually apply the insights you gain to the initial problem that motivated you to ask the question in the beginning.
Good luck with your survey. When you do it right the information you receive will be nuggets of gold that will help you improve your business.
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