SmallBizResource Blog -- Internet

Survey Says: Zoomerang Can Bring You Closer To Your Customers

Posted by Gayle Kesten Friday, Oct 31, 2008, 11:48 AM ET

Holding onto the customers you have and convincing them to spend more is top of mind, to be sure. One more tip I'll throw into the mix of advice: try Zoomerang, an online-survey maker, to find out what's on your clients' minds.

"Given the turbulent state of the economy, it is more important than ever before for companies to cost-effectively connect, engage and listen to their customers," said Rob Glickman, director of Zoomerang at MarketTools (parent company), in a statement.

Exactly my point!

Zoomerang has made the self-service creation of online surveys easy and affordable for nearly a decade, but with Thursday's announcement of a redesigned Web site, I thought I'd give it a whirl (that, and it was honestly the first time I had heard of it). Three versions are ripe for the pickin': Basic, which offers enough functionality to create a survey and is free; Pro ($19/month), which includes a reporting and analysis feature and is billed as the "ideal" choice for small businesses; and Premium ($59/month), which lets you collect feedback via your mobile device, among other more sophisticated features.

I tried Basic, mostly because it was the only version available to test, but also because its features seemed enough for my purposes, and I'm a toe-in kind of gal when it comes to experimenting with new software. Overall, I would compare my experience to the one I had in May with GenBook, an online scheduling tool that, like Zoomerang, just worked without any complications.

To get started, Zoomerang asks for minimal information (name, email, and password creation), then you're in and presented with a page encouraging you to upgrade to Pro. (You can't blame a business for trying, though I bypassed the offer and went straight to my account.) Next up: deciding whether to create your survey from Zoomerang's templates or to make one from scratch. I went the template route and was presented with four categories to choose from: business, community, personal/social, and education. I chose business. You're then presented with more specific drilldown options tied to the type of survey you want to create, such as customer satisfaction or demographics.

From there, you name your survey, hit submit, and then receive back preformatted questions and answers -- all of which can be easily modified. You can also add and delete questions, shuffle their order, and customize your greeting and color scheme. Once you're done, you have two options for deploying your survey: via email through Zoomerang, or with a URL that you can distribute/post on your own. You also can specify whether participants can take your survey multiple times.

That's it. I encourage you to see (and take!) the survey I created, which took me *maybe* 10 minutes to do so, and that was with a little bit of editing.

Now for some limitations. Basic only allows for 100 survey respondents, up to 30 questions, and storage for 10 days. You can't export the data or make findings public to participants. You also can't go back and edit your survey once it's completed, or redirect respondents to another Web site when they're finished with the survey. (This side-by-side comparison of all three plans will fill you in on the rest.)

Naturally Zoomerang isn't the sole online survey game in town; bMighty covered a handful of others earlier this year, including Key Survey, Survey Monkey, Vovici, and ZAPSurvey.

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