Use Targeted Door to Door Surveys for Marketing and Sales Growth

Everyone understands the importance of knowing your target audience and customers. But how many companies have figured out how to do reliable market research? 

Door to door surveys offer one of the few proven strategies for getting face to face with prospects in your target audience, and finding out their opinions, perspectives, beliefs, frustrations, and preferences. 

What is the purpose of door to door surveys?

Door to door surveys are one of the best strategies for conducting highly informative market research. Here’s what you can gain:

Data collection

Door to door surveys, more than anything else, are about collecting data. You want to know your customers, prospects, and target audience better.

What do they think about your company, your products, and your competitors? What challenges do they face related to the solutions your products or services deliver? What matters to them? What are their values and beliefs? How do they spend or save their money? What are their preferences related to your industry?

A good door to door survey can reveal all this and much more. And unlike other forms of market research, you’ll likely get incredibly strong participation. People generally like being asked for their opinion — especially when you ask them face to face. 

Brand affinity

And, the fact you’re coming to them directly, and not trying to sell anything, also helps them lower their guard, and they will perceive your company in a more positive light. You’re not assuming you know what they want or think. You’re asking them. 

So in addition to high quality data collection, you’re also building brand affinity and perception. 

Lead generation

Collecting data is great, but what are you going to do with it? On one hand, you can use your new and valuable insights to help craft marketing campaigns, alter your customer service, improve or add to your product line, and many other outcomes.

But in many cases, you can also follow up with the very same people you just surveyed. Some of these people will turn out to be great leads, and this can in fact be one of the primary goals of your survey. 

Why don’t other market research methods work as well?

You can collect data about customers and prospects in numerous ways, and each research approach has its share of challenges and advantages. But door to door surveys overcome most of the difficulties of other forms of market research, except for being more time consuming.

Online surveys have low participation rates and less reliable data. Phone surveys are also difficult to get people interested, and usually feel intrusive. 

Other forms of data collection, such as tracking clicks, likes, and websites and pages visited, can give insight into what people do. But they also have disadvantages such as privacy challenges, and the uncertainty of knowing for sure who these people really are. 

And the door to door approach usually works better than attempting to engage people in a public setting such as a mall or along a busy street. Those can work too, but you have less control over who the survey participants will be, which makes it harder to extract the information specifically related to your target audience. 

Plus, in public settings people are on the go, and you’re interrupting them. At home, they know they can just go back inside when you’re done. 

What are the main benefits of in-person surveys?

A door to door survey offers a more personalized approach to market research than a mailed or online survey. It’s much more relational. This is good, because it generally leads to high quality data, honest responses, and richer insights for your researchers. 

In addition, if you want to use anything visual in your survey, such as an object, an image, a video, or even a product demonstration, this is easier to execute in person. 

You’ll also tend to get more participation and better responses from a higher percentage of your targets with in-person surveys. It’s very hard to get people to fill out online surveys, even if you email them multiple times. 

And, you can deliver a door to door survey to a carefully chosen target audience or specific community — even selecting specific addresses rather than whole neighborhoods, zip codes, or streets. This will result in more reliable and high quality data. 

Lastly, any good leads you engage with will be ripe for follow up, because they just got to participate in a positive, personal experience with researchers, or what we call brand ambassadors, for your company. 

Types of door to door surveys

There are two main styles of door to door market research.

Questionnaires

The Q&A style is the most straightforward approach to getting consistent, quality feedback from your survey participants, and it’s the easiest for your market researchers to make happen. 

You can hire a team of professional brand ambassadors from Power Direct to carry out these types of surveys, and they only need minimal understanding of your products and services because the questions and the interview plan are the same every time.

Questionnaires can be delivered with pen and paper, but these days the best approach is with a touch screen. Tablets work wonders for this. In some situations, the survey respondent can choose their answers directly. In others, the interviewer would verbally ask the questions and then fill in the answers on the form.

When you collect data this way, the answers will be tabulated immediately and you’ll be able to analyze your survey results right away.

Interviews

The door to door interviewing approach differs from the questionnaire in that it enables your market researchers to ask follow-up questions. Here, you’ll probably be asking the same basic set of questions for most survey respondents. But if you decide to go deeper and really try to understand what your participants are thinking and feeling, this more personalized approach provides additional room to ask more questions and probe for more depth.

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With door to door interviewing, the interviewer needs a bit more training, because they need to be able to think on their feet and tailor their discussion to each respondent.

What are some door to door surveying best practices?

This is a big topic, but door to door surveying boils down to four essential areas:

• The quality of the questions
• The relational skill of the interviewer
• The technology supporting the survey
• Finding the right people

Nail those four, and your survey will go well. 

Question quality

Creating good questions requires you to know what insights and objectives you’re looking for. What is the goal of your survey? What do you want to find out that has led you to the point of conducting interviews in person?

This is the foundation of your questions. From there, you need to work on making them clear and easy to understand. Avoid situations where wording can be read in different ways. Avoid double negatives and jargon. Make sure you’re not using words that only certain cultures, generations, communities, or occupations might understand. For instance — it’s a risk to include pop culture references unless you are very confident your respondents will know them. 

Include a mix of closed and open-ended questions. If you decide to use rating systems in your questions, be consistent. Don’t make some questions rated from 1 to 5, and others from 1 to 10. 

Order your questions thoughtfully. Don’t start off with thought-provoking questions. Begin the survey with easier and lighter questions. 

Want some help getting it right? The data experts at Power Direct can help craft the perfect questions for your survey. 

Relational skill

In some ways, you either have this or you don’t. So, make sure and use brand ambassadors who have some relational skills. You can’t train a pig to keep its room clean. 

That said, there is a level of skill involved in conducting an interview — especially door to door interviewing — that you can teach even to highly relationally skilled people. 

Communication skills like eye contact, how to listen, body language, non-verbal cues, when to speak and when to keep silent, how to respond after a strange answer or when the respondent is unable to decide which answer to pick — all this and much more can have a powerful effect on the survey experience of your respondents and thus the quality of the data collected. 

Technology

Make sure your tech is ready to go. The worst thing is to show up at someone’s door for a market research survey and then the technology fails. Of course, this is almost guaranteed to happen at least once, which is why you should always have an analog backup. 

Use good survey technology. Test it out. Make sure it compiles the data correctly at the end. Make sure it’s easy to read with large enough fonts. Make sure you can read it even in sunlight. And in addition to all that, have a paper version of the survey in case the device fails. 

Targeting

You can identify the respondents for your survey based on several types of information.

First, you can use demographic data such as age, race, income level, and educational level. 

You can use location data that goes far beyond just the zip code. You can target specific houses based on their physical characteristics. For example, what kind of landscaping do they have? Do they have a pool? Do they have customized driveways? 

With Power Direct’s targeting capabilities, you can even target based on how much money people spend in certain categories such as telecom, utilities, quick service restaurants, and various others. In fact, we have over 700 different targeting and demographic categories you can use when deciding which participants to include in your door to door survey.

Who can conduct door to door surveys?

If your business has the resources, you may be able to conduct your door to door survey on your own. But it’s a challenging effort, and the key requirements will be:

• Time to plan and implement the survey
• Trained staff for conducting the survey
• The money to pay for staff, materials, transportation, etc
• A method for identifying the target audience for your survey
• Technology to collect, analyze, and report the data

For most companies, that’s a heavy lift, especially if you want to run your survey in multiple cities. That’s why brand ambassador companies such as Power Direct have perfected the in-person survey process.

Our brand ambassador leaders know how to run data collection campaigns. And, we have the ability to hire, train, and manage teams of brand ambassadors in cities all across the country. We have the technology to conduct the survey, and the experience to make sure the job gets done right.

Best of all, we also have unmatched targeting capabilities due to our door hanger marketing service, such as those mentioned earlier. 

And, if the goal of your survey isn’t just data collection, but also lead generation, we’ll coordinate with you so you know which survey respondents qualify as leads. This will enable you to follow up with them afterwards. 

Use Power Direct to conduct your next door to door survey

Power Direct can handle every aspect of your next door to door survey.

If you decide to work with us as your survey partner, we will work with you to create the survey. We’ll upload it to our brand ambassador technology platform so you can collect, process, and report the results from your survey. We’ll identify the targeted households for your survey in whatever cities you prefer. And, we’ll employ our tried and true recruitment system to hire, train, and manage the market researchers who will conduct your survey.

Reach out to our team about your door to door survey idea!