Surveys are a great way to gather information about your customers' interests and spending habits, allowing you to tailor your marketing campaigns to better target your customers. In combination with Zen Loyalty, this can create some very powerful targeting options indeed. Creating surveys requires some careful planning, but in the Zen Portal they are fairly simple to create. In this tutorial we will create a new survey with a range of different questions designed to find out more about your customers.

 

Part One: Creating a New Survey

 

If the Portal's Navigation Menu is not already in the Marketing Menu, start by navigating to the Marketing menu by clicking the Menus link followed by Customer, Services and Marketing. Open Administration by clicking on the link and a drop-down list of menu items will be displayed. Click on Edit Survey to open the Marketing Survey Maintenance screen.

 

 

Start by writing down some questions and answers on a piece of paper. The type of questions will depend greatly on how you wish to target your customers. For example, if you want to be able to give away weekly AFL tickets you might ask which AFL team they support. In this way you can give the tickets to someone who follows a team that is playing.

 

In the Marketing Survey Maintenance screen, make sure that New Survey is selected in the Survey drop-down list. Give the survey a name in the Description field and enable it by selecting True in the Enabled drop-down. If you want to use an external file for the styling of the survey, enter the filename in the External Form field, otherwise select a form style from the Form Style drop-down list. Form Styles can be created in the Form Styles screen. Please see the Form Styles tutorial for more information on how to do this. There is also a Comments field that can hold up to 3000 characters to describe the survey for later use. Press the Update button to save the survey so far.

 

 

Click on the Questions tab to start inserting questions and answers into your survey. Click the red Create Question link to add a new question to your survey.

 

 

To create a new question, make sure the ID field reads New Question. To edit a question that has already been created, select it from the ID drop-down list. Enter the question as you want it to appear to your customers in the Question field. Ensure it is Enabled and select whether you want to make it Compulsory to answer the question or not. There are several Question Types to choose from:

 

 

The Question Order field determines where in the survey this question will appear, with 1 being first, 2 being second and so on. If you leave this field blank, the questions will automatically be assigned an order. There is also a Comments field that you can use to describe the question to remind yourself of what you want to use the responses for. Press the Update Question  button to save the question when you have entered all of the details on this screen.

 

 

If you have selected a question type that is not True/False, you will need to also enter the eligible answers for the question. After you press the Update Question button, a red link appears above the buttons that reads Click to Add/Edit new Answer(s). Click this link to open the Marketing Survey Question Answer Maintenance screen.

 

 

Ensure that the ID field reads New Answer to create a new answer for the question. Alternatively, select an answer that has been created for the question in the ID field to edit it. Enter the answer in the Answer field and set whether to enable it in the Enabled drop-down. The Answer Order determines the order for the answers where 1 is first, 2 is second and so on. Leaving this field blank will list the answers alphabetically. Press the Update Answer button to save the answer to the question. Repeat these steps for each eligible answer for the question.

 

 

Return to the Marketing Survey Question Maintenance screen by clicking the MKT Quest breadcrumb at the top right of the screen. Now you can see the details of your first question by selecting it in the ID field. Notice that each answer is displayed in the right side of the screen.

 

 

By selecting New Question from the ID field and repeating the steps listed above, you can create an extensive survey for your customers.

 

Part Two: Using the Survey Results in Marketing Strategies

 

Surveys can be used to target your customers via the Mail Out, SMS Out and Email Out marketing strategies through the use of filters. In this section of the tutorial we will discuss how to use filters to specifically target certain customers based upon their responses to the survey we just created.

 

In the Marketing Menu, navigate to the Surveys report by clicking on Marketing Reports then Surveys.

 

 

This will open a report screen that provides some information about your marketing surveys. Click on the link that relates to the survey that we created in Part One of this tutorial and a small menu appears with three options:

 

 

 

In this part of the tutorial we will create a filter to target customers that answered the AFL question in the previous part of the tutorial and specified that they follow the Essendon Bombers. In order to create a new filter, select Edit Related Filters from the option menu that appeared when you clicked the survey. Since we have no filters so far for the survey, the screen that appears lists no filters but does have a link that reads Create Filter. Click this link to create a new filter for your survey results.

 

 

Enter a name for the filter in the Filter Description field and any comments for the filter in the Comments field. For the AFL question, select Must Have for the Essendon Bombers answer. If we wanted to refine the search further, we could use the And or Or fields to determine how we wanted to relate the answers for the filter. For example, if we wanted to target only the Female Bomber Fans, we could select Essendon Bombers AND Female for an answer to another question. If we wanted to find either Bomber fans or people who like beer, we would select Essendon Bombers OR Beer for an answer to another question. Because we are only interested in Bomber Fans, select either And or Or so that we are not ignoring the answer to this question. Press the Save button to save the Filter to the Portal.

 

 

Now we can use the filtered results to target a correspondence to our customers. We will create an Email Out correspondence using this filter but it should be pointed out that the steps are very similar when performing an SMS Out or Mail Out correspondence.

 

Open the email editing screen by selecting Email Out and Edit from the Marketing Menu.

 

 

Enter a description for the email in the Description field. Type an email body, subject and return address in the areas provided and select any attachment that you need to send. Press the Update button to save the details of the email to be sent. Like all editors the special placeholders can be used to insert data from the database.

 

 

Now that we have set up our email to be sent, the next step is to generate the Email Out according to our filtered results of our survey. Click on Email Out and Generate in the Marketing Menu to open the Marketing Surveys Email Out screen. Click on the link that relates to the survey with the new filter and select Run Related Filters from the options menu that opens.

 

 

You have the ability to further refine the filter according to Loyalty data by selecting it in the Extra drop-down list. This allows you to filter according to sales data for example. The Selections tab allows you to filter the results according to the customer's birth month, age range and / or gender. Select the link that relates to the new filter. You have three options in the menu that opens:

 

 

 

By clicking Merge this Selection, we have now sent an email to everyone that has been returned by this filter (all of the people that answered "Essendon Bombers" to our AFL question in our survey).

 

This tutorial has displayed a means to target the audience of your marketing campaigns and is just the tip of the iceberg! You can create surveys and filters that are as detailed as you need. The more information you have on your customer base, the more effective your marketing campaigns can become.