Shownotes
In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson tackles two diverse questions in the "Ask Us Anything" segment. He shares insights on gathering customer feedback using AI-powered open text forms and wraps up with rapid-fire dating advice for listeners.
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Best Moments:
(01:27) How to get more input from customers and prospects using AI
(02:46) The rise of open text feedback forms and their benefits
(06:43) Statistics on the effectiveness of open text feedback forms
(07:41) Introduction of Marigold, the email sending platform
(08:30) Rapid-fire dating advice questions and answers
(11:39) Promotion of Eventastic, a free virtual event about events
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Check out our FREE + VIRTUAL EVENTS! ->
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MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!
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Transcripts
Foreign. Welcome to do this not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.
You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.
We are back for Ask Us Anything from the do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. This is our super short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions and we try to tackle one of each.
And if you want to submit a question, it's really easy. Go to jayshwettleson.com There's a button that says podcast, another one that says ask us anything. And we love getting questions.
So let's jump right into it. Let's do the work question first. We got a question from Brianna from Austin, Texas. All right, Brianna, what do you got?
Jay, we're having a lot of internal debates where nobody agrees on why and how people are using our products. How can we get more input from our customers and prospects that can guide our plans? Love this question.
Because there's been a big change in how we can get a lot of information from our customers and our prospects. And it has to do with AI and everybody could do this. It's super easy.
So first off, let's talk about the way that we normally would get feedback, which is surveys. Surveys are garbage, okay? Or people just filling out these response things after an event.
Or, hey, do you like our product after they've purchased it, whatever it is. This is all garbage.
Not total garbage, but surveys are like asking someone's favorite color and then you design their entire wardrobe based on the fact that they like the color blue. It's. It's a starting point, but it's not a complete picture.
And so the issue is what we all do is we have these questions on forms, all of our forms, whether you're a business marketer or consumer marketer, and the questions are on that are on forms on are all things like, are you a homeowner? Yes or no? What is your company size? What industry are you in? Do you like travel?
And the information that you get back is both useful and useless all the same time. It's so generic, and it's like, whatever.
But now there's been a big new trend because of something related to AI, which I'll talk about in a second, which is everybody's now using open text feedback forms, otherwise known as form free form fields.
Basically, it's when you have a box on your form, right, where people are filling out your form, where people can write in the answers to whatever question you're answering asking them with zero answer options. They're writing whatever they want, okay? And they're saying it however they want.
The reason that this has become gold is that AI can help us now to synthesize all this information.
So before we get to how AI could do that for you really easily, there's really two ways that you want to think about leveraging free form fields where people just write in whatever they want. The first one is on all sorts of different forms that you have.
Maybe they're downloading content, maybe they just bought a product or service from you. You want to have these free form fields and you want to ask questions to the people that are on these forms of yours on your sites.
And I don't care if you're a boring B2B brand or you're some sort of direct to consumer brand, you still want to be capturing this information because this is going to allow you to get some really important input and you want to ask a question on these forms that are a bit more fun than normal. Okay, so for example, you'd ask things like this on your form. If you had to convince your best friend to try us, what would you say? All right?
Or where do you usually hang out online and what's the easiest way to grab your attention there? Or what's one thing you'd want us to fix, improve or jazz up? We could take it, we promise.
Or what's one thing we could add to our product to make your life at work? We ridiculously better, right? And this gets you feedback from people. You're going to be shocked what you get back. It's going to be out of left field.
It's nothing you ever thought about before. And it's going to spur a lot of ideas, a lot of innovation.
Now, you don't want to just be doing this on your forms because you're just going to get, you know, onesie2z responses.
You actually want to think about doing campaigns specific to this exact thing where you're sending out emails with subject lines like just the word question, or a subject line that says you got a minute, or a subject line that says help. Need some input? And then in the body of the email you say, hey, listen, you're awesome. We want to pick your brain.
This is not some boring survey, but this is where we could use a sense or two from you about blah blah, blah, right here. And you have a link and then they go and they fill it out, right? And this is working incredibly well.
Another version of doing this exact same thing is by sending out an email and instead of them clicking through and going to a form and writing in their answer, you write in that email and say, reply to this email and let us know. And you actually capture all the replies to those emails.
So you'd put in the subject line of your email question with an exclamation mark and then the body of the email you'd write, we are working on this new awesome thing. Could you reply to this email and let us know if this sounds cool or not really or any thoughts that you may have?
And you'll be shocked about how many people reply back. People love giving their opinion. Okay. People love being heard. People love feeling that their input is as being valued.
Now the reason that this is surging is that it used to be it was super annoying to synthesize all this information because it was just these free form fields and everyone's writing different things and it's annoying.
But now what you do is you take this data, all the submissions on these free form fields, or all the replies to the email that you just sent out and then you literally copy and paste it either in a spreadsheet or just copy and paste it into ChatGPT and you tell ChatGPT to do things like this. Cluster the responses below into categories or topics based on similarity, summarize the key points and ideas and put them into categories.
Or you could say, identify any patterns or outliers or recurring phrases in the following text data. What do these patterns suggest? Or rank the issues or concerns raised in these responses based on frequency and impact.
So you could take all this free form information, submit it to ChatGPT and instantly will synthesize this for you and it is a home run. Why do you want to be doing this? Here's some quick stats, right? Here's a stat from Qualtrics.
Open text feedback forms uncover 80% more actionable insights as compared to closed end surveys. HubSpot just came out this one, they have three times more customer specific solutions when you have a free form field. Okay.
Than if it's all just fixed fielded. And this Last one from SurveyMonkey, 58% of improved customer sentiment.
When you have surveys with free text options, it improves your overall customer sentiment massively. We just did this for our event eventtastic that we announced.
It's this new free event that we announced and we had over a thousand registrations in the first 60 minutes. And we had a free form field asking people, hey, you know, you have any ideas that we should consider?
And we had 400 people fill out the form in the first hour. And the ideas have radically changed the direction of this event because they're awesome. It's stuff that we never thought about.
And this is what you want to be doing now. All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, which is totally ridiculous, this podcast is presented by Marigold.
Yes, Marigold is my email sending platform. I could not strongly recommend something to add to your martech stack. It is incredible. I've been using it for years.
We send out billions of emails, whether you're a consumer marketer or business marketer, and they have this new piece of content. It is the loyalty program optimization guide.
You might not have a loyalty program and I don't care if you're a one person shop or a 10,000 person company, you need to read this guide because loyalty marketing is where it's at. You can get this guide for free@jschwedelson.com Marigold that is jschwedelson.com Marigold check out this loyalty guide. Check out Marigold.
They are awesome. Let's get into the ridiculous question.
Okay, over the holidays we got in a ton of ridiculous questions and we got a bunch of these dating advice questions, which is so weird because I don't know anything about dating. I've been married for a hundred years.
But we decided, hey, let's take a bunch of the dating advice questions and let's try to rapidly answer a bunch of them. So that's what I do. I got four questions here about dating advice.
I which I don't know anything about and I'm not an authority on, but I'm going to answer them anyway. So here we go with our ridiculous questions. All right, here's the first one. What's the least awkward way to say I don't like sushi?
When the person I'm going on a date with has said that they want to go to a sushi restaurant on the first date? Here's what you say. You go, I don't like sushi. Can we go to something else? Why is that even a question? Hello? I don't understand that.
All right, next J. Is it okay to Google someone before a first date or does that make me a stalker? No, I Google everybody.
I Google people before I get on a call with them. I Google people that Pop in my mind I haven't thought about in 100 years. I Google everybody.
If you don't Google somebody before a first date, I think that that's weird. Is that weird that I said that? I don't know. Well, whatever. Google them.
All right, Jay, if they call their ex, their ex, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. If they call their ex crazy on the first date, do I run or ask for the full story?
Well, first of all, you 100% ask for the full story, because even if you don't ever go on a date with this person again, that's probably a fantastic story, and that's total entertainment. So you definitely should ask what the story is.
But I think it's also important to understand what that person thinks is crazy, because you're like, oh, my God, this person calls me twice a day, and it was so annoying, and they drove me crazy. And you're like, well, I like talking twice a day. So if they think that person's crazy, then they think I'm crazy.
So I think for multiple reasons, you want that full story to expose them. Or maybe, you know, the person was crazy. You're like, all right, I think that person's crazy, too. All right, last one.
How do I politely tell someone that their profile photos are way too misleading? Okay, so basically what happened there is you were going on a date with this person. You'd never seen them.
You saw their picture on an app or online, whatever, and they looked really good in that profile picture. But then you met in person, they were complete opposite of what they look like, so it was like fake advertising. So how do you tell them that?
That's a tough one. You don't. Hey, listen, you're uglier in person. That's not cool. I don't know. I don't know. You know, you hear, here's what I got. Here's what I got.
You could say to the person, so do you think I look like my profile photo? Right? And then they'll say, oh, my God, you totally do. Or, was that photo taken three years ago? Whatever.
And then it's going to force them to be like, do you think I look like my profile photo? And you'll be like, you know, sort of, but your hair's a little different. You know, when did you take that photo?
And you can kind of ease into the fact that that looks nothing like them. All right?
And if they're gross and you're not into them at all, then don't say anything, because you're not going to go back out with them anyways, who cares? All right. We've really talked about a lot of very, very, very important things on this podcast today.
So listen, check out eventtastic.com this is free. This is virtual. We have limited spots. This is going to be in June. It's going to be bananas. It is the world's largest event about all things events.
Consumer events, business events, small events, in person events, giant events, webinars, workshops. If you do anything in the world of events you want to check out eventtastic.com that is with one T and it's free. It's virtual. We have limited spots.
Hope to see you there and keep the questions coming. Thanks. Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.
Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time.
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