As a magazine publisher, it is important for you to keep in touch with your readers, so that you can monitor their opinions and expectations and keep your magazine appealing to them.Reader surveys can help you keep in touch with how your readers think and what they want from your magazine. Some of the things that surveys can provide information on are:This chapter will cover two topics: survey types and survey techniques.
Survey Types
Questionnaires – Included On Your Subscription Application And/Or Renewal FormsWith this type of questionnaire, you can ask people about such things as their geographical location, their jobs, their income, their areas of purchasing responsibility, their interests, and so forth. You can also ask them what kind of features they would like to see in your magazine. This kind of questionnaire is commonly used for controlled circulation (free-distribution) magazines, where a database of readers is maintained – and
often sold to third parties (only including the details of people who have agreed to information on themselves being disclosed to others).
Questionnaires – Inserted Into The Magazine
The reasons for this format are the same as with the preceding category – the only difference is that they are included with the magazine for all readers, not just sent to new and renewing subscribers.
Questionnaires – Sent By Email To Readers
These are becoming increasingly popular and there appears to be a growing willingness for people to complete them as they tend to be easy and quick and do not involve posting an envelope.
Telephone Surveys
With this type of survey, a sample of people is selected to contact. It is important to note, however, that people may have expressed a preference not to receive unsolicited telephone calls, and so telephone surveys may be best kept as an option on a questionnaire form, where you ask whether the person would agree to a future telephone call and, if so, to indicate this on the form. If, however, a person has already given you their telephone number, it is likely to be acceptable to make this kind of call.
Readers’ Advisory Groups, Panels Or ‘focus Groups’
These are samples of readers, potential readers, or other interested parties, who are approached from time to time for their opinions, reactions and ideas. With such groups it is possible to make periodic assessments of opinions and behaviour, try out new ideas and get feedback on an ongoing basis.
Correspondence Columns And ‘readers’ Corners’
These encourage debate and are other ways of gauging opinions, although they are only likely to give a narrow sample of readers’ opinions.
Feedback
Inviting feedback on the magazine as a whole, or on particular sections or items, is another useful way of gathering information, but is likely to produce a much more limited response than a targeted survey. A simple way of inviting feedback is through the editorial column of the magazine itself, but often such invitations have disappointing responses.
Survey Techniques
Conducting surveys is a specialised process and, if you want to do anything more than a very basic fact-gathering exercise, you would be well advised to enlist the services of a professional in this area. There are a number of publications on survey techniques
(see Appendix 4), which go into a good deal of depth on the topic. The following points simply outline some of the issues you will need to consider.
Incentives
Response to printed surveys tends to be very low – it may well be less than 5% of those invited to respond, so it is important to do whatever you can to increase your response rate. One way of doing this is to offer an incentive to complete your questionnaire.
Examples of incentives are:
- a free gift
- a reduced-rate subscription
- entry to a prize draw
Timing
Surveys should not be conducted too frequently; if they are, readers may well become bored, irritated or fail to complete them. Once a year is probably about the maximum for a good general survey, although you could conduct ‘mini surveys’ on specific topics more frequently. Some good times to do a survey are when you have a new development in mind and you want to test opinion towards it, or when you need more information about your readership in order to monitor trends. You might also wish to do a survey in order to assess readers’ possible responses towards potential advertising campaigns.