7 Data Collection Methods Businesses Must Know

Data collection is an integral part of a business’s success; however, ensuring its accuracy, completeness, and relevance to the organization and other issues at hand is vital. The information gathered not only allows companies to analyze past strategies but also stay informed on what needs to change.

Further, the insights gleaned from data help stakeholders to be hyper aware of their organization’s efforts and take actionable steps to improve various strategies—right from altering marketing strategies to assessing their customer complaints and so on.

It’s important to trust your web data collection procedures and abilities as basing decisions on inaccurate data can have far-reaching negative consequences. By ensuring quality and accurate data collection, stakeholders can be assured of their business decisions. Listed below are a few offline and online data collection methods:

• Surveys

Surveys can be physical or digital questionnaires that collect both quantitative and qualitative data from subjects. For instance, you might conduct a survey to gather attendee feedback after an event. This can provide you a sense of what attendees enjoyed, and what could be different, and uncover areas where you can improve or save money during your next event.

Though physical copies of surveys can be sent out to attendees/participants, online surveys present the opportunity for distribution at a comparatively larger scale. Running a survey costs nothing if you use a free tool; hence, online surveys can also be inexpensive.

• Transactional Tracking

Track the data each time your customers make a purchase helps you to make informed decisions, boost your targeted marketing efforts, and understand your customer base better. eCommerce and point-of-sale platforms usually allow you to store data as soon as it’s generated, making transactional tracking a seamless data collection method that pays off in the form of customer insights.

• Interviews and Focus Groups

Broadly speaking, interviews and focus groups involve talking to subjects face-to-face about a specific issue or topic. While focus groups are typically made up of several people, interviews tend to be one-on-one. Both of these can be used to gather qualitative and quantitative data.

Through focus groups and interviews, you can collect feedback from your target audience about new product features. Watching them interact with your product in real-time as well as recording their reactions and responses to questions can help you gain valuable data about which product features to pursue.

This method allows you to ask subjects about anything you want such as their motivations, opinions, and feelings regarding your product/service or brand. However, it also introduces the potential for bias. So, it is advised to craft questions that don’t lead the target audience in one particular direction. One downside of conducting focus groups and interviewing is they can be time-consuming and expensive.

• Observation

Observing how people interact with your website/product/service can be useful because of the candor it offers—you can witness it in real-time if your user experience is confusing or difficult.

However, setting up observation sessions can be difficult. You can avail of professional data collection services to observe a user’s interaction with a beta version of your site/product or record users’ journeys through your site.

Though less accessible than other data collection methods, it enables you to gather firsthand experience as to how users interact with your product/site. You can leverage the quantitative and qualitative data gleaned from observations to make improvements and double down on points of success.

• Online Tracking

Pixels and cookies can be implemented to gather behavioral data. Both these tools track users’ online behavior across websites as well as offer insights into what content they’re actually interested in and engage with.

Other than this, you can track users’ behavior on your website, including whether users are confused when using it, which parts are of the highest interest, and how long they spend on product pages. This enables you to improve the website’s design as well as help users navigate to their destination.

An important thing to note is that tracking online behavior can have ethical and legal privacy implications. Ensure you’re in compliance with local and industry data privacy standards before tracking users’ online behavior.

• Forms

Online forms are beneficial for collecting qualitative data about users if you are looking to gather demographic data or contact information specifically. They’re simple to set up and relatively inexpensive and can be used to gate content or registrations for webinars or email newsletters.

This data can then be used to contact people who may be interested in your product, and build demographic profiles of your existing customers, as well as in remarketing efforts, such as content recommendations and email workflows.

• Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring your business’s social media channels for follower engagement is one of the most accessible ways to track data about your audience’s interests as well as motivations. Many social media platforms have built-in analytics, nonetheless, there are other third-party social platforms that give more detailed, organized insights drawn from multiple channels.

You can use data gathered from social media to determine which issues are most important to your followers or have an impact on them. For example, you may notice that the number of engagements dramatically increases when your business posts about its sustainability efforts.

Final Words

Understanding the different types of data collection methods available can help you determine which is the best for your budget, timeline, and question you’re aiming to answer. When saved, stored, and combined, multiple data types collected via different methods can provide an informed picture of your subjects as well as help you make better business decisions.