How to ask questions your audience will answer

It was my first job. I was 21, fresh out of university and armed with the most terrifying thing in marketing - a clipboard!

My boss had told me to go and gather feedback from the delegates at our international conference we were hosting. Being young and naive, I thought I was being fobbed off. I wanted to be on the stand, or possibly handing out refreshments by the door, where people were busy networking. Y’know - the place where fun things were happening.

“You’ve got one of the most important jobs here,” my boss said. She was twenty years my senior and knew her stuff. “What’s the point of us spending hundreds of thousands of pounds without feedback? We need to know what we are doing right or wrong, for next year.”

Fast-forward to 2025 and my clipboard has been replaced by online surveys, polls and chatbots. Trying to get any sort of feedback is harder than ever before, even if you bribe them with discounts or vouchers. However, there are ways to make it easier, using human psychology. 

Here’s my five tried-and-tested tricks for getting feedback (and looping it back to sales). In every case, follow this rule of thumb: keep it simple, keep it direct and keep it in the moment. 

1. Ask for it in your welcome sequence.

“What’s your key problem at the moment?” 

Or, if they signed up for a new course, or downloaded a free resource, “What questions do you have about xxx? Is there anything you want me to cover? I reply to every email.”

Obviously, you do need to reply, so make sure you have a process in place to flag their replies and respond personally. 

2. Drop it in event conversations

Again, the key is to do it in the moment, when they are there and already thinking about you. You don’t have to compete for that attention and you can foster the discussion with follow-up questions (what worked? What sucked?) and a mystery bonus for people who respond. It also keeps people in the course and makes them more likely to finish it.

3. Use polls

I love polls! My favourite is the smiley-faced till poll used by Co-Op supermarkets, which follows all the rules I’ve set out above. It takes a hot second to complete and the pictogram is brilliant for people who have poor eyesight or English as a second language. 

You can add polls to your emails, blog posts, pop-up and even your invoices. However, they really come into their own if you are running a live webinar. Both Zoom and Google Meet offer polls and you can add them informally in a Facebook or Youtube Live by asking people to send an emoji or respond in the chat. Either way, a poll helps you by:
- keeping your audience active and animated
- get their buy-in for your subject or proposal (ready reclaim your Friday?)
- helps you gauge the level of experience or tech in the group (have you heard of API webhooks?)

4. Use banners

If you have a website, you have the ability to put a pop-up or banner on your main page. We typically see them as a a way to promote discounts (e-commerce) or events (services and education). However, they can also be used as a third way: to solicit information from your visitors, with a quick “is this useful?” button. Given the average B2B rate is 56%, anything you can do to get your rate down and pinpoint the most useful pages is helpful. 

Banners also work in private chat groups, if you run coaching sessions via WhatsApp, Telegram or another provider, such as Skool. You can pin the request to the top of the thread or drop it in at the end of an appointment.

5. Create an interactive survey

You can use branching logic in a standard survey to direct people to more specific questions, based on their feedback. Typeform and SurveyMonkey do a brilliant job of this, A more intriguing option is to make your survey conversational, using AI. Why limit yourself to the written word, when you can create a real-time interactive avatar? This allows you to add an element of entertainment, humour or excitement. It’s also easier to get extended feedback if people can talk direct instead of typing (as our speech is faster than our fingers). Ask for 60 seconds, start with a broad question and narrow it down.    

Final tips & thoughts

Getting feedback from a business audience is always hard, simply because they are too busy thinking about their business to focus much on yours. If you can reduce friction by keeping the questions simple, direct and in-context when they are already with you, you’ve done the hard work.

What about incentives?

Ah, yes - the dreaded Amazon voucher. Incentives can work when your relationship is financially driven - for example, if you run a reseller channel and you can offer them a better discount on their next deal. It’s not so easy if you are service-based or software-based, because

1. The subscription or sale is often divorced from the service user as it gets processed by the finance department
2. After a certain level, people are more motivated by convenience or time-savings as the voucher is less than their hourly rate. 
3. A sufficiently large gift or voucher can end up being a taxable benefit. 

I’ve found offering time-saving bonus that with a direct benefit (swipe my conversion cheat sheet for your next ad campaign) gains more interest than a voucher. 

This sounds like a lot of work!

It is. I recommend doing it once, then automating the heck out of it, so you don’t have to do it again. My favourite tools are:
- Opt-in Monster (pop-ups/banners)

- Mailchimp surveys (you can tag and add the responses to a workflow in the system)

- Typeform if you don’t use Mailchimp (you can add their API to almost any email system)

- Canva if you want free, simple and quick event forms

- Zapier: for triggered follow-ups. You can use the tool to notify your team, update records and even draft responses.

- HeyGen for interactive avatars 

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