Hi,
My inbox is full of company surveys that trigger the same reaction every time: ugh leave me alone, insta-delete. The surveys come with cheery, generic messaging such as …
- We value your feedback!
- Here’s your chance to tell us how we’re doing!
I’m going to be unusually transparent about our intentions for this 1-2 minute survey. If you want to skip ahead and just fill it out, click here. (As an added incentive, you’ll also be entered into a drawing to win prizes).
Company surveys 101
Surveys help companies make more money by gathering reams of data about you and your preferences. That’s why they’re so pervasive.
Surveys can be a good thing! Sometimes the objective is just to make the product better.
But gathering this much data can also turn sour in various ways. For example, let’s say a company’s surveys suggest that readers haven’t noticed a small decline in quality, or that they value other aspects of a product more highly than the one the survey is about. You may eventually get a diluted product marketed toward the lowest common denominator, which makes a ton of money, but also kinda sucks.
Here’s the real reason for Examine’s survey
Readers visit Examine for a zillion different reasons. They range from complete newbies to MD/PhDs and come from nearly every country on the globe. But to be completely transparent, we’re mostly in the dark about what different kinds of readers want from us.
With so much time and money spent on scouring studies, we’ve spent way less time learning about reader preferences than we should. Occasionally though, we get a clue as to who our readers are. Here are the results of a quick poll from an email sent about a year ago.
Of the respondents …
- 35%: Optimizers (I’m looking to optimize aspects of health like cognition, sleep, or aesthetics)
- 25%: Hard mode (I’d like to improve a health condition that can feel all-consuming)
- 19%: Conditions (I’d like to improve or prevent a health condition that’s not all-consuming)
- 12%: Muscle and fat (I’m looking to lose weight, get ripped, or improve athletic performance).
- 10%: Health professionals (I mostly read Examine to help patients and clients, not myself or friends and family)
Side note to you hard-moders: As a fellow hard-moder, I feel for you. You’re not alone!
This data was a good start, but it was imperfect. The sample size wasn’t large enough, the survey was embedded in an email about tough health conditions, so responses could be skewed in that direction, and so on.
So, onto the real reason we want you to fill out this quick survey. Surprise … the reason is ultimately still linked to money.
But we’re a little different than most companies that send surveys. Our revenue comes solely from the quality of our research, since our founding charter eliminates typical ways of making money, such as from third-party ads, corporate gifts and partnerships, or selling supplements.
We’ll always go all out when it comes to quality, but we can do a much better job tailoring our presentation to people with different health goals and knowledge levels. Right now, everyone gets the same content by email each week, everyone gets the same user interface when they visit Examine, and so on. Tailoring might be extra important for an audience as varied as ours. And there’s no downside for you: it’s the same information, just (hopefully) better funneled to your specific needs.
If tailoring our content and interface helps us make more money, great. If it doesn’t, that’s okay, too. We’ve never made a decision solely for revenue’s sake. Going extremely deep into research doesn’t make us nearly as much money as competing websites that are broad and shallow, but we’re science nerds who are going to nerd out no matter what, so might as well share that research with you.
So please fill out this short survey (and enter to win a prize!)
It only takes a few minutes to fill out this short 7-question survey to help us understand you better.
There’s no tracking or nefarious stuff going on here. We’re planning to start tailoring the Examine experience a little more closely to different segments of our audience, and this is a first step.
If you fill out the survey, you’ll be entered in a draw to win a free year of Examine+!
Help us shape the future of Examine now:
Thanks for reading all the way down to here. I’m truly impressed by your attention span!
Sincerely,
The Examine Team