Send personalized benchmark reports to survey respondents

A survey produces a good personal report when its answers are numbers or fixed choices that can be lined up across respondents. "What was your open rate last quarter?" with ranges to choose from can be compared. "How is your email program going?" can't, at least not in a report that says where someone stands.

When Kite writes a benchmarking survey, it includes three kinds of questions:

• Peer-group questions. Company size, industry, role, and region are the details Kite uses to decide who each person is compared with.
• Benchmark questions. These are the numbers people want to compare, asked as ranges or multiple choice so that every answer fits into the analysis. A question like "How many marketing emails do you send per month?" with five ranges works better than an open box.
• A way to send the report. The form asks for a work email and says plainly what the person will receive. That sentence is your promise, and it's also why people give you an address they actually read.

In Typeform, Kite builds the whole form, including multiple choice, dropdown, rating, opinion scale, and email questions, in your brand's colors and fonts. In Google Forms, Kite creates the form and writes its text questions. You add the multiple-choice questions in Google Forms yourself, and Kite reads those answers like any others.

Kite also writes the invitation. It leads with the report people will get, because a specific promise brings in more responses than a general request for help with research.

A comparison means something only when the peer group is genuinely similar and large enough to trust. Telling a 15-person agency that it spends less on software than the average respondent isn't useful if that average includes 2,000-person companies. And a "peer group" of four respondents gives a median nobody should rely on. It can also let someone work out what a specific competitor answered.

Kite reads every response first and cleans the set. It sets aside test entries, duplicates from the same email address, and responses that stop after the first few questions. Then it looks at how many respondents fall into each combination of size, industry, and role, and it chooses the narrowest group that has enough people in it.

Say your survey has 40 responses from software companies with 20 to 100 employees, but only five from fintech companies of that size. Kite compares the fintech respondents with all software companies of 20 to 100 employees, and their reports say so. You see the groups Kite chose, and how many people are in each, before any report is written.

For each group, Kite calculates the figures the reports will use: the median answer to each question, the range that the top quarter and bottom quarter fall into, and where each respondent sits among them.

A good personal report tells each respondent the few things they'd most want to know, rather than repeating every question back to them. Twenty rows of "you: 3, peers: 4" are tedious to read and easy to ignore.

For each respondent, Kite looks for the answers where they differ most from their peer group, in either direction. It usually leads with two or three of those comparisons and adds one where the person is doing well, so the report isn't only bad news. Then it explains each comparison in plain sentences.

Take the marketing manager at the 40-person software company. Their report might say:

• Their open rate is 22 percent, which is in the bottom quarter of the 40 software companies of their size. The median is 31 percent.
• They send two marketing emails a month. The median for their peers is five, and companies in the top quarter for open rate send between four and eight.
• Their list has grown faster this year than most of their peers' lists have, which puts them in the top quarter for list growth.

After each comparison comes a short note on what the top performers in their group do differently, drawn from the survey's own answers wherever possible. Kite writes these notes in your brand voice and in your company's name, so the report reads like advice from you, not a spreadsheet export.

Each person's report contains only their own answers and figures for groups. Nobody's individual answers appear in anyone else's report.

Kite emails each respondent their own report, one email per person, from your Kite team address or a connected email account. The email opens with the comparison that matters most to that person, carries the rest of their report in a few short lines, and links to the full benchmark.

Before anything sends, Kite shows you sample reports from different kinds of respondents, such as one from a small company, one from a large one, and one from a group that had to be widened. You correct the wording or the comparisons once, and Kite applies your changes to every report. After you approve, Kite sends a small first batch, checks that those emails went through, and then sends the rest. It leaves out anyone who has asked not to be emailed.

The full benchmark goes on a report page that Kite builds and publishes, with charts and tables for every question and every peer group. It opens from its link without anyone needing to sign in. Because it shows only group figures, you can share it with everyone, and Kite can turn its findings into social posts and a blog article when you're ready to publish the results more widely.

Most teams send reports after the survey closes, when the peer groups are complete. If you keep the survey open longer, Kite can check for new responses on a schedule, or start work as soon as each Typeform response arrives, and send each late respondent a report built from the groups you already approved.

A personal report starts more conversations than a thank-you email does, because it gives people something specific to respond to. Someone in the bottom quarter for open rate will often reply with a question, and a question is the best possible start to a sales conversation.

Replies to the reports come back to your Kite team address, and Kite reads each one. It drafts an answer to each reply, whether that's explaining how a figure was calculated or suggesting a time to talk, and brings the drafts to you to approve.

Kite also looks at who responded to the survey in the first place. It researches each respondent's company and role, scores them from one to five against your ideal customer profile, and explains each score. For the strongest fits, Kite drafts a follow-up built around the gap in their own report. It might offer the marketing manager a 20-minute review of their email program, for example. Kite records those respondents in your connected CRM, with a note on what their report showed, so your sales team sees the whole picture.

Follow-ups go to the people who would find them useful, at most twice and spaced several days apart. Kite reports which emails were delivered, which failed, and who replied, and it saves what worked in your knowledge base for the next survey.

The respondents who received a useful report are the easiest people to ask again. When you run the survey the following year, Kite invites last year's respondents first and promises them a report that shows how their numbers have changed.

Last year's responses are still in your survey tool or spreadsheet, and Kite records the peer groups and their figures in your knowledge base, so a returning respondent's new report can show both how they compare with their peers now and how much they've moved since the last survey. That second comparison is something only a returning respondent can get, which makes it a strong reason to answer again.