To understand the customer’s interest in your new products or services it is very important to create online surveys. Today, there you can find many software solutions for the purpose. While some of these tools are subscription-based, the others are absolutely free. You can easily come up with surveys that you can use to achieve your objectives. However, there are many things you need to keep in mind in order to create an effective online survey:
Preliminary Research
Depending on your requirements you can create multiple surveys by using one of the online survey software solutions. Determine what you want to know through your survey. Once you do this, find out what you are supposed to do with this information. You may require different information at different times depending upon your goals.
Determine your target audience
Most survey software solutions let you add an email list. This means you need to determine the people who are going to be on that list. Pick out a particular group of people for your survey:
- Existing clients
- Potential clients
- Sales leads that you may have to purchase
Customize your survey as per your target group
The language or the tone you use for your online survey would depend on your target audience. This will increase your response rate and give you better results. For instance, questions that might work for college students may not work for senior business executives.
Make sure the questions in the survey are simple
It is always better to keep your questions simple and straightforward, whoever your target audience may be. No one usually has the time to read the questions more than once if they seem complex.
Multiple-Choice Questions
Give distinct choices if you are going to use multiple-choice questions. Do not use identical options that might confuse the participants. Make sure the number of response choices are less so that your questions are clear.
Put your questions in an order
You can choose how you want to order your questions.
- Random order: each respondent sees a different order of questions
- Static order: all respondents see the same order of questions
Static order is always better if you want to control the results of your survey. Try and make the first few questions as interesting as possible. Once you succeed in engaging in respondents you will have no problem with the results. Try to put the most personalized questions first as respondents would love to share their experiences. Put the least personalized questions towards the end.
Group your questions
Grouping your questions is very important while creating a survey. Questions that address a single theme should be blocked together as they will give you specific information.
Format your questions
There are usually various layouts on many of the online survey software websites that you can use to customize your survey. Use lots of white space between your questions. It is even better if there is just one question on one page. Use a progress bar to measure the progress of the respondent so that he/she is not overwhelmed by too many questions.
Test Your Survey
Make sure your survey is perfect before you send it out. Check for any mistakes in grammar or spellings. Try to assess how a responder would react to such questions. See if there are any confusing questions or something that might seem offensive to the respondents. Check if the order is logical enough to get the right responses. Once you are satisfied with your survey, you can release the same to your target group.
These tips can help you create meaningful and effective online surveys that will help you obtain valuable information. You can try different customer survey tools available online like – Quest Back to kick start an online survey campaign.
