Tips For Designing An Online Survey

Online surveys serve as an effective tool for research, marketing and customer service. They enable you to collect valuable information about prospects and customers. You can gather information about their demographics, preferences, buying behavior and income. Online surveys can be extremely beneficial for the owners of stratup and small businesses. However, it is important to understand how to  properly collect information and interpret results.

Here are few tips for designing an online survey:

Define your objectives: Many businesses start a survey project with a huge brainstorming session. However, they focus only the questions to be asked instead of what they need to learn from the survey. It is important to have a clear set of objectives and understand what you want to learn from the survey. Focus more on your the ultimate goals rather than just listing questions.

Survey design: It is preferable to keep your survey short. In case your survey is long, break it into several pages to make it look shorter. Avoid using open ended questions in your survey. Putting open ended questions can lower the response rate. Ask only those questions which are relevant to the primary goal of your survey. Also, avoid using too many multiple choice questions. Moreover, when you ask for personal information, such as phone number, address or email address, from your customers explain them why you are asking for the information.

Implementation: Test your survey on a test group. Testing your survey will enable you check if there are any logistic issues and know how long it takes to complete the survey. In case it takes more than 12 minutes to complete the survey, you need to cut it short. Ask the members of the test group for their comments and suggestions. Use their feedback to improvise your survey. Once you have executed the survey, offer the respondents incentives for completing the survey.   

Collect results and analyze data: Organize and sort the collected data properly. Analyze the data and act on negative feedback. Use the feedback to understand what your customers exactly want and modify your products and services accordingly.