10 Tips for Designing an Effective Online Survey

Online surveys are a popular way for businesses to gauge customer satisfaction or measure the impact of a marketing campaign. Surveys can be posted on the business website, and participants can be invited by email or Facebook. There are many ways in which a survey can be helpful in revealing things about your business, product, or service. Nevertheless, some ground rules apply when it comes to putting the survey together.

1. A short survey is better than a long one. Most participants are willing to spend on average up to ten minutes completing a survey. In practice, this means that an online survey with more than twenty questions is too long.

2. Questions on an online survey need to be easy to understand and easy to answer. This means that short questions and short answers are best. Multiple choice questions are a popular option. Avoid asking open-ended questions, and be careful not to suggest the answer in the way the question is posed. If possible, offer a scale of answers ranging from negative to positive, for example, 1 being a most negative response and ten, a most positive response.

3. Grouping questions together according to topic enables you to ask general questions first, before going into more detailed questions. When you group questions that use the same answer scale together, the participant will be able to answer the questions more quickly.

4. Place sensitive questions near the end of the online questionnaire. After answering other questions, participants will be open to sharing more sensitive or personal information, like age or eduction level.

5. Participants don't like to be confronted with too many questions that are not relevant to them. You can avoid participants getting frustrated by using routing technology, which allows for automatically skipping irrelevant questions.

6. Always tell your participants that their personal details will be kept safe and won't be shared with any third parties. Including this statement on your online survey can increase the response rate by inspiring trust.

7. An online survey that looks good and is presented well will have a higher response rate than one that looks like it has been thrown together quickly. Pay attention to layout, fonts, and colors, and incorporate design elements from your business website, like your logo.

8. Using visuals, like images or video, can stimulate participants' memory. If you would like to know if people remember or noticed your last mailing or advertisement, include it in the survey to jog participant's memory.

9. Before making your survey public, have a few people do a test run of the survey to make sure it is functioning correctly and all the questions are clear.

10. You can start making your own online surveys today by using Smart-Survey's questionnaire software and free online survey tool.

Online surveys are an easy and cost-effective way to find out how your customers feel about your business, and applying these tips will help you to get the most out of your online survey. The results of the surveys can be used to fine-tune products and services, and they can even be used to make important decisions about the directions of your business as a whole.