6 Tips To Create Effective Online Surveys

Having communication with customers through online surveys has now become a smart communication building approach. It helps you to understand customers’ tastes and preferences, to strategize business decisions. 

However, before you leverage the benefit of online surveys, it is important to know how to make them effective. Here are six things to do it the right way –

Know Your Survey Goals

Unless you set up realistic goals, the survey will be a wastage of time. Some of the key points to focus are:

• The reason why you are conducting a survey.
• Customers you will be targeting.
• The things you wish to learn through the survey.
• How this data will improve your business.
• whether you should prioritize feedback, data, or lead generation.

Once you know what is achievable through the survey, it’s time to match the possibilities with the business priorities. Defining tangible objectives will help frame precise questionnaires, quizzes, or polls for the customers.

Choose Appropriate Topics

One of the hardest parts of creating an online survey is to choose topics that are interesting to the audience and valuable to your brand. Many companies waste both time and money simply entertaining their audience without gaining valuable insight.

So, next time you start a survey, take into account the topics that will help to chase the business goals. Analyze what your audience finds interesting and neglect the ones that don’t comply with the customers’ needs, preferences, as well as your objectives.

Don’t Overload The Survey With Questions

Tons of questions aren’t going to benefit you in any way! Consider writing precise and relevant ones according to your preferred topic.  You can diversify your questionnaire in four ways:

• Ratings
• Multiple Choice Questions
• Picture Choice
• Open Forms

Decide which type of questions will the audience understand what you want to ask so that they can put their thoughts as well. 

In addition to this, avoid asking ambiguous questions such as, “Where do you like to shop?” It gives a vague idea of whether you are talking about clothes or footwear! Be specific while you ask. Also, using absolutes such as ‘always’ may distort your results. Instead, you can use ‘likely,’ ‘often,’ etc.

Create Or Customize Catchy Templates

Once you have crafted the questions, it’s time to choose an attractive template. Sleeker the design will be, higher will be the chances of completion. Select a customizable template that reflects your brand and conveys what you want.

Some of the features you should check while using an online survey tool are:

• Background photo uploading
• Themes
• Fonts
• Brightness adjuster
• Photo positioning options
• Different backgrounds and question colours to choose from.

Distribute Surveys Smartly

The distribution of surveys put a huge influence on the completion rates. You don’t need so many different voices from a massive crowd; just target your audience and get their insight. Here are some of the tips to deploy surveys on different channels:

• Embed the survey on your website, blog posts, or articles.
• Message directly in the messengers or send a link in an email or SMS.
• Share in your professional group’s chats.
• Make sure that you are using these channels to share information with your existing audience and not building the new one. 

Send Your Survey At The Most Appropriate Time

It’s best to send the surveys after the working hours. However, the response rate depends on the preferences of your audience. They may prefer reading their emails on the weekend. Or, might be lunchtime surfers. You can ask your audience when they like to receive communications. It will help you to plot a strategy to send out surveys and boost the response rates.

So, those were some of the best strategies you can use to create an online survey. Read them and let us know your pick!