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[Survey Swipe File] The Exact Questions You Need To Ask Plus 12 Amazing Survey Strategies

[Survey Swipe File] The Exact Questions You Need To Ask Plus 12 Amazing Survey Strategies

The word ‘Survey’ must be sounding very familiar to you and you would be thinking that it is just a collection of some randomly put questions asked in order to know your customers a little more than before…

Most of the companies around us do not even pay much attention to carry out any research. They think they know their customers already and that they do not really need to know more.

These companies are basically proceeding with the guesswork; guessing what the market demands, what the customers need and what the trends are…

Because in order to know what exactly the market requires, you need to dedicate a separate team for the research work. There has to be a constant research going on which will determine the demands at each and every point. So not having any department like this means the company is trying to skip the research part.

In this article, you’ll get…

A clear cut idea on how should you create online surveys the right way, how can they help you deliver a better program, connect with your clients on a deeper level, and  improve your client retention rates.

I will be giving you some amazing tactics and strategies on how to build up your on-site survey to cut down on the misleading results and increase the accuracy. Here are..

Contents

12 Amazing Survey Strategies/ Tips:

1. Make Sure Your Survey is Really Needed

The very first step is to make sure that survey is the most appropriate research tool for your project. For making this sure, you need to analyze the other data collection methods or research tools like observations or focus groups.

Check on what method is the most suitable for the research you are about to carry out.

Make sure the data you are about to collect is not collected before or if it is collected, than it can be used for comparisons, or seeing the trends.

It is highly recommendable to see what kind of research you actually need, is survey the most significant tool and would it give you the benefit to the fullest.

See, data collection requires too much effort and time, so you can’t waste both your time and effort just like that. You need to be sure of what you need to avoid any kind of wastage.

2. Create a Crystal Clear Goal for Your Surveys

Make sure that you have set a particular clear-cut goal for your survey. There should always be a set reason/ aim. Do not just randomly throw questions at your audience.

Once you have set a goal, you will also be able to structure to-the-point and effective survey questions, otherwise your survey wouldn’t make sense at all.

A focal point is a must to have for anything which needs to be researched, or else you’ll end up having a generalized research which wouldn’t be of much use to you or your clients.

So, make sure you have clear goal!

Set goals for Survey
Source

The graph clearly shows that the main factor which people consider before writing a survey is to set a goal. Because setting up a goal lets you build your survey in  a much better way.

3. Keep your Survey Questions Relevant

Always remember that when a person is filling up your questionnaire, he is taking out his precious time for you. Do not take this fact for granted.

It is a favor that he is giving you.

Never think that it’s his duty. It is a plain favor to you!

So your task is to keep your survey short and precise. Do not add irrelevant questions in it.

Respect this favor that the person is providing you and save his effort and time.

This infographic below shows who is actually filling the surveys today.

Feedback Survey Statistics
Source

Regarding these visitors and providing them ease would also include designing your survey in a super efficient way and following the survey logic: sub-questions, branch and skip logic, masking logic, and still other advanced logic types.

By including these in your survey design, you ensure respondents only see questions that are relevant to them.

4. Know Your Audience

Another most important factor which you need to consider is knowing your audience beforehand.

You need to know your target market and that target market needs to be your only survey audience, because otherwise your research would go down the drain as your the audience would not be focused.

Be sure to narrow down the target market before you form your survey.

Form the question according to the audience. Include demographics questions like their age, gender, income and education levels. This way, you can get a much better sense of who they are.

Survey Tips - Know your Audience
Source

5. Keep it Short

Keeping your survey short, precise an-the-point is another significant factor which will lead to higher number of your filled surveys.

The shorter you keep it, the more accurate answers you will get.

Tips on how to create feedback survey
Source

The above graph shows that 45% of people are willing to spend 5 minutes, at most, on your feedback survey, while 33% are willing to spend up to 10 minutes. Meaning, short surveys are highly preferred.

6. Avoid Common Survey Questions

Take special care when forming your questions. Try putting relevant, to-the-point and specific questions which will help you dig out proper and more accurate results.

Asking common and typical questions is just wasting your own time and the visitor’s time.

7. Add an “Out-of-the-Box” Questions in your Surveys

Always try to provide something unique, something which hasn’t been offered before. Asking typical questions is too mainstream. Users are already bored. Ask a unique question which will make them think.

Create Survey with TruConversion Survey

This shows how TruConversion formed different questions creating a change in its survey and digging out more about its audience. We need to create unique questions other than the typical demographic questions.

8. Pre-test Your Surveys

Pre-test your survey with a few members of your intended audience.

Through this you might be able to find inconsistencies or unexpected question interpretations that would be triggered by the customers.

Pretesting and piloting your survey can help you identify questions that don’t make sense to participants, or problems with the questionnaire that might lead to biased answers.

Survey Creation Tips - Test Your Surveys
Source

The above image exhibits how your pre-testing would gather results and improve your final survey before it is actually distributed.

9. Keep a Consistent Rating Scale

If you’re using Likert rating scales, use a single points system throughout your survey. If 1 means “extremely satisfied” and 5 means “extremely dissatisfied,” maintain this scale throughout your survey.

10. Establish Your Survey Credibility

For making the visitors believe on your site and your surveys, you need to build a bond trust between them and your company. This trust will be built by establishing a relationship.

This could include sending a pre-notification email and asking for their participation in filling the survey.

Putting endorsements and testimonials on your site would help a lot. Testimonials by celebrities, relevant experts/ specialists add an element of trust among the audience.

11. Use the Best Distribution Method

The placements of your surveys is extremely important as well. You need to be sure about the channels your surveys is going to be distributed through and distributed to.

There can be various ways in which you can reach your audience, some are as follow:

  • Email Invite: Best if you have an email list and want to track responses.
  • Website Collector: Best if you want customer feedback from people using your website. You can either do this as an embedded survey or a pop-up.
  • Web Link Collector: Best if you want to send your survey through several channels. You’ll get a link that you can copy and paste anywhere: social media channels, in your newsletter, via text or in emails.
  • Buy a Targeted Audience: If you don’t have customers yet, but want to survey a specific demographic, check out create a Targeted Audience Collector based on attributes like gender, age, income and employment status.
Best ways to distribute surveys
Source

12. Send Notification at the Suitable Time

Sending your reminders/results and follow ups is important but you need to check if your timing is correct or not. Be sure you are contacting you customer at the right time.

Email them on a good time, take care of the time difference. Use a mass mailing system but never make your emails look like an automated mailing system… Personalize it!

Target each group according to their age and lifestyle. Use the right medium, time and context.

Best Time to send Survey
Source

13. Accept Negative Responses

When you connect with a bigger audience, you will end up meeting different people where some would be very welcoming while some would be aggressive, cranky and rude.

Be ready to meet them all. Just be patient and polite, losing your temper would never be the solution.

You are the end where you need to grab the customer, understand all his moods and reply very nicely, whatever the situation is.

Here are some tips on addressing negative survey answers:

  • Respond quickly
  • Be appreciative of the feedback, always.
  • Offer to correct the problem that the customer has mentioned.
  • Invite feedback, whatever it is. And give the customer a way to contact you.

14. Give Incentives

Offer them rewards and incentives which will keep them motivated to fill up your surveys.

Remember they do not see any charm in filling up your surveys. You have to make an attractive and attention-grabbing offer to which they would not be able to say no.

Survey Questions Swipe File

Popular Survey Tools

You must be having some common questions regarding online surveys in your mind…

Like:

Is there a good survey tool for capturing website visitors when they bounce or exit? What are the best survey tools to use for obtaining the voice of a customer?

I’m going lighten up your shoulder a bit and give yous effective tools which are going to help you in creating survey question.

Here is a list of some most commonly used Online Survey Tools:

1. Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is one of the most well known names among online survey tools.

In the free version, you’ll get:

  • 10 questions
  • 100 respondents
  • 15 question types
  • Light theme customization and templates

The site has a well designed system which is quite easy and friendly to use.

2. Typeform

Typeform is known as the best creative srvey creation tool.

It has an attractive interface. The motto itself is very catchy “Asking questions should be easy, human, and beautiful.”

The free version, nicknamed the CORE plan, has too much to offer, including:

  • Unlimited questions
  • Unlimited answers
  • Data export
  • Custom design themes or choose from templates
  • Basic reporting

The Pro version includes payment fields, a calculator feature for scoring and pricing, options to send respondents follow-up emails. Worth $25/month only.

It has a beautiful design and hefty capabilities even in its free version.

3. Google Forms

Google Forms is another brilliant creation by Google.

Some awesome features of Google Forms:

  • Unlimited surveys
  • Unlimited respondents
  • Survey answers and data are automatically collected in Google Spreadsheets
  • Lots of theme options
  • Add your own custom logo
  • Add images or videos
  • Skip logic and page branching
  • Imbed survey into emails or website
  • Add collaborators
  • 100% free!

Google Forms is the only free online survey tool that provides free skip logic, which is pretty awesome. This will definitely be the first choice for most.

  1. TruConversion

Best Survey tool - TruConversion

TruConversion is an all-in-one application tool which helps you boost your conversions by a great margin.

It allows your website visitors perform certain actions by asking them directly through fully customizable micro surveys and polls anywhere on your website.

Features:

Custom Design: Choose a pre-designed theme, or customize the look and feel by choosing your own colors and fonts.

Responsive Layout: Create responsive surveys that’ll adapt to any screen/device and increase response rate.

Custom Branding: Add your own logo to your surveys to match your own identity.

Varied Question Types: Choose from  wide range of question types, including multiple choice, text Answers, scoring, date and scale.

Intelligent insights: Create reports and get actionable insights by identifying trends and patterns with powerful filtration

And it’s absolutely FREE for 30 Days!

5. Zoho Survey

Zoho Survey is another awesome decent free survey creator tool. The free version gives you:

  • Unlimited surveys
  • 15 survey questions
  • 150 responses

You’ll get much more with the paid versions, which start at $39/month.

6. Client Heartbeat

Client Heartbeat is a bit pricey survey too as compare to other options.

However, it has some different features. You’ll be able get alerts to warn you of unhappy customers, see how your customer satisfaction compares against your industry benchmark, as well as a testimonial widget that can display endorsements on your website.

7. Survey Gizmo

Survey Gizmo creates some cool looking surveys, and they’re a great choice, even with the free version, so long as you don’t plan on getting a ton of respondents.

Survey Gizmo has a limited free version which is hidden towards the bottom of their pricing page. This free version offers:

  • Unlimited surveys and questions
  • 50 respondents
  • Several basic question types
  • Free templates
  • Basic reporting
  • Option to export to CSV

Paid versions start at $15/month and offer much more features, like skip logic and piping, customized themes, multiple users, API, and data encryption.

8. Survey Planet

The free version of Survey Planet is quite robust, the services include:

  • Unlimited surveys
  • Unlimited questions
  • Unlimited respondents
  • Survey theme options
  • Survey embedding

The Pro version, at the price of $15/month, offers plenty of extras. With this version you can remove Survey Planet branding, include printable survey results, and include in-question images. This version can export to excel as well.

9. My Survey

My Survey is light on the graphics and design and heavy on the details where it matters.

My Survey succeeds where many other fail in simply letting the survey taker know exactly what’s going to pay out the best and soonest.

This tool offers convenience, accessibility, return on time and privacy.

Survey Question Types

While creating a survey, you will include different types of questions in your survey so that you can know your audience and its opinion to the maximum extent.

Some most common categories of the question include:

  • Multiple Choice Questions

This question type allows the respondent to select one or more options from a list of answers that you define. This should be used multiple choice questions when you have a fixed number of options.

  • Rating Scales

With rating scale questions, the survey taker selects a single rating for your question along an equally spaced continuum of possible choices.Customer satisfaction survey question often use a Likert scale to measure customer opinion or attitudes. But make sure your Likert Scale is consistent throughout your survey.

  • Comment/Essay Box Question

Open-ended survey questions require respondents to type their answer into a comment box. Responses are then viewed individually or by sophisticated text analysis tools, like SurveyMonkey’s Open Ended Question Analysis tool.

  • Demographic Questions

To gather information about a respondent’s background, lifestyle or income level, for example, demographic survey questions would serve you well.

Here are some Best Customer Survey Questions:

  1. How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or a colleague?
    Likert Scale from 1-5 (5 being ‘Strongly Agree’)
  1. Overall how satisfied are you with our company/ service?
    Likert Scale from 1-5 (5 being ‘Strongly Agree’)
  1. How did you first hear about our web site?
  • Television
  • Radio
  • Newspaper
  • Magazine
  • Word-of-mouth
  • Internet
  • Other: Please Specify _______________
  1. Which of teh following words you would use to describe our products?
  • Reliable
  • Effective
  • High Quality
  • Satisfactory
  • Ineffective
  • Poor Quality
  1. How Responsive have we been to your questions and concerns?
  • Extremely Responsive
  • Very Responsive
  • Somewhat Responsive
  • Not so Responsive
  • Not at all Responsive
  1. Which of the following categories best describes your last experience purchasing a product or service on our website? Would you say that your experience was:
  • Very pleasant
  • Somewhat pleasant
  • Neither pleasant nor unpleasant
  • Somewhat unpleasant
  • Very unpleasant
  1. How likely are you to purchase any of our product again?
  • Extremely likely
  • Very Likely
  • Somewhat Likely
  • Not so likely
  • Not at all likely

Survey Questions Swipe File

Conclusion:

This was all about the survey strategies which you need to build up before designing your survey questions.

A well thought out survey would always be different than an abruptly put survey. So never forget to keep these tips in your mind while creating surveys for any website.

Picture of Justin Rondeau

Justin Rondeau

Justin Rondeau is the Director of Optimization at DigitalMarketer and leads product innovation at TruConversion. He specializes in optimizing marketing campaigns and digital experiences to help grow businesses and is also interested in user experience research, karaoke, split testing, mustaches, and the Boston Bruins.

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