Let’s just begin with a simple assumption: do not trust survey editor that promise you a high completion rate because they are so beautiful or whatever. Completion rate is highly impacted by the relation between you and the community you target and the reasons why you are asking those questions. If I send a survey to team of 10 people about what they want to do next friday night, I have a high chance of getting a 100% completion rate. If I buy 10 000 emails online of people who don’t know me asking them questions they don’t care about, I have a big of getting no answer at all. We’ve done the test. And design, UX/UI or whatever people are selling don’t matter.
Enough talking, here are the tips :
- Write down on paper what are the informations you need at the end of the day. This is the only way for you to ask efficient questions to your community. It will take only 15 minutes of your time, but it will both increase your response rate and give you the best insights. Do it.
- The less questions, the more answers. Keep your survey short. We do recommend not to exceed 10 questions per survey. This part is strongly linked to the first part. If you think you can measure 5 or 6 hypothesis per survey, you are wrong. Most of your respondents will only answer to 1 or 2 anyway before they get bored and quit the survey. Avoid useless questions. Do you really need to know the adress of the respondent ? Why ? Ask informations that are crucial for you, not more.
- Ask questions. Short questions. We see a lot of questions that are not really questions. We see a lot of questions like this: “Your favorite color is:”. THIS IS NOT A QUESTION. Please do the simple effort of asking questions like you learned in kindergarden: “What is your favorite color?”. It sounds stupid, but your respondents do not want to make any effort to understand what you are asking. Second, we also see a lot of super looooooooooooooong questions. WRONG! Studies show that respondents are very likely to quit the survey when the question is too long. We highly recommend you to ask questions that are no longer that a tweet (140 characters).
- Keep the type of questions simple. Some survey editors claim taht they have 20 different type of questions that increase response rates etc… Well it’s not true. Once again, your survey should be answered as fast as possible. Once you have chosen 2 or 3 types of questions, stick to it. We highly recommend you to use simple & multiple choice questions as much as possible. You obviously need some text questions, but do not use them too much. We measured that surveys having more than 10% of text questions have a lower completion rate. Once again, if step 1 is done well, you probably won’t need any text questions.
- Use an awesome design. Your clients, coworkers, friends, family deserve to be treated well right ? Then offer them a unique response experience. Use full screen background pictures of you event or you product. Avoid Surveymonkey and Google Form. There are a lot of great survey companies out there (Typeform, Survmetrics, Getfeedback, and obviously Vizir), trust them.
You’re all set up to create an amazing survey. Focus on the first part, choose the right tool and get started. Most of all, share a lot of surveys, it’s the best way of taking the best decisions.
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Cheers,
