5 Ways To Get The Best Results From Online Surveys

If you’ve ever worked for a company that sells products or services (which is just about any business out there), you understand the value of knowing your customer. Even more importantly, you understand the value of a customer who provides honest feedback. In a perfect world, customers would tell you exactly how they feel about your product, and offer suggestions to improve its use. Unfortunately, that’s hard to do when most people are bombarded with up to 10,000 advertising messages a day, according to today’s digital marketing experts.

Nevertheless, it’s critical that before any new product or update is launched, a good dose of market research is required to achieve success. One way marketers are getting rapid feedback from consumers is from targeted online surveys. But not every online survey platform is created equal; there’s an art to creating online surveys and making sure they reach the right audience to get faster survey responses. The following 5 tips will help you get the best results from online surveys, so you can improve the customer experience and refine your marketing initiatives.

1. Define Your Survey Goals & Objectives

Before creating your survey, it’s important to define concrete goals and objectives. Without direction, your survey will feel like it’s floundering and will not yield useful results. A few questions to think about when outlining your goals and objectives:

• Why are you creating this survey? Is it to improve user experience of your mobile app? Is it to find out how often people order take out? Whatever it is, have a clear answer to the “Why” question.
• What do you hope to find out from this survey?
• Who are you trying to reach? Prospective customers? Existing customers?

Not sure where to begin? Pollfish has a variety of templates to help you get started depending on your objectives.

2. Keep Your Survey Short

Most consumers have short attention spans, especially when you’re asking them to take a moment out of their day to complete your survey. Survey questions should be short, sweet, and to the point. Survey questions should be visually appealing too. What do we mean by that? The survey format should be inviting and easy to skim, making it simple for consumers to provide feedback. Pollfish uses a variety of methods, from the standard multiple choice questions to more creative features including images, sliders, numeric rankings, videos, and star ratings.

3. Hone In On Your Demographic

Without a defined audience, you’ll be less likely to get the results you’re looking for. Advanced online technology can allow you to specify your audience criteria, which saves you lots of time and minimizes the unknowns. You can get real granular with Pollfish’s Audience Builder, which allows you to select audiences based on location, age, gender, and various custom quotas. The more targeted your audience, the better results you’ll receive.

4. Send It Out At The Right Time

Timing is everything, so they say. Deciding what time to send your survey out can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to reach multiple audiences that may have different schedules. The general consensus shows that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best days to receive response. As for times of day, Mornings and the end of the workday tend to have the most engagement. Again, this could vary if you are targeting an audience that doesn’t work the typical 9 to 5 job. Additionally, mobile use means that consumers could be more likely to engage with surveys at all hours of the day, since most people keep their phones on them. Fortunately, when you use a survey platform that allows you to track and analyze data, you can see in real-time when people are responding, so you can refine your survey the next time around if needed.

5. Analyze Data and Categorize Results

What’s the point of survey if you can’t measure the data? With each survey you create, you should be able to a) review the responses, b) categorize the data, and c) be able to act upon that data. You can parse out the results based on the initial criteria you chose (age, gender, location, preferences, etc). Next, look trends within the results. For example, did mostly females respond “Yes” to a particular question? Why might that be? Report your findings and develop a narrative based on those findings to help communicate the results. Finally, decide how you will act upon your survey results. It’s helpful to divide into three categories: what you can solve immediately, what you can work on now, and what you can plan for the future.