7 Steps for Creating Successful Online Surveys
An online survey can give you powerful customer insights for setting long-range plans and for making small, incremental changes in how you're running your business or organization.
So, how do you create a great survey--one that delivers those powerful insights? The 7 steps laid out in this article are proven best practices that, when followed, will greatly increase the success of your surveys.
Step 1: Define the objective of your survey
No matter what kind of survey you want to conduct, it takes thought and planning to make it count. "Throwing" a quick survey together skips over the #1 key to a successful survey--setting one objective.
Determine your objective by pinpointing the problem you need to fix and what you need to know from your customers in order to fix it.
Problem: There is a slowdown in foot traffic/sales in my retail store.
Objective: To determine why numbers are down and what I can do to increase them.
Knowledge: Are less people coming in because of the new department store that opened up the street? Does my pricing need to be more competitive? Are there products I can carry to fill a niche for my customers?
Problem: I need to add new services to my consultancy to increase revenue.
Objective: To learn what additional services my customers would buy.
Knowledge: What services are customers getting from others that I could provide for them? What services are they interested in but not currently taking advantage of? If I offered certain services, would they be interested in them?
Step 2: Select your audience
The audience for your survey is dependent upon your objective. A few examples:
Objective: To gauge the overall satisfaction of my customer/member base
Audience: Entire customer/member base
Objective: To determine what additions customers want made to your offerings
Audience: Everyone who purchased that product in the last quarter
Objective: To improve attendance of my events
Audience: Attendees to last week's seminar
Step 3: Develop your questions
Ask only what you need to know, not what you want to know. Remember that you're trying to solve a problem, not discover "nice-to-know" tidbits of information. Your customers, and you, don't have time for that.
You may want to use some open-ended questions. They let you hear responses in the customers' own words. However, this question type has its drawbacks. The answers take time to sort through and categorize. Closed ended questions give you more manageable data that you can interpret quickly. Do include one or two open-ended questions, but plan to stick with close-ended ones for the majority of the survey.
You can also include some demographic questions to better understand who your audience is, but keep them to one or two questions.
Step 4: Organize your questions
The order of your questions matters! As a rule, move from general to specific. A "gut check" question like, "What is your overall satisfaction with X product?" is a good place to start. Also, make the first few questions easy to answer so you can get your respondents into a rhythm. You want them think, "This will go quickly." A few more tips...put related questions next to each other and demographic ones at the end of the survey.
Step 5: Write a compelling invitation
Make your email invitation interesting and enticing. Don't just ask them to take your survey. Provide them details like what you want to learn about and how you will use the data. Give them a general idea of how long it will take to complete it and, lastly, for a boost in responses, make it personal by including a name and signature. Here's a sample invite:
Subject line: How were your flowers from Nancy's Blooms?
Header: Your opinion is important to us-please share it!
You recently purchased a floral arrangement from Nancy's Blooms and I want to hear what you thought about your experience-were the flowers fresh? Did they arrive on time? Please answer these questions and a few more in this short, 10-question survey.
Thank you for your valuable time. Your feedback will help me and my staff to serve you better!
Sincerely,
Nancy Rose
Owner, Nancy's Blooms
Step 6: Evaluate your results
Once the results are in, go back to your main objective and the knowledge you wanted to gain. Did you get the information you needed? Are there any surprises? Before making any decisions, be sure to balance what you see in the survey data with what you know from your own experience, direct conversations with customers, and your business intuition.
Step 7: Take action
Determine what changes to make based on the results of your survey. Even small changes can make a big difference. And if you are making changes that your customers asked for, tell them. It strengthens your credibility and the customers trust in you when they see that you care about what they think. They'll be more motivated to give feedback when you send your next survey.
Now, it's time to craft that survey! Start with your objective and work your way through the other six steps and you will get powerful results that you can use right away.
