Surveys are a great way to gather information from your customers or employees. Online surveys offer many advantages to the business, including increased response rates and better time management. Without these benefits, many companies are forced to abandon their surveys in favor of costly phone polls.
This is not an ideal situation for a company’s bottom line if it has any aspirations of expanding its customer base because the phone poll will be much less effective than an online poll. This article gives you the whole information about how to create an online survey and how to increase survey response rates for your business.
The Main Advantages Of Online Surveys
The following are some of the most important advantages online surveys offer to your business:
Increased Response Rate
Response rates are higher through online surveys because they take less time to complete than paper or phone surveys. This advantage is critical, particularly in customer satisfaction surveys, where a great deal of information needs to be gathered. It has been proven that people tend to respond more positively when they can answer quickly and easily.
Lower, More Affordable Costs
Because online surveys are less expensive, they are more viable than phone polls. Because of the lower cost, companies can use information gathered through online surveys to send out targeted emails based on recipient demographic data and change their marketing tactics accordingly.
Real-Time Access
With web-enabled computers and software, you can access your survey results at any time of the day or night. The good thing about this is that since responses are a real-time situation, you will have full insight into the process much quicker than with other types of surveys that may not be synchronized with a live human being answering the questions for you.
Convenience
Online surveys are convenient. They allow you to target your questions based on the collected data and offer real-time results, which means that you will know immediately what the consequences are of the survey. This will especially come in handy if you want to respond to specific people, using a live agent or some other automated way of communicating with your customers and employees.
Steps To Create Online Surveys
In order to create a strong online survey, there are several steps that need to be followed. These steps include:
Determine The Objectives Of The Survey
What do you want to achieve by creating the survey? What are your main objectives? Your answers should be based on what your company needs and not what you personally like. Keeping focused on the objective will help create a survey that is more useful.
Define The Required Information
Once you have an idea of the objective, you can figure out exactly what information is needed to complete that objective. Make sure to ask yourself these questions first. Your answers should be based on your company’s answers from previous surveys, or if not, give you a good basis for your own survey.
Design Of The Survey
Once you have the questions figured out, you will need to design your survey. Don’t forget to include all the different people and demographics that can be reached via email, phone, or online. Avoid leaving blanks, as this may cause errors in your survey results. Leave the answer “not applicable” to questions if there is no reason for them to be answered; otherwise, you may confuse people with unrelated questions.
Determine The Demographic Segment To Study
The next thing you need to do is determine whom you will be targeting in your survey. This part is more based on marketing research than any other aspect of this process. This is where you will define who qualifies for the survey and what type of information each one of them should fill out in order to maintain proper market research standards.
Determine The Number Of Surveys To Be Carried Out
It is best to have at least two surveys that are of different lengths. If you only have one survey, consumers may leave the first one and never return to answer the second. Remember that people may not always be online, so don’t wait too long before conducting another survey, or your respondents may forget by the time they get back to answer it.
Counting And Analysis Of Results
Once your survey has been completed, you should review the results and see if they match up with your objectives. If not, you will have to redo the survey, adding or removing questions or creating another one altogether. Depending on your specific questions and answers, you will have to analyze them using a certain strategy. This can be time-consuming.
The Bottom Line
To create a strong online survey, you must keep in mind the survey’s advantages and objectives according to their business needs. If you do so, then don’t be afraid to start taking surveys and increasing response rates. And once you get those responses, don’t forget to use them for the purpose for which they were collected for!