Online surveys are fantastic, because they can give you great insights into how your customers or staff think. A successful online survey allows you to develop long term strategies, small changes and anything else that will increase your productivity. However, how do you create a successful online survey? This is all about understanding best practice procedures, developed by specialists who have been looking into creating a successful online survey for years.
What Is the Objective?
A successful online survey has a very clearly define objective. In order to set your goal, look at what the problem is that you need to fix and then think what sort of information your respondents could provide you with in order to fix the problem.
Who is Your Audience?
Once you know what your objective is, you will also know who your audience is. A successful online survey is distributed only to the right people. This can be millions of people, or just two or three, depending on what you want to know. For instance, if you want to know how well received a service is, you would only send a survey to those who have tried it. If, however, you want to determine whether there is a demand for a brand new product, you could ask the entire world.
Ask the Right Questions
It isn’t about what you want to know, but what you need to know. Hence, a successful online survey only asks the right questions. This isn’t about determining fun little statistics, but rather it is about collating data that allows you to improve your service.
Be Inviting
The key to having a successful online survey is to have it replied to. Hence, you have to make sure that you are very inviting to people. Rewards and incentives generally work. As a store, for instance, you could include a special offer, discount or tester product in order to have people reply. However, being inviting is also about using the right wording.
Follow Through
Last but not least, make sure you use your results and evaluate them and that this leads to a new action plan. Communicate this with the people who have replied to your surveys as much as possible. Because a good survey is anonymous (this will increase the number of responses you receive and the confidence people have in your survey as a whole), you may have to share your results through generic newsletters or even press announcements. As a store, for instance, you could have a large poster at your entrance that indicates what sort of changes you have implemented as a direct result of your customers’ input.