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How Do You Conduct Online Surveys? Steps, Practices & Benefits

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Conduct Online Surveys Online surveys (primary)
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In this competitive market, companies that listen to customer opinions are far more successful and profitable than those that don’t. Customer feedback is the building block of improving & growing an organization. 

We wondered how you could gather customer feedback in this post-pandemic world, where social distance has become normal? 

Answer: Online Surveys

An online survey is a type of data collection that allows companies to solicit customer feedback on a large scale. Online surveys are a hassle-free way to gather meaningful feedback from users all over the world. The beauty of an online survey is the anonymity, an ideal environment for people to reveal their true opinion about your business, products, or services. 

In this blog, we will explore how to conduct online surveys that allow you to gather valuable customer feedback & some more. But first, let’s clear out some basics. 

What are Online Surveys?

An online survey is essentially a structured questionnaire administered over the internet. 

Researchers create a list of questions to ask their target audience and distribute it over the internet using emails, website pop-ups, or social media. The respondents can provide their answers following the secured link or on the content itself. The response is automatically transmitted to the survey software used for data collection & the data is analyzed. 

A properly built online survey delivers reliable, accurate, and actionable insights to help you make data-driven decisions. 

Online surveys are best useful for gathering insightful information about the current market, customer preference, customer opinion on new products, or employee research. 

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What are the types of Online Surveys?

An excellent online survey can collect the information you need to improve your marketing strategy and product development, along with CX and EX. However, it is better to remember there is no one-size-fits-all survey template that you can use for every purpose. Different surveys provide you with different data. 

Here we will mention three purposes for conducting online surveys. 

Employee Surveys: 

Employee surveys help you gauge how satisfied and engaged your employees are. It enables you to learn about their belief, opinions, concerns, and many more that can be useful to improve the organization’s work culture and environment. 

Market or Product Surveys: 

Market surveys give you insight into the needs and wants of your audience. It helps you understand them and learn how you can reach and engage them to do business with you. The data from market research online surveys guide your market efforts and improve your products to fit the customers’ needs. 

Customer Research Surveys: 

Customer research allows you to listen to what your customers say about your business, products, or services and their experience with it. You can use CX, CSAT, or NPS® surveys to understand how to keep customer loyalty high and improve retention. 

How effective are Online Surveys?

We can’t discuss the basics of online surveys without discussing why you should conduct online surveys. So here are three reasons why online surveys are the most effective method to collect data. 

Data Accuracy: 

The data gathered using online surveys are reliable and accurate. The margin of error in online surveys is small because respondents themselves submit their answers to the online database. 

Broader Reach:

The benefit of conducting online surveys is its reach. You can gather responses from a thousand people at any point in time. You can reach people on the opposite side of your country or the world in their native language to gather data for your research. 

Anonymity: 

Respondents have the choice to participate in the online survey without revealing their identity. The benefit of confidentiality boosts participants’ confidence to take the survey and provide honest feedback. This improves the response rates and offers you valuable insights. 

Now that we have covered the basics of online surveys let’s see how to conduct online surveys and the best practices to follow. 

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6 Steps to Conduct Online Surveys

Wondering how you can conduct online surveys for your subsequent research? Follow these 6 steps.

1. Decide “Why” you want to conduct online surveys:

Creating a survey without any objective is like flying a plane without a compass. The goal of your survey gives structure to your survey. The insights you are looking for will help you decide which questions to ask and who you should ask these questions. 

Let’s say you want to gather people’s opinions about vegan food. You have to establish your objective at the end of the survey.

  • Do you want to start a new diet? That’s why you want to know about people’s experience with vegan food? 
  • Do you want to open a food truck, so you want to the demand for vegan food? 
  • Do you want to market your vegan food so you are scouting for the target audience?

You can’t ask the same questions for all three purposes. Different survey objectives require different questions to get the most accurate data. 

2. Find your target market:

To ensure your insights are accurate and reliable, you should decide who you will share the survey with. In some cases, it could be that you have more than one target audience. In such cases, you need one survey for each demographic. 

For instance, a cosmetic company can break down its target market into males and females or different concerns such as makeup, skincare, or hair care. You can send complete sets of online surveys to each demographic or apply to skip logic to route the respondent to relevant questions. 

If its a trouble pointing out your target market, you can build a panel using Voxco Audience. WIth 90+ profiling points, you can create your panel audience resembling your target market. 

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3. Determine the sample size

The next step to conduct online surveys is to ensure that you have a large number of respondents. The number of respondents for your online surveys will ensure that the analyzed data represents your target market. 

It is often not possible to survey the entire target demographic. In those cases, you need to create a sample size that is big enough to create a strong and accurate estimate of your target audience. 

If you are surveying the demand for vegan food in your city, enough people should respond so that the survey result represents every person’s opinion in the city. 

[Related read: Creating a Survey, the Right Way]

4. The right time to conduct online surveys

Timing has a significant impact on the survey response rate. If you send an online survey at the wrong time, it can decrease the number of responses you receive and lead to wasted effort and resources. Moreover, the time you choose to send the survey can also affect the validity of the answers. 

For example, customer satisfaction surveys should be sent after delivering a product or service. Customers can provide honest and accurate feedback if you follow up immediately while the experience is fresh. 

Or, if you are looking to send an employee satisfaction email to new recruits, the best time to conduct online surveys is a couple of months after they have joined. This allows them to analyze their experience in the past couple of months, and they can offer some valuable feedback. 

5. Create survey questions

There are many types of questions you can use to make your surveys interactive and engaging. When writing questions, it is important to keep them relevant, ask one thing at a time, keep the language simple, & give respondents the option to skip. 

The benefit of online surveys is adding skip logic to your surveys. This allows respondents to answer questions based on their previous answers. 

For example, a pet food company is surveying its target audience for its new product. If a respondent selects that they don’t have a dog at home, the respondent will be routed out of the survey. 

[Related read: How to Write Survey Question?]

6. Send the online survey

Design your survey with the brand logo, color, font, and theme to keep brand consistency in your surveys. Select the best way to distribute your online survey and launch it. 

There end our steps to conduct online surveys. Following, we will discuss the important things you should follow to conduct online surveys and how you can gather data. 

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Best Practices to Conduct Online Surveys

Follow these best practices to make your online surveys efficient and accurate results. 

Use the right survey software

Using the best survey software can ease the challenge of designing a beautiful survey. Survey software can help you personalize the survey as per your brand, add advanced logic, a progress bar, and create secure links to send surveys. 

Ensure a logical pattern of the survey

Make sure your online survey follows a proper order. Start with an introduction that informs respondents of the subject of your research. Follow it up with some basic demographic questions and then narrow it down to explore the research topic further. 

 

Send reminders

Not spam but remind the non-responders of your surveys. Sending them a personalized reminder can help boost response rates. 

Often your respondents may miss the chance to take the survey due to their busy schedules. Send them a simple reminder a few days after the launch of surveys and a few days before it ends to give them a chance to respond. 

Offer incentives:

Respondents are taking their time to respond to your surveys; consider offering them rewards for completing the surveys. 

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How to Gather Data using Online Surveys?

Online surveys are internet-based surveys. You can share them using various digital channels and reach a wider audience. Here are some of the ways you can gather data using online surveys. 

Send emails: 

There are over 4 billion email accounts around the world. You can send an online survey link to your email or embed a micro-survey itself in the email and send it to a list of addresses. 

Upload on social media: 

Millions of people use many social media apps. This is one of the best ways to gather data from a wide audience. However, select the social media platforms based on where most of your target audience is and where your business will market better.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can benefit from using online surveys instead of traditional research methods. 

How Do You Benefit from Online Surveys?

Conducting online surveys can help you gather insights on issues that may hamper the business. Online surveys are easy to administer and can help you reach a wide range of audiences in seconds. 

Here we have enumerated the advantages of conducting online surveys. 

1. It’s cost-efficient: 

Online surveys reduce the cost of administering the research, unlike interviews, focus groups, or pen-paper surveys. There is no extra expense spent accommodating the participants or printing questionnaires. 

Moreover, you don’t need to hire professional designers to create surveys or analysts to uncover insights. Survey software guides you in designing beautiful surveys and automates data analysis. You don’t have to allocate company resources to online surveys. 

2. Its time-efficient: 

The time it takes to set up and conduct online surveys is shorter than traditional research methods. The survey software performs automatically. You can quickly create and deploy surveys over the internet. The software then automatically transmits the responses and analyzes them in real-time. 

3. Quick data analysis: 

The major benefit of conducting online surveys is that data analysis is a real-time event. The responses are saved and analyzed as soon as respondents have submitted their answers. You can create reports in any form and export data with others for further analysis.

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4. It’s convenient for participants:

In online surveys, participants can respond to it at their convenience. Participants can respond anytime they want in a comfortable environment. This gives the control over to the participant to start and stop the survey whenever they want.

Also, online surveys can be designed with a skip-logic so that questions that aren’t relevant to participants are automatically skipped. 

5. It’s accessible on any device: 

Online surveys can be sent as a link via email or uploaded on social media. Respondents can access the survey on their mobile phones, laptops, computers, tablets, etc. 

6. It can screen participants: 

You can add a screening question at the beginning of an online survey to gather valid responses from the target audience. 

Or, you can also use a screen question asking the respondent’s preferred language to enable participants to view and respond in their preferred language.

Wrapping up;

This concludes how you can conduct online surveys. An online survey is the most convenient and popular data collection method. 

Survey creation is quick results come in immediately and are analyzed faster. However, it doesn’t stop there. With results in hand, you should start creating an action plan on how you can use the data to grow the company. 

Go through each step in how to conduct online surveys because each plays a vital role in influencing the responses you receive and the decision you make with the data. If you are curious about what else you can do with online surveys, you can talk to our experts and contact us here. 

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