The Best Practices on Creating Engaging Online Surveys

One or a few happy customers does not mean your business is on its way to success. It’s important to track individual views and experiences. Surveys provide hard numbers on people’s opinions and experiences. These numbers, in turn, help make important individual decisions.

Big data is certainly the rage these days, but it’s the explicit data that is needed to fully reveal the individual motivations behind actions. This is where survey methodology comes into the picture.

Introduction

Whether you’re interested in knowing how many employees will show up for the annual dinner party, what your customers think about your customer service or how your product offering compares to that of your competitor’s, surveys are often the best and most reliable methodology to determine people’s opinions, experiences, and expectations.

Importance of creating online surveys

Surveys prove to be the most reliable method to get genuine feedback from your customers.

Here are 4 main reasons why it’s important for your business to conduct surveys:

Uncover answers

By creating free online surveys, you can uncover answers to various questions and learn about your customers’ real motivations behind their actions and behaviors. Only after discovering what is important to your users can you deliver on their expectations.

By taking care of the privacy needs of your survey respondents (for instance, by using online and mobile surveys rather than telephonic surveys), you can encourage respondents to be more honest and open in their feedback.

Evoke discussion

By creating free online engaging surveys, you can go deeper to communicate with your respondents about your survey topic within a broader perspective. This will enable your respondents to engage and discuss important topics in much detail.

Make decisions

When making important decisions, businesses cannot simply rely on gut feelings. Decisions have to be sensible enough and made after gathering and analyzing data. Surveys will help you collect unbiased data from your respondents on the most important topics that you can safely base your important business decisions on.

Compare results

The views, behaviors, opinions, and experiences of your target audience that surveys help collect, will enable you and your stakeholders to compare results over time and establish essential benchmarks.

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How to create free online surveys?

You don’t need to have a PhD to start creating surveys. Here are some handy tips and steps for you to start designing smart and strategic surveys:

Start with why

Start by clearly defining your survey objectives and goals. Ask yourself what it is that you want to find out from your respondents and what actions you want to take after looking at the survey results. Cut off any unimportant questions that do not add value.

Visualize the end result

To be able to create something for real, you first need to visualize the end result. Visualize the kind of report that you see being generated after you run your survey. This will help you figure out the kind of information that’s most important for you to make business decisions after looking at your survey results.

Rank your priorities

The first two steps must have given you a good idea of all the possible questions and topics that you’d like to discover from your surveys. It’s best you list these topics down according to prioritization. Make sure to keep the questions format as easy for your respondents as possible.

Choose question types carefully

When creating your free online surveys, make sure you choose question types that will deliver the best information. Open-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, rank order, ratio scale and matrix questions are some of the most appropriate question types for surveys.

Write the questions

When creating your free online survey, ensure to thoroughly think through the questions that you would include in it. Banish bias in your wording as well as in your question order. Have a person review your survey before sending them out.

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How to create engaging surveys?

Effective survey design, flow, and questions power your research. To create engaging surveys, consider optimizing the different aspects of your survey until you feel satisfied.

Here are some tips to consider:

Ensure that your surveys feel like a conversation

Mastering the art of conversation is especially important when it comes to gathering feedback. That’s essentially because the way your questions sound in a survey will decide how your respondents will respond to them. Ensure to create surveys that are clear, user-friendly, conversational, and easy to understand.

Voxco’s conversation survey format displays your survey questions like a casual conversation in a messaging app, which makes respondents feel more familiar with the survey.

Personalize your survey experiences

Personalized surveys are far more appealing and recognizable to respondents. It’s a good practice to add a logo, and a distinct, fun theme and layout to your survey.

With Voxco’s personalized survey templates, you can customize your surveys in a snap. You can even add images and embed videos to your surveys, which are also great ways to increase engagement.

Ask questions people can’t wait to answer

Start by choosing questions that are most likely to pick the interest of your respondents. For high engagement success rates, consider starting with a multiple-choice question. Since these are easy to answer, they draw a lot of engagement. You may also consider embedding the first question into your email invitation.

How to improve your survey response rates?

Creating your free online survey is just the start. The biggest challenge to overcome is to actually get your potential and existing customers to take the survey. It’s a challenge because your audience already receives tons of marketing messages every week. Cutting through this noise isn’t a mean feat.

Here are some of the most effective methods to increase your survey response rates:

Your Main Message: Make Your Respondents Feel Special

To get your survey respondents to want to complete your survey, you need to make them feel special. Try expressing your genuine appreciation for their participation. Make them feel that you truly value their opinions. A pro tip would be to ensure that your survey is as short as possible and does not take any more than 5 minutes to complete.

Examples of messages you can incorporate:

“We want to know what you think.”
“Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey.”

Provide Incentives

If you’re having a hard time getting your respondents to take your survey, try offering incentives such as gift cards, tickets, coupons, and discounts. This will likely improve your survey completion rates instantly. However, be mindful of thr incentives you offer – they should appeal to everyone in your target segment.

Don’t Waste Their Time: Keep Surveys Short and Relevant

Your respondents will not want to spend time on a survey that doesn’t give them the option to select “does not apply” or skip questions that aren’t relevant to them. You’ve got to give them an out.

Voxco’s powerful survey platform will give you the option to easily build survey logic rules and multiple paths into your surveys.

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How Voxco can help you create free online engaging surveys

Voxco has helped organizations worldwide collect and act on feedback by creating free online engaging surveys.

Create surveys using Voxco’s wide range of powerful survey templates:

Customer experience survey templates

Voxco’s CX survey templates help improve your customer experience by better understanding your customer pain points and developing an enriching customer journey.

Employee experience survey templates

The employee experience survey templates will help reduce your employee churn by understanding areas of concern within your organization.

Market research survey templates

Market research survey templates empower you to learn key drivers behind market trends and understand your target audience.

Product experience survey templates

Product experience survey templates will help you understand your detailed customer preferences and develop a coherent product strategy to drive them to your brand.

Patient experience survey templates

PX survey templates will enable you to better understand patient concerns and perform better in mandated PX tests.