13 Tips for Choosing a Tool and Crafting Thoughtful, Insights-Driven Surveys
Surveys are one of a business's most effective tools in collecting valuable customer feedback to incorporate into product development, email marketing, or social media campaigns.
Online survey and analytics platforms have come a long way in recent years, such that even cash-strapped small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and start-ups can easily access quality consumer data through do-it-yourself (DIY) research. Toluna, a digital insights and survey technology provider, runs a worldwide social voting community that polls users on everyday topics, and offers a consumer data and automated survey platform for businesses, with customers including CVS, Orbitz, and Spotify. Toluna founder and CEO Frédéric-Charles Petit talked to PCMag about the features and factors to consider when evaluating a survey tool, and gave some recommendations.
"In the last several years, we've seen that efficiency and automation are modernizing the way market research is conducted such that you don't need to be a research expert to generate data and leverage it to your company's benefit," said Petit. "The intelligence of the researcher is now embedded in technology—with today's generation of tools leveraging a strong methodology that respects the qualitative research foundation that users want. This produces speed and cost efficiency, and means that research is increasingly accessible to the masses."
Considering the Right Buying Factors
There's a glut of online survey tools on the market. From SurveyMonkey and Zoho Survey to our Editors' Choice survey tool SurveyGizmo and dozens more, figuring out the platform best suited to your business can be overwhelming. Before getting into how to build an effective survey, Petit laid out some of the most important considerations when choosing the tool through which your business will interact with customers and users.
Survey Creation Tips and Best Practices
"Businesses need to be plugged into what consumers are thinking, as consumers are the ones who fuel successful brands, and they're more vocal than ever now with social media. It's not about gathering as much data as possible; it's about gathering the right data that will help brands understand the customer, prospective customer, and the marketplace at large," said Petit.
8. Narrative Structure and Flow"Have a narrative structure and flow within the survey in order to be able to tell a compelling story that is worth reading," said Petit. "Start with a few broad questions that not only help establish the basics of the audience's background and point of view, but also to weed out any participants who fall outside the target market. In the remaining questions, drill down deeper into the crux of the story."
9. Be Mobile-Versed "Use a DIY survey platform with an easy-to-use mobile app to enable participants to complete surveys anywhere, anytime," said Petit. "Similarly, you can make your survey mobile-native by limiting the number of open-ended questions to one to two per survey."
10. Keep It Short and Focused"A common pitfall to avoid is building surveys that ask too much of a respondent at one time, leading to the respondent answering in a haphazard manner, which dramatically diminishes the value of the data. A good rule of thumb is to limit the number of questions to between five and 15," said Petit.
11. Never Ask a 'Yes' or 'No' Question "It won't result in compelling data, plain and simple," said Petit. "Consider asking the same 'golden' questions over time—across a number of surveys—to track changes and trends within the data."
12. Consider Data Quality"As respondents move toward taking shorter, more efficient surveys, we must adapt and learn to do more with less, with an eye on continuously improving data quality," said Petit. "One way to ensure data quality is to use a survey tool that validates respondents using their email address, blocking fake or disposable IP domains. It's easy to verify this at the outset of your engagement with the platform."
13. Put Yourself in the Respondent's Shoes"Consider taking the survey yourself as a test," said Petit. "If you wouldn't want to answer all of the questions you're asking, whether because of length or content, chances are your respondents won't want to either."
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.