Online surveys are a great tool to learn useful information about your customers, friends, donors, or whoever. Your survey can provide you with all sorts of insights about what you're doing well, what needs work,and what people are thinking and feeling. In order for it to do so, however, you have to make sure you create a good, methodologically sound, survey. Here at Zoomerang, we want you to have the best, most reliable survey results possible, so we put together these 3 tips for trustworthy results.
1. Define One Objective
It’s important to be clear with yourself about the objective (yes, that’s right just one) you’re trying to accomplish by sending your survey. If you don’t even know what your goal is, it’s going to be awfully tough to accomplish it. And if your respondents don’t know what you’re really asking them because you tried to pack everything you ever wanted to know into one survey, they’re going to have a hard time telling you what you want to know. Make it easy on them. Choose one, well-defined objective.
2. Work Backwards
Once you have your objective defined, you can start crafting a survey that gets at the heart of the issues. So, for example, if you’re trying to gauge customer satisfaction at your shoe store, you’re going to want to ask about the various elements that affect it—customer service, in-store experience, shoe selection, etc. You then want to create a question that addresses each element individually. For example: “How approachable were the salespeople?”
Avoid “double-barreled” questions, which try to address two elements at once. For example, the question: “How friendly and helpful were the salespeople?” Maybe you have helpful salespeople who are extremely unfriendly. Don’t confuse your respondents by making this mistake. Separate the question elements instead.
3. Test Your Survey
You want to make sure you have someone give your survey a test drive before you send it out into the world to start collecting responses. What seems intuitive to you may very well be confusing to someone who doesn’t live in your head. Have them take your survey, paying special attention to any questions that may be biased, unclear, or poorly stated. Did they think the survey was too long to take in one sitting? Too short to really tell you what they're thinking? Get this feedback from a detail-oriented friend before, not after, you've sent it to your entire email blast.
Conclusion
Your online survey is only as good as your survey design. Don’t waste your time on a survey with inconclusive results. Save time, energy, and money by narrowing your focus to one, well-defined objective, creating questions with that focus in mind, and testing the survey before sending it out.
Happy survey-making!
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