Online Survey Tips

2012 is a year full of transitions. Here at Zoomerang, we’re evolving into SurveyMonkeys. But the changes aren’t just happening here. All around the world, technology is changing the way we do business, organizations are quickly becoming social, and the world seems smaller and more complicated all the time. Clearly, some flexibility and restructuring is in order if you (and we) are going to handle all these transitions gracefully and successfully.

It can seem overwhelming, but these transitions can actually be great catalysts for much needed change and growth. With just a little bit of planning, you can make 2012 your best year yet. Here are some ways you can use online surveys to help you manage the changes effectively.

1. Planning Survey

Technology, social media, and the ripples they’ve created are changing the way we communicate. This has implications, of course, for your online surveys, but we're here to help you stay up on the latest tips and trends. 2012 is going to be a survey-worthy year! Here are 3 suggestions to get you going:

Too Legit to Quit

It’s always a challenge to get people to answer your online survey, but in 2012 people will be more, not less, distracted. It’s going to be more important than ever to keep your survey, short, sweet, and to the point, in order to avoid survey abandonment. That means keeping questions focused on one objective, not trying to get feedback on all 671 of your new ideas and products at once. Research has shown that surveys with the most successful response rates take 5 minutes or less to complete, so keep that in mind when creating your survey.

Be Mobile

This holiday season, Zoomerang is giving back to non-profits. There are so many great organizations doing important work in our community, and we wanted to shed some light on them. Just go to our online survey before December 19, and vote for which non-profit will win $3,000 from Zoomerang this holiday season.

You might be asking yourself, what do online surveys have to do with non-profits? Quite a bit, actually. A big portion of our customers work in the non-profit sector, so our experts have created survey templates to help them achieve their survey goals and needs. Here are a few:

My job at Zoomerang has resulted in an unintended consequence—I’ve become compulsive about taking online surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys, consumer behavior surveys, funny surveys I find on Facebook and Twitter. You name it, I’m taking it.

All this survey taking has helped me get into the head of an average respondent, and understand what works and what doesn’t when creating an online survey. Here are my top 10 tips if you want me to stick with your survey, and give you my complete, honest opinion:

 1. Keep mandatory responses to a minimum

Here at Zoomerang, we want you to have the most reliable, trustworthy survey results possible. After all, what’s the point of creating a survey, making it beautiful, and carefully selecting your respondents (or letting our Zoomerang Sample panel do the work for you!) if you can’t trust your results?

Humans are inherently prone to bias, but your survey doesn’t have to be! Here at Zoomerang we offer question and answer rotation, a fast and easy way to minimize the potentially biasing effect of human nature on your online survey.

Your respondents may be biased to choose the first answer in a multiple choice question, for example. By randomizing your answers, different respondents will see different answers first, and the bias will be neutralized. With the click of a button, we allow all of our customers to randomize the order of the answers in any multiple choice, rating scale, or ranking question.

We’ve all heard that integrating social media is an important business strategy in the new media economy. The web and social media provide powerful, cost-effective ways to reach customers, but it’s not always obvious how to leverage the platforms they provide. On top of that, creating fresh, compelling, relevant content can be a lot of work!

That’s why Zoomerang teamed up with PR Newswire to present the free Webinar, “Staying Top of Mind through Creative Content Generation.” Sarah Skerik moderated the webinar, which featured Douglas Karr, CEO of DK New Media, and John O’Connell, Senior Public Relations Manager at HNTB.

None of us like to think of ourselves as superficial. But from one survey maker to another, there are some simple, surface-level details that really make a huge difference in the mileage you can get out of your online survey. I know you’re not preoccupied with silly, shallow matters (wink), so I’ve laid out 3 quick tips to help you think a superficial genius.

1. Deployment Timing

Research shows that the best days of the week to send an online survey are Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Friday your respondents are likely to be too anxious for the weekend to give your survey the attention it deserves. The weekend is a no-go since most people have filed away work-related information to a hidden place, deep in their brain. And Monday your survey is likely to get lost in the bottomless pit of emails that have accumulated over the weekend.

You should also take your respondents’ life cycles into account. Are you reaching out to retail employees? You probably want to avoid the holiday season. Accountants? Avoid deploying your survey at tax time.

Having trouble getting people to open the fun, clever, important survey that you slaved away to create? Un-opened survey invitations can feel like the online equivalent of being stood-up. Thankfully, there are some quick, simple tips to help you increase your survey response rate, so you’ll feel like the cool kid in the chat room.

 1. Make sure the sender’s email address has the company or individual’s name in it, so the recipient doesn’t confuse it with spam

2. Keep the subject short and sweet—35 characters or less

3. Avoid those pesky spam filters by leaving out words like “free” and “important message.” Also avoid using all caps, exclamation points, and dollar signs. Spam filters search for these and may send your survey invite straight to the spam box if you include them.

4. Stick to the golden rule of survey deployment—no more than one survey per week, per person

You don't have to be a data nerd to create totally awesome insights from your surveys

As a product of the awesome 80's, I fondly remember the 1984 hit movie "Revenge of the Nerds". The film chronicled the journey of several outcast nerds as they try to form a fraternity in college and fit in with the popular crowd. However, the nerds despite their super human intelligence and analysis capacity did not fit in with the "in" crowd . By flexing their brain power, by the end of the movie, the nerds finally overcame adversity. You too can get nerdy with your survey data and still be one of the cool kids in the room. So put on your Ray Bans and get ready to flex your gray matter, here are three data nerd tips from Zoomerang's power users.

Don't lose what you already know

You just finished collecting all of your survey responses, made some initial analysis and now you're ready create a killer presentation that will "wow" your boss and solicit "Ohs and "Aahs" from your peers. But, how can you pick the best charts and graphs to represent your survey data? In a world of information overload it's important to choose the right visualizations for your data set. You need to create visualizations that will make it easy to focus on the data that is important. Here are some examples of charts and graphs that you can create from your Zoomerang survey data and show the insights that matter.

Pie Charts: