Conducting an Online Survey

Surveys are an essential component to marketing. After all, how do you know what to do in your marketing efforts if you do not know what your visitors are thinking? So many companies do the equivalent of wadding up money and throwing it up against the wall when they do their marketing. Rather than directly asking visitors what they think, they guess. OR they will base their marketing on what they think would be cool. Make surveys a key part of your strategy in tailoring your website to your visitors.

In conducting an online survey, there are some tips which can help you get the best results:

Be Concise

Do not make the survey longer than it has to be, and write questions which are succinct and easily understood. Many people will abandon the survey if they see it is really long. They don’t have the time to take it, and don’t really care about you enough to dedicate the time required.

Don’t be Afraid of Open-Ended Questions

Many online survey systems allow checkbox-type answers which the user simply selects and the system automatically tallies the results. However, with an open-ended, free response question, you can get the respondent’s actual emotional response to the question. Many times the answers will be a lot more varied than you would hope, but at the same time you will often get input you did not expect and that is useful information.

Seek an Emotional Response

Simple, robotic tallying questions can give you quick data. Questions like gender, age, etc. are simple, factual questions. But, when using a survey to drive future marketing efforts, you want to use questions that will elicit an emotional response - a response from the heart, so to speak. Questions that pose a scenario and get their reaction can work well. For example, “If our website would feature xxxx, how would this benefit you?”, or “What would you be able to do better in your life if you had such-and-such”? These types of questions, coupled with a free-form text entry, would garner their emotional reaction. And then you can make a judgment, based on their response, of whether they are enthusiastic, bored, apathetic, angry, etc. Data on the emotional tone of the respondent is useful in determining the tone your promotion should take. For example, showing enthusiastic promotion (capital letters, exclamation points, and exciting claims) is very likely to be passed over by the visitor who is bored or unimpressed.

Offer an Incentive

Speaking of emotional response, many internet users are bored and unimpressed. At least when it comes to websites. Realize, at first, that your website blends in with all the other sites they have likely visited. If a visitor has been to your site before and came back, then they are probably already “sold”. However, most visitors will be new. Asking these people to take some survey is probably going to fall on deaf ears because they don’t care enough to fill it out. So, offer an incentive. Give them something for free in exchange for filling out the survey. You’ll probably get a lot more responses that way.

Conclusion

Install a survey system to your web server and make use of it. Used correctly, it can be one of the best marketing tools you have used.

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5. The Importance of Surveys, SurveyMonkey

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