In business projects, surveys can be invaluable tools. They allow you to determine the exact benchmarks to measure your success, define your main objectives, and identify potential issues early on. But surveys can also be misinterpreted or misused if they’re not leveraged correctly. This leads to unreliable results and consequently encourages you to take the wrong actions that won’t support your end goal. To prevent this from happening and ensure you utilize surveys correctly, there are a number of tips and tricks you could use for building reliable data. Here are some of the best ones:
Find the right audience
Simply creating a survey and getting as many people involved as possible won’t be enough to ensure success. You need to engage the right population in order to get the most relevant results. For example, there won’t be much point in conducting a survey in a shopping center if your goal is to ask questions about online purchases. Instead, you will have to identify the audience that truly matters, which will likely be the target audience you’re marketing to. Then, try to reach them on suitable platforms where they are likely to appear, whether it’s in person or online.
Measure correct metrics
One of the most common mistakes businesses make when creating surveys is asking questions about specific aspects of the company that they simply can’t change. This practice often wastes time and collects useless information rather than getting real results. If you have no effect on aspects of the employee, customer, or another respondent’s journey, don’t include them in your survey. Focus only on the things that you can actually improve to ensure the effectiveness of your survey.
Use various questions
It’s also recommended to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative questions throughout the survey. Quantitative questions are often used to determine the extent of specific factors (e.g. customer satisfaction) while qualitative questions can gather the main reasons behind common answers. Using a combination of these two types of questions can also aid in breaking up some of the monotony for respondents, thus making the survey more interesting and increasing your completion rates.
Leverage the best tools
Make sure you use the right platforms for creating your survey as well. Opt for a great online survey tool with very useful features such as pre-written questions, support for multiple languages, custom themes, responsive layouts, custom branding options, question branching opportunities, and more. With a variety of great tools and features, it will be easier to create a survey that fulfills all your needs and requirements and ensures positive results. This might also help to make the user experience better for respondents, thus increasing your success rate.
Always provide options
When you provide respondents with a preselected set of answers, you have to expect that each individual will give one of the provided answers. However, this doesn’t always happen, as many people decide to give up on a survey altogether rather than give an answer they don’t fully believe in. To avoid this issue, provide an ‘other’ option with each question. This option should have some empty space where respondents could write their own answers or elaborate. This ensures higher completion and might provide you with greater detail as well.
Prevent sampling bias
It would also be wise to ensure that all samples for your survey are taken randomly. This will help you guarantee that there isn’t any bias in the answers you receive, thus securing a great set of valuable data. Keep in mind that you don’t need to find thousands of respondents either. If you manage to collect a few hundred answers to your survey, you will likely have enough information to proceed with the following steps. But of course, this will depend on the type and size of your business, as well as your main objectives.
Don’t lead respondents
Your survey questions must also be written in a way that doesn’t lead the respondents. Leading can result in false responses and significantly corrupt your data. For example, instead of asking “Are you pleased with our customer service?”, choose a question like “How satisfied were you with the service you received?”. More neutral questions will give your audience the opportunity to answer openly and honestly, thus giving you a more realistic view of the collected information.
Incentivize participation
One of the most important parts of the entire survey process is also incentivizing your audience to actually complete your survey. This could be something simpler such as a ‘thank you’ email or a free drink, or it could be a bit more meaningful to respondents like special offers and discounts on future purchases. Regardless of the solution you choose, incentives are the most effective way to improve your completion rates. Done right, they could also aid in improving the overall user experience by making your audience feel more appreciated and valued.
When starting a business project, surveys can be quite helpful for setting benchmarks and identifying key goals. Use the advice above to ensure your surveys are created correctly and support success.