Creating a Great Online Survey

Have you ever wondered how to make a great online survey for your business? For a survey to be great it must be crystal-clear, reputable and have a workable understanding in order to elicit appropriate responses from survey takers. When your survey is ideal you will get a much higher response level and with increased quality of questions, they will be much simpler to fill out. Below are 5 important initial steps to aid you in putting together a great online survey.

Be sure to clarify why the survey is being made

Having unclear goals will generate blurry outcomes, rendering your survey mostly ineffective. To have a great survey it must possess focused objectives that are easy to perceive. Keep a pen and paper handy in order to write down such questions as:

• What is the point of the survey?
• What specifically needs to be accomplished by it?
• How will it be used after obtaining all the data?
• How will the survey results impact your decisions?

Although these questions may appear trivial they can save you a lot of trouble later. The essence of a good survey is an excellent set of questions. A few minutes of careful planning of the questions to be included in the survey can make the difference between a good survey an an excellent survey. 

Create a brief yet focused survey

The quality of the responses to your free online surveys will be best if you keep the survey focused and short. Instead of attempting to make a master survey that tries to address numerous objectives, just keep it focused upon one objective.

Fewer survey participants will abandon your survey if the survey is kept short. A short and well thought out survey will typically get a much higher rate of response. Most people want survey questions to be simple and brief. If the survey is too long and confusing, most will have the desire to ditch the entire survey. This will result in you getting only partial data and attempting to make sense of it all will be an exercise in futility. Keep your questions directed towards aiding you accomplish your specified objective. Don’t bother throwing in questions that beat about the bush and are not focused on the stated objectives of the survey. 

To keep the survey to an appropriate time limit, give it a test run with a few volunteers and time them to see how long it takes. If it is about 5 minutes long, then this is excellent. If you get into the 6 to 10 minute range then this is satisfactory. However, anything more than that raises the risk of participants abandoning it.

Questions should be easy to answer

Avoid jargon and make your inquiries straight to the point. You should not presume that survey participants can understand acronyms. Keep the questions direct and to the point throughout the survey. Below is an example:

Compare: What has your encounter been like while interacting with our staff?

To: How pleased are you with the response of our staff?

When feasible, you should use questions that are close-ended

When using online survey software, providing questions that are close-ended will bring about distinct choices and better results and make the analysis worthwhile. This question type can be used through multiple choice, rating scale or even just plain and simple yes/no. The open-ended inquiries enable the participant to reply to questions using their own content. The open-ended types are additionally ideal for questions that supply practical data and insights of quality. However, it is better to use closed-ended questions for analyzing and collating applications.

Maintain consistency with the rating scale questions in the survey

For contrasting and measuring sets of variables, it is suitable to use rating scales. Keep your rating scale consistent throughout. Be sure to apply the same total of points on your scale and keep the high and low rating consistent. In addition, make sure you make use of an odd number scale in your survey – which makes it simpler to analyze your data. Responses that can’t be trusted will come as the result of changing your rating scales, so be sure to keep them the same.

There are more steps in making an online survey, but these five will give you a great head start.