Top 10 tips for successful online questionnaires
Online surveys and questionnaires enable you to create a dialogue with web users, and measure their level of satisfaction. You can also effectively understand and analyze your market's needs, whatever your sector: public services, industry, associations, service, health, retail, tourism, etc.
Today, data collection is a major challenge for organizations wishing to better target their communication campaigns. Let's take a look at the tips for successful online questionnaires, the best software tools, and how to achieve your survey design objectives.
Why create an online questionnaire?
Whether you're a small business owner, a self-employed entrepreneur or the head of an association, you have a lot to learn about your target audience. Who are your customers? What do they think of your services? How can you improve your efficiency and better meet their needs?
These are all essential questions for increasing your efficiency and ensuring the success of your decision-making. With the development of advanced online questionnaire solutions, you can define and send out different types of survey:
- Market research, to launch a new project or offer a new service;
- A marketing survey, to obtain detailed information about your industry and competitors;
- A satisfaction survey, to find out what your customers think and develop your products;
- Data collection, to conduct research and establish your expertise;
- A website evaluation questionnaire, to analyze online behavior and optimize the user experience.
These different types of questionnaire enable you to collect quantitative and qualitative data to enrich your customer knowledge, make useful decisions and measure the results of actions undertaken. Creating an online survey form is a real management tool.
10 tips for a successful online questionnaire
1. Start by clearly defining your objectives.
To avoid superfluous questions, focus first on your priority topics and objectives. Start your survey with those questions that are essential for your company or association.
2. Always contextualize your questionnaire.
In your introduction to your panel, tell them the purpose of the survey, the number of minutes it will take to respond, and the rules of confidentiality. Limit identity-related questions and prefer an anonymous questionnaire to gather the maximum number of responses.
3. Be as concise as possible.
The shorter your online questionnaire, the more responses you'll get. If the form is long, consider dividing the questions into different pages with a progress bar. The golden rule: no more than 10 questions per page.
4. Write questions precisely.
Get straight to the point and keep them accessible, using sentences that are easy to understand and avoid asking several questions in one. Questions such as "How would you rate the restaurant's atmosphere and welcome?" are to be avoided, otherwise you'll collect data you can't use.
5. Don't direct your questions.
If you want to target your customers and find out what they think of your products or services, stay neutral and avoid biased answers. Don't influence their answers by using overly categorizing adjectives.
6. Don't force your respondents to answer.
Don't make questions compulsory - this is a common mistake in online questionnaires. There's nothing more frustrating for a respondent than not being able to validate their answers because of a missing answer. Don't forget to define alternative options such as "Don't know" or "Other" fields.
7. Ask very few open-ended questions.
Once again, apply the law of least effort to your panel of respondents. By limiting the number of open-ended questions, you boost your participation and conversion rates, and make it easier to analyze your results later on.
8. Organize your questionnaire into several parts.
Respondents need to know where they are and what topic or theme they are answering. Be sure to organize the form logically, with distinct headings or sections. It's best to create one page for each group of questions relating to the same subject.
9. Don't neglect the design of your questionnaire.
The more attractive and user-experience-oriented your online questionnaire, the more you maximize the number of responses. For added professionalism, take the time to adapt the survey design to your site's graphic charter.
10. Choose the right publication method.
Before sending out your survey, make sure you choose the right channel for distributing your online questionnaire according to the habits of your target audience and your sector of activity: by e-mail, via social networks, a press release, etc.
Want to go further?
Have you thought about making questionnaires with drawers, setting up personalized exit pages or using table or matrix questions? Find out more by downloading our white paper on the 20 most effective tips for successful online questionnaires. You'll also learn how to avoid bias and offer an incentive to encourage your customers to fill out the form to the end...
4 steps to creating an online questionnaire
Ready to create your first online questionnaire and collect your first data? Here are the four main steps to follow to make your survey a success:
Step 1: Create the questionnaire
With the right online questionnaire software, you'll have dozens of customizable question types and features to create your own personalized pro survey form. Make sure your questions are short, precise and easy to fill in.
Step 2: Customize the design
Creating an online questionnaire also means taking care of the design and personalization. Choosing the layout, fonts, colors, graphics and animations all contribute to the attractiveness of your survey and activate brand recognition with your customers.
Step 3: Distribute the survey online
Here we come to the question of hosting your online survey. You have a choice of publication options: integrate your survey into your website, publish it via an anonymous link, send it by e-mail, or post it on social networks.
Step 4: Analyze the results
Once the survey is complete, it's time to analyze and study the results! Questionnaire software often offers automatic, customizable reports to help you understand and break down your results.
How to choose the right online questionnaire software?
To ensure the success of your evaluation surveys, satisfaction surveys and market studies, the choice of software and hosting for your online questionnaire is an important step. Choose professional web tools that are easy to use and set up.
If you consider the best solutions on the market, like Eval&GO for example, you can get the most out of your surveys with :
- Customized options, an intuitive interface and a pro questionnaire editor to easily create advanced scenarios, able to integrate and organize any type of question logically and efficiently, in a pleasing graphic charter.
- Secure hosting conditions for the questionnaire, with automatic backups and network functionality to distribute the survey via all existing channels: social networks, e-mail, link sharing, QR Code, website, blog, etc.
- Real-time results, automated dashboards and comprehensive reports based on your performance indicators to guide you in your decision-making, exploit your results and manage your quality monitoring.
- Simple contact management tools to import and export your target and respondent lists and transform your online questionnaire into a genuine marketing campaign.
Finally, before you take the plunge, test your questionnaire creation solution! Expert software and the most popular managers offer trial versions and free demos to help you determine which type of account best suits your needs.
Successful online questionnaires are a matter of common sense
Online questionnaires are an effective way of targeting your customers, gaining a better understanding of your audiences, and always providing more accurate answers to their needs. To help you develop your product and service offering or gain a better grasp of the challenges facing your market and sector of activity, follow our tips and advice to optimize the wording of your questions. When it comes to online surveys and research tools, opt for professional web solutions with advanced hosting, contact management and reporting features. Your conversion rate and sales depend on it.
Article translated from French