When a company understands its customers, it is better able to serve its market, which is an important element of business success. Online surveys are an extremely cost-effective tool for gaining the information you need to make better decisions and ultimately win more business while outmaneuvering your competition.

A well-designed and well-executed survey can not only identify potential prospects from a base of leads, but can also provide enormously valuable information about needs, buying influences, customer demographics and competitive threats. Businesses are given many opportunities to collect survey information, although many times they don’t take advantage of them. These include:

• Online Event Registration – When attendees register for an event
• Lead Capture – Log visitors to a trade show booth
• Sign up for a download, product or report from your Website
• Recruit and classify business partners
• Respond to a marketing campaign or promotion
• Measure customer satisfaction following a sale

Online Survey Design

Every survey should start with a clear objective. Whether its purpose is prospecting or gaining a better understanding of a potential new market, the objective should be well defined. As the survey is developed, it should be tested on candidates who are similar in background to the intended audience. Testing will reveal if a survey is too long, leading to a high rate of abandonment, or identify questions worded in a confusing or misleading way for the respondent, leading to bad data.

Depending on the particular information desired, there are a number of types of questions that can be employed in a survey. They include:

• True/False
• Multiple Choice – Choose all that apply
• Multiple Choice – Unrestricted (for example, add “other” text field)
• Multiple Choice – Single answer restriction
• Importance Scale – Rate from “Extremely Important” to “Not at All Important”
• Rating Scale – Rate from “Excellent” to “Poor”
• Custom Rating Scale
• Relative Ranking
• Open Ended (essay to text field)

There is a type of question for almost any kind of information desired. The challenge is to make sure you use the right type of question for each particular piece of information you are seeking.

Online Surveys vs. Traditional Methods

Traditionally, surveys were conducted face-to-face by individuals. Today, many surveys are conducted over the telephone. Response rates and accuracy for one-on-one surveys are very high relative to other approaches. However the major downside to conducting personal surveys the expense.

Direct mail has also been used to gather survey information. Respondents are mailed a survey form and encouraged, often through some form of reward, to complete the survey and drop it in the mail. The benefit of direct mail surveys is the wide audience of respondents they can reach. The disadvantages include very low typical response rates and the inability to provide ancillary information if a respondent is unclear about exactly what is meant by a particular question. Also, the responses must be converted from paper to a database for analysis, which can be expensive and error-prone.

Advantages of Online Surveys

The Web provides a new medium for surveys that can be extremely effective, and offers advantages beyond personal interviews and tele-surveys. Online survey technology can provide most of the benefits of one-on-one surveys while leveraging the Internet to dramatically reduce costs. Online surveys can even mimic the conditional branching capabilities of one-on-one surveys but without the complexity, providing focused, targeted questions to different classes of respondents in a way that is completely transparent to them.

Survey Design Consulting

Developing a survey can be tricky, and if you ask the wrong questions or use the wrong format, your investment and effort can result in misleading or erroneous conclusions. If you are not experienced in survey design and implementation, it pays to consult with an expert. Market Vantage provides survey design consulting and online survey implementation services to help you meet the objectives of your next survey project. Please complete the form to the right if you are interested in this service

Online Survey Consulting Information Request Form