This is what we’re most familiar with. After creating some questions with SurveyMonkey, we can send out the link to our customer list, Twitter followers, and anyone else. Then we give it a few days, check back, and have all sorts of feedback (hopefully).
Now, many people get poor results when they send out surveys. Either nobody finishes the survey or the responses aren’t helpful. It doesn’t have to be this way. Use these easy tricks to make sure you get great responses from your surveys.
Keep it short. We’ve all filled out surveys that took over 20 minutes. Was that a fun 20 minutes that you remember fondly? Of course not – it was tedious work. And I bet you started rushing through the answers after the first few questions right? I sure do. So if we want to get quality answers from our customers, it’s critical that we ask only a few key questions. Try to keep your surveys to 5 questions, and definitely don’t go over 10.
Ask only the questions that you’ll use. Every question should serve a purpose. And don’t tell me that one extra question “couldn’t hurt.” It does. If you don’t use the information you’re asking for, you’re wasting your customer’s time. You’re also wasting yours. You’ll have a whole batch of responses to look through and none of them will make a difference. Instead, save time and get better responses, by including only the essential questions.
Start with open-ended questions. When you start asking your customers questions for the first time, their answers are going to completely surprise you. So if you build a survey full of rating scales and multiple choice questions, you’ll restrict answers to your own assumptions. But when you use open-ended questions, you’ll know what your customers are really thinking.