How To Do A Survey: Top 10 Tips
Updated: May 6
Find out more on how to do a survey by following the 10 top tips below to help you along the way. Whether you’re a beginner or you have created a survey before, you will find this post useful.
Especially now as online surveys are becoming an essential part for all businesses from large brands down to small websites, where it’s needed to gain valuable feedback in a quick and efficient way from customers or employees to help steer direction of company strategies or to settle issues.
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1. Survey templates or start from scratch
Many of the survey maker platforms include survey templates for different purposes. Therefore, it’s perfect for you to use in selecting a template and customising it the way you want it instead of starting from scratch and spending endless number of hours in developing the survey questionnaire.
2. Ease into the first question
Given it’s the first question in the survey, it’s really important not to put people off from completing the survey by asking personal or sensitive type of questions at the beginning. So, if you have any sensitive type of questions like income or number of people in household it’s best, they are placed at the back of the survey.
3. Question types
There are two main kinds of questions that you need to be aware of – open questions and closed questions that consists of a variety of question types. It’s good to be consistent and use mix of these questions where relevant to avoid boredom to set in amongst the participants but try not to use more than two open questions as it adds a lot time to the survey.
Open questions give participants the opportunity to answer the question in their own words, where they can express the reasons why they purchased a particular brand or what they don’t like about a website rather than being prompted to select an answer.
Closed questions give participants a choice of options to choose from like a single response with a yes or no answer to multiple responses to a question like mobile brands you are aware of from a list.
Below are different types of closed questions you can use in your survey.
Single response questions
Single response as the name suggests is where only one answer is allowed like what age group they fall under. Even many questions covering attitudes of the participant are single response from a pre-coded list.
Multiple choice questions
Multiple choice questions allow participants to offer more than one answer. This could be from a list of brands that they may know of, considered, purchased or used and is easy to fill out. If your using a list of answer options, please make sure the list is randomised to avoid bias.
Rating scale questions
Rating scale questions are a scale of numbers that are likely to be from 0 to 10 and are used to ask participants to rate a website, service or product on different things.
EXAMPLE – Q. On a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 being not at all to 10 being extremely likely, how likely are you to recommend Brand X to friends or family?
Likert scale questions
Likert scale questions helps to establish the level of agreement from the participant for each statement on a 5 or 7 point scale about a brand or a person’s behaviour. It can be from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” but also the level of likelihood to buy as well.
EXAMPLE – Q. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?
I enjoy entertaining people at home
1. Strongly agree
2. Slightly agree
3. Neither agree nor disagree
4. Slightly disagree
5. Strongly disagree
Ranking questions
Ranking questions are needed to find out what aspects participants rate in order of importance for a website, service or product. It’s best practice to ask the participants to list their top 3 factors in order from a list of factors. Randomisation or rotation should be applied to the list to avoid any bias towards the factors at the top of the list.
4. Routing (conditions or logic)
Routing is a set of conditions to meet criteria you have set in the survey to target an audience, where quota sampling can be used or ask particular questions that not all participants see. For example, there could be a small section in the survey asking participants who visit the cinema regularly about their most recent experience but would only apply based on answers given at previous questions about whether they visit the cinema or not and how often they go.
In this way, it shortens the survey for many of the participants as they don’t have to answer every single question.
5. Piping
Piping in surveys takes an answer given at a previous question and places it in the question text later on in a survey like a brand or website. This can be used to make the survey more personalised based on previous answers such as asking the name of the participant, which is then included in the some of the questions later on in the survey to address the participant.
6. Avoid technical jargon if you can
It’s important not to include jargon and acronyms unless they are used as everyday terms. If you need to include a technical term in the survey, it’s best to include the meaning of that term before the question.
7. Ways of making the survey engaging
Making the survey more engaging is key to participants completing the survey instead of dropping out. So, try to be creative and use the survey features available like sliders or carousels to change any questions that you find boring like large grid of statements as well as limiting a long list of options to the most important to you. You can also use conversational style survey feature to be more engaging.
8. Online survey length you should aim for
It’s best not to exceed a maximum survey length of 15 minutes before participants significantly start dropping out of your survey. Although it’s a shorter survey length for polls or pop up surveys on your website, which should be a maximum of 5 minutes especially if they are non-customers (15 questions). For more lengthy surveys you should aim up to 10 minutes or less.
9. Online methods of recruitment for your survey
See what options you have available to invite participants to take part in your survey whether that’s through social media channels, email or within your website.
10. Responses rates
This is more for once the survey has gone live. The response rate is basically the number of people who have completed the survey divided by the number invites that were sent out. This measure helps to gage the success of your survey in terms of number of completes, so the larger the sample, the more statistically robust your results will be.
A couple of things to keep in mind
Be wary of GDPR laws in countries from the European Union if you are going to send surveys via email as this is around the secure storage and use of customer details, so you will need prior permission (an opt in) from customers to send them email survey invites.
Another thing to keep in mind are technical issues from the participants end as it’s dependent on the software and hardware they are using. Remember a survey will look very different from a computer to a mobile device where some graphics in the survey may not appear right. Device optimisation is key to addressing this issue.
Key take outs
Remember to keep the survey to not more than 15 minutes or 5 minutes if you are running a poll or pop up survey on your website. Also keep to the length of the survey that you said it will take in the introduction as many of the participants will drop out and fail to complete the survey. For example, you have said it’s a 10-minute survey but it actually takes 20 minutes to complete. Therefore, test it out many times with friends and family before your survey goes live.
Most survey maker platforms have templates that you can apply and customise instead of spending even more time starting from scratch, which is particularly useful if you’re a beginner.
Try out survey maker platforms like 123FormBuilder.com that are relatively inexpensive (free trial offers available), easy to use, consist of many useful features and serves many purposes like polls, quizzes and different types of surveys (customer, employee, NPS and chat surveys).
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