8 Quick tips to improve your surveys
Sometimes people are so excited about launching their first survey that they just keep adding questions until they can’t remember what else to ask.
This kind of approach is perfectly normal when someone doesn’t know the “rules of the game”, but leads to low response rates, filling errors and too many questions which ultimately will just be ignored - either because they don’t contribute to the survey goals or because there was no time to analyze them.
To help avoid these problems, we have prepared 8 quick tips that will significantly improve your surveys without much effort. Our goal is to provide all Survs’s users with a quick guide to start building successful surveys right away.
1. Plan it!
Before you start designing your survey, ask yourself: Why am I doing this survey? What are my goals? What do I want to know?
2. Short is beautiful
Keep in mind that the shorter the survey is, the greater are the chances of having high response rates.
3. Introduce “yourself”
Start by explaining the survey’s purpose, how the results will be used and how long it will take.
4. Divide and conquer
Present your questions in logical groups, leaving the personal identification questions to the end of the survey.
5. Be clear and to the point
Speak the language of your audience and pay attention to the size and clarity of your questions: if the respondents have to read a question more than once, it means that it is too confusing.
6. Let it flow!
To avoid breaking the flow of the survey, try not to use many different types of questions. If you force your respondents to learn a different scale for every question your survey completion rate will surely decrease.
7. Protect yourself!
Be cautious about using open-ended questions (questions where the respondent answers in their own words) because they are much harder to analyze than closed-ended questions (questions where the respondent chooses between one or more answer options).
One of the must usual errors in online surveys (well, in all kind of surveys) is asking questions that end up never being analyzed. Remember that in online surveys short is beautiful ;-).
8. Test, test and test a little more!
Before launching your survey don’t forget to test it several times until it is finely tuned.
