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Survey Tips

At Insiteful Surveys, our goal is to give you all the tools required to build an online survey, collect results, and analyze your data. Surveys can be conducted on a variety of topics, and you can gain invaluable information about your customers just by asking a few questions.

1. Identifying an Objective

Before you begin developing your survey, you must decide want you to accomplish. Clearly define a list of objectives or questions that you have about your business, customer, competitor, or product. When you design your survey, make sure every question asked refers to one of the objectives you have outlined. Without thinking through the objectives before your survey is designed, you might miss the mark and prevent the survey from being as effective as it can be. 

2. The Introduction

The beginning of your survey should include an interesting introduction that clearly states the purpose of your research. Your introduction should grab the attention of potential respondents and encourage their participation. The introduction should also include instructions on how to complete the survey and an estimate of how much time it will take.

3.  Writing the Questions

Though writing a survey may seem easy, some amount of skill and attention is required. You should take the time and effort to carefully think out each question, as irrelevant and carelessly worded questions may produce substandard results. Making decisions on bad results could create serious problems. 

Below are some things that should be kept in mind when designing your survey. 

• Keep the survey short.  
• Ask only questions that directly address the study goals.  
• Let your visitors know their progress.  
• Make the questions quick and easy to complete.  
• Use plain, easy-to-understand language.  
• Organize your questions in logical groups.
• Ask important questions first--demographic questions last.  
• Make the survey visually appealing and branded to the site.  
• Allow skip patterns.
• Allow rotation of question responses.  
• Don't combine two questions into one.  
• Avoid biased or leading questions that indicate the preferred answer.  
• At the end of your survey, provide a place for respondents to add comments and thank them for their assistance.
• Choose the appropriate question format (single answer, multiple answer, open ended, etc.)
• Test your questions on a sample audience.  

Various Question types and when to use them:

1. One Choice (Drop down or radio button)
Select this type if you want to force respondents to choose only one answer from the listed choices. 

2. Multiple choice (check boxes)
This question type allows respondents to select one or more answers from a list of options. Use this question format if you would like the respondent to choose one or more of the answers that may apply to the particular question.

3. Matrix - One Answer Per Row
Use this question type if you desire respondents to rate many listed items in a single question. This question type allows choices to be evaluated across a range or scale.

4. Open Ended - One Line
Select this type when you want the respondent to type in a short response.  This is typically used when you require a short phrase such as a name or address.

5. Open Ended - Essay
Select this question when you seek a more thought out, longer response, which will be typed in by the respondent.

Insiteful Surveys provides the tools for you to add sound questions to your survey. Once you create an account and begin creating your survey, you can click on "sample questions" to find a battery of questions to help you get started.

4.  Collecting Responses

We provide all the tools necessary for you to successfully collect responses.

1.  Link in an email

If you have a low-volume site, don't have a site, or have questions geared toward a specific audience (such as newsletter subscribers) then the email method is recommended. Ensure that your customer email list is updated frequently or else you may have a poor response rate. You can use our email function to send email invitations to your customers.  When using an email list:

• Make sure to state up front what your intention is, especially if you have never emailed them before or seldom do so.Otherwise, you may be accused of spamming.
• It is okay to send one reminder email 2-4 days after the first invitation email is sent. But, refrain from sending repeated solicitations.

If you would are interested in gathering the opinions of a larger online audience about a concept or Web site, you may need to make use of an online survey panel.  We can provide an appropriate segment of online customers to suit your needs. Contact us at customerservice@insitefulsurveys.com for more information about using a provided list of customers for your survey.

2.  Pop-up window on your site

If you desire to gather opinions about your site or learn more about those visiting your site, then your best option is intercepting those visiting your site with pop-up surveys. Keep in mind the amount of traffic you have coming to your site before you decide to use your site as your primary method of data collection.  Pop-up surveys are recommended because:

• They yield high response rates. 
• They allow you to learn about current visitors to your site. 
• They allow you to keep visitors on your site. 
• They enable you to control the percent of visitors invited to complete a survey. 

Two other important things to keep in mind when using pop-up surveys:

• It is usually better to intercept visitors once they leave a particular page, as opposed to when they first enter a page. 
• Activate the window once per unique visitor. 

3.  Link on your site

If you prefer not to use pop-up windows, then you can also place a less obtrusive link on your site, but your response rates are very likely to go down.  If you use this method, attempt to make the link stand out and place the link prominently on your site where people are going to see it.

Below are some items to keep in mind once you begin collecting data with your survey:

• Leave the survey open for at least a week, but no longer than two weeks. If the survey is open for less than a week, the most frequent visitors will be overly represented.
• Don't allow a respondent to take the survey more than once.  We allow you to prevent duplicate responses by enabling cookies.
  

5.  Analyzing the Data

With Insiteful Surveys, you will be able to gain access to your results in real-time. Much of the primary analysis can be done by viewing the summary results that we provide. We also give you the ability to drill down on particular responses. Below are some things to keep in mind when analyzing your data.

• Delete any duplicates or other undesired responses from your data.
• Determine if you have a sufficient amount of completes.  Typically, the larger sample size the more reliable your findings will be.  In most cases, 100 or more responses per survey is statistically large enough to draw fairly firm conclusions.
• Determine if it is appropriate to look at specific subgroups, such as males versus females.

For more complex analyses of the data, you can export your data file into a spreadsheet or statistical program. Some of the programs we recommend to analyze your results are SPSS, SAS, or Microsoft Excel and Access.

If you would like assistance with any step of your survey process feel free to contact us at customerservice@insitefulsurveys.com or call us toll free at 877-540-2992. Thank you for your interest in Insiteful Surveys.