One of the golden rules about marketing is that pretty things attract customers. Poorly designed promotions, online surveys and emails turn people off and show how unprofessional you are.
With the extremely competitive nature of marketing today, the best and most intriguing design always wins out over something that was half-assed (pardon my French). Even with a zero budget to develop, create and send out an online survey, great design just takes some creative muscle.
Here are some more tips to create a "winning" online survey.
Website-Based Surveys
Surveys that pop-up as floating windows on home pages are a great strategy. You engage with your customers immediately and implore their good nature to help you improve your service.
In some cases, company's keep a floating, generic survey on their website at all times.
This type of survey requires extra special attention to design. Unlike email-based surveys, floating surveys rely on more of a snap-decision made by the customer. So, here are some tips to improve your web-based surveys:
- Don't overwrite. Keep your incentive or "push" clear, concise and easily digested.
- Offer an intriguing reason to fill out the survey.
- Don't be too aggressive in your plea; it turns off potential customers.
- Ensure that you've another place on your site for customers to fill out your survey.
Question Flow
Consider writing your questions in a logical sequence. If you don't order the questions in this manner, you run the risk of confusing and frustrating your customers. Also, online survey questions build upon each other, where the following question delves deeper into specific issues.
To order your questions properly, here's a generic layout that will get you started on the right way:
- Basic optional personal questions (name, age, sex and/or address)
- Moderate optional personal questions (lifestyle, interests and/or income)
- Basic customer questions (purchasing history, product satisfaction)
- Moderate customer questions (quality, service and/or technical assistance)
- General feedback
Answer Choices
One of the best design tricks is to vary the type of answers provided. From scale-based questions to multiple choices, remember that each type of question requires a specific and unique answer type.
For example, a scale usually follows a question regarding the quality of a product where customers can rate their opinion. Also, questions that ask about customer satisfaction have multiple choice answers.
However, one design tip that is often overlooked is the use of feedback boxes that require customers to write. The more you ask your customers to write their answers, the more likely you'll lose them because it requires time and effort to fill out.
Keep the majority of your questions simple so that customers can easily check or select their answers. For fill-in boxes, keep it at the end where customers can offer their generic feedback on your products and services.
Survey Size
Ask anyone to do something that is long is boring and a major time-consumer. People only have a certain length of attention and after its finished, they jump onto the next thing.
Keep your survey brief. Get to your point and do so quickly, otherwise, you're going to lose them. Or, even worse, get skewed responses because of their irritation with you.
