Innovative Survey Forms with the AidaForm Online Survey Maker

How You Define Your Audience

Plan your survey with a target audience mind. Of course, you can simply share your survey link on the web and hope for the best, but it is much more effective to define your audience and tailor questions specifically for them. If you already have a customer database, analyze it to better target your research.

Want to gather information from your existing customers? Or is it new potential markets you’re looking for. The key to better data is defining who you need the data from. When you know that, the quality of information you collect increases sharply.

How You Ask Survey Questions

An online survey creator can help you build any kind of survey form, but it cannot help you decide what to ask and what language to choose. Surely, there is a ton of things you want to learn about your customers, but simply putting them into one big questionnaire isn’t enough.

Think instead, what answers can be used as actionable feedback (Our customers want us to offer catering on full-day events) or help you confirm a hypothesis (Customers’ age is/is not correlated to the type of backpacks they prefer to buy from your online store), then formulate your questions accordingly.

The quality of the data also depends on how you write. Here are a few best practices:

• Keep the language simple and clear
• Be as specific as possible to get precise answers
• Break big concepts into multiple questions – you cannot gauge customer satisfaction in a single question
• Avoid leading questions – if you let your opinion reflect in the question it will compromise survey results
• Use scales and ratings to analyze correlations better

How You Conduct Your Survey

Putting your survey online is easy – AidaForm’s online questionnaire builder lets you share the direct link to social networks, include it in emails. Before you do that, there are a few things to check to make sure the survey runs smoothly.

After you create your survey and before you make it available to your audience, do a couple of test runs on your friends or colleagues to make sure your questions and survey structure are clear and easy to understand, the logic checks out and it doesn’t take too long to complete.

Once you’ve done your pre-testing, think where people are going to take your survey. It’s a web survey, after all, and almost half of the world’s internet traffic is now mobile. More than 19% of online surveys are taken on smartphones and tablets, says the recent Greenbook’s study. AidaForm makes sure your survey questionnaire looks good on any device, so you don’t have to worry about that too much. Just avoid wordy sentences that will take up half of a smartphone’s screen.

Finally, schedule the whole survey research process in advance. Collecting responses takes some time even online: don’t let data grow old or get lost in the process. Make a timeline that includes not just the deployment, but also collection time frames, analysis, and report building.

How You Get People to Respond

Motivating people to answer your survey questions isn’t easy. As long as they don’t have an incentive to do it, they won’t, so show them why completing your survey is worth their time and attention. Sometimes, asking nicely is enough, especially if you’re addressing an active and friendly community who appreciates what you do. Alternatively, you can offer a small present or a freebie that will be attractive to your audience: an Amazon voucher, a discount, or a chance to win a prize.

When asking to participate in your research, be positive and explain how the participants will help you by completing the questionnaire, and use a clear call to action phrase like “Start the survey now” or “Participate today for a chance to win an iPhone X”.