Design Great Survey Forms in the Online Survey Maker by AidaForm

Online surveys are a method of gathering information online from individual people for a variety of purposes, including market research and feedback collection. No matter what kind of information you want to gather – rating scores, answers to multiple-choice or long text questions – the AidaForm’s free survey creator helps you easily collect and evaluate survey form responses.

AidaForm features dozens of ready-made rating, matrix, slider, Likert and other scales fields to create any kind of online survey form: service satisfaction, event evaluation, Net Promoter Score survey, and many more.

Slider Rating Scale Matrix

Common Online Surveys to Use for Your Business

You can use surveys to gather any kind of information that helps you improve your services or products, and even develop new ones. Decide what you want to learn and craft an easy survey:

Improve website usability
Get product or service feedback
Conduct market research
Follow up on events
Gauge customer satisfaction
Measure employee satisfaction

What are the typical questions for the above survey types? What else is there to keep in mind? Read the dedicated articles at AidaForm Blog – it’s full of great ideas and samples. The AidaForm’s free online survey maker will help you build a mobile-ready survey form with any kind of questions you want – no coding in HTML required.

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4 Steps to Create Online Survey Forms with the AidaForm Builder

Step 1

Make a Web Survey Form

AidaForm is a survey generator that offers a fully customizable form templates: fill them with as many custom question blocks as you like! Insert responsive elements every survey needs, including multiple choice questions, opinion scales, ratings, and drop-down lists. For detailed feedback or comments, use text boxes, where respondents can enter freeform replies. The thing is, you won’t need to code anything – the survey generator lets you select ready-made blocks and drag them to your form in a fully visual editor.

Step 2

Touch Up Form Design

Depending on the tone and purpose of your survey, select a minimalistic design or go with brighter colors. Customize the color theme if you want the form theme to match your website’s design. AidaForm’s smart design themes make sure all your design adjustments look good with every block you add even if you have zero web design experience.

Step 3

Deploy Your Survey and Gather Responses

There is a variety of ways to share the survey you created in AidaForm. The easiest option is to get a link to your survey form and publish it on social networks or email across your MailChimp database. Don’t forget to include a motivational message to let people know why you’d like them to participate and how long it will take.

AidaForm can also generate a form code to paste to your website directly if you wish. Wherever users submit their answers – via email, social networks, or on your website, you’ll see all submissions in one place – your member’s area at AidaForm.

Step 4

Analyze and Evaluate Data

While getting people to participate in your survey is, without a doubt, important, it’s crucial to evaluate results quickly and efficiently. AidaForm lets you do that through integrations and reports. When someone submits a response, you get notified via email so you won’t miss anything. View reports for summaries and statistics to gain insights and make business decisions based on the data you collect. Export data sheets to Excel or Google Sheets for further research and reference.

The 4 Hows of a Successful Survey

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 Write Questions for Your Survey

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 survey 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 free survey maker 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 form 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 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 you 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 survey, and use a clear call to action phrase like “Start the survey now” or “Participate today for a chance to win an iPhone X”.

Relevant templates

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