Every survey completed is a favour someone does for you to help you gain valuable data and insights. Though a participant may agree to take your survey, if the questions are not engaging and interesting, the data you end up with may not be as insightful as you want it to be. In order to avoid high survey bounce rates, you need to write an actionable survey with questions that are streamlined, relevant, and straightforward. An actionable survey is going to get more valuable data at a higher completion rate than a poorly written survey.
The concept is simple, but how do you make an engaging survey? It isn’t that difficult as you think if you keep the consumer at the forefront of your mind while designing and creating the survey. Having a clear focus and using this to customize your survey questions will help you capture the data you are seeking. Creating an effective survey doesn’t have to be a daunting task. The quantitative research experts at Ambivista are always focused on collecting the data that is actionable and impactful for its clients. With our many years of survey consulting experience, we have discovered some key factors that are important for designing an effective survey.
The Key Factors:
- Surveys should have a clear objective and focus solely on that objective. These kinds of surveys generate high response rates and allow for more efficient analysis on the backend. You might be tempted to add some nice-to-have questions or questions to supplement another project, but you need to stop yourself or be prepared for a low response rate and lots of frustration when doing the analysis.
- Optimize Your Survey Flow
- Don’t send surveys to people who don’t qualify to take the survey. It annoys them and you don’t want to invalidate your data.
- Put general questions at the beginning to obtain their unbiased opinions first. Then, narrow the focus, getting more specific as you work through the survey. Hold sensitive and identifier questions, such as income and race, for the end if possible. These types of questions may estrange respondents and if so, you don’t want to lose them early in the survey.
- Keep the respondents’ mindset on one topic at a time. Going back and forth between topics can confuse respondents and cause them to lose their interest incompleting the survey.
- Make sure survey language is consumer-friendly. The response choice should accurately reflect their onions, attitudes, and language.
It’s best to conduct qualitative research before developing your survey if you are not familiar with their language. This will help you to understand how consumers speak about your category and brand.
- Keep the survey length short. The days are long gone when people used to have time to complete 45-60-minute surveys. Now people are bombarded with emails, social media, text messages, etc. What’s more,none of them have a willingness to engage in long surveys. Do everything you can to keep your surveys as short as possible.
- Take care while designing and phrasing questions and responses.
- Ask only one question at a time – compound questions can lead to uncertainty in the analysis.
- Never use biased questions – For example, “How much do you like this product?”
- Ensure your response list is exhaustive – that is everyone can identify with a response. For example, if you were inquiring into one’sfavouriteflavour of milkshake, you wouldn’t want to list just chocolate and vanilla. Rather, you’d want to include other flavours, and perhaps even include an “other” option as well.
- Make sure your response list is mutually exclusive so respondents can easily select only one response. For example, if you were inquiring into the number of times one drank milkshakes in the past month, be careful not to have overlapping responses (e.g., 0-2, 2-4, 4-6, etc).
Once you’ve written an effective survey with well-designed questions, you will be well on your way towards getting actionable insights. If you have any queries, contact us, we would be more than happy to assist you!
