7 Assured Ways to Improve Your Online Surveys

There’s no limit to the number of ways you can utilize online surveys. From market research to feedback and insights for improving your product – we need them everywhere. Amidst the information age of today, businesses deeply depend on the data received and analyzed through online surveys.

But even after spending enough time in creating, designing and spreading your online surveys - how often does your target audience actively engage with them? What’s the average response rate? Probably not as much as you expect, right?

Well, don’t worry about it, now that you’re here - we’ve got your back. Although an easy, fast and inexpensive method of obtaining mass insights, generating high response rates for online surveys needs a strategic approach.

In this blog, we will discuss the most impactful measures to improve your online surveys and boost their respective response rates. Let’s get started!

Why Online Surveys are Vital for Your Business?

When you need to collect meaningful data from your target audience, the most systemized approach is using online surveys. Not only they are easy to scale, but get you the required results much faster and in an efficient manner.

If you aren’t utilizing online surveys already, it’s high time you start doing that. Here are the most important reasons why online surveys can make a huge impact on your business:

• Automated data handling: The biggest benefit of using online surveys is storing the responses automatically in a database. Additionally, it’s easy to handle with minimal chance of errors.

• Functional & design flexibility: As surveys are often designed as online forms, they can be curated as per your requirements. From different types of question responses to flexible design elements, an online survey is completely flexible for you to deliver a creative interaction.

• Economical: Before online surveys, collecting data from audiences was not only tedious - it was expensive too. Now as online surveys can be independently shared, and embedded in websites and emails - they’re way more economical.

• High customer engagement: For obvious reasons, digital surveys are much more interactive and engaging and attract more responses. It’s immensely convenient and easy for audiences to fill up online surveys rather than paper forms.

• Improved response rates: The most sought after metric for surveys is the response rate. All thanks to the intense flexibility and interactive nature of online forms, you experience considerably higher response rates. That directly means your efforts generate more ROI.

Although the response rate of online surveys is higher than the traditional methods, a few updates to your survey creation approach can boost it incredibly. Let’s now take a look at how can you improve your online surveys and hence raise the response rates too.

How to Improve Your Online Surveys?

There’a direct correlation between the improvement in online surveys and growth in success rates. The more engaging, appealing, concise, convenient and thoughtful your surveys feel to the target audience, the higher the chances of them filling it up.

The overall average online survey response rate is 33% which is way lower than the range considered to be reasonably good which is 50 - 60%.

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It’s clear that a majority of the online survey forms are still unoptimized and need to be improved. With the same objective, we have shortlisted the top 7 ways you can utilize to enhance your online surveys and boost your online survey response rate by curating survey forms optimally.

1. Set a Clear Goal

First things first, your survey should have a clear predefined goal. To analyze the information and extract insights, you should set your objective for the survey. Ask yourself some questions. Why do you want to execute this survey campaign? What are your goals with the obtained insights from this survey? Do you want to collect data from the audience to optimize your marketing campaigns? Do you want to improve your product by getting user feedback? Are you seeking testimonials for your service?

Although it might sound naive, most organizations create surveys without clear answers to these questions in their mind. It’s important that you plan your online survey well before diving into the creation and launch stages.

Consider a recruitment agency as an example. If they had to survey which role has the highest demand currently in different industries, their survey campaign would ask relevant questions to the audience. ‘Which industry do you belong to?’ ‘What are your hiring needs right now?’ Which hiring obstacles have been the most frequent for you?’ The idea is to create a strategy through your core survey aim.

2. Keep Simple and Relevant Questions Only

A mistake that causes maximum harm to your online survey’s success rate is putting up long questions. No one likes to spend their energy on reading complicated questionnaires while taking up online surveys - no matter how important it is (which usually isn’t) for them to fill it up.

Ensure your questions have no fluff, the language used is understandable even by 5th-grade students and aren’t deep analytical questions which require them to spend more time.

To avoid making them feel frustrated, remove the irrelevant questions too. Review your survey questions multiple times and try to discuss that among your teams for an optimal launch. Questions unrelated to your objective or with a high probability of not getting received well by the audience should be dropped off.

3. Start with Easy Questions and Gradually Increase the Bar

Adding complex questions at the beginning of an online survey is a sure-shot way of increasing your drop-off rate. And you don’t want that. The best practices for creating online surveys include starting with the easiest and most effortless questions and keeping your most sensitive ones for the last.

The idea behind doing that is to help the audience gain momentum and when they have reached the final stages, they probably won’t leave the entire survey even if it’s an analytical question. You can think of it as more of a psychological trigger, and when leveraged well - can drastically improve your online survey response rate.

4. Enhance the Variety of Questions

Imagine answering 10 questions in the form of plain text consecutively - it’ll almost prompt you to drop out due to the fatigue. The same type of questions that too require only text-based answers would make your online survey monotonous for the audience. Use various questions like multiple choice, Yes/No, Rating scale and more interactive ones to make your survey more convenient.

5. Don’t Ignore Graphics

If you want users to be more active while answering your online survey, do add relevant graphic elements including but not limited to images, GIFs, short videos and illustrations. User experience is the key element in engaging the audience, nothing can be better than making your surveys visually appealing. Hence, for improving your response rate and adding up to your online survey’s significance - graphics play a vital role.

6. Test it Yourself

Testing your online survey inside out is critical. But there’s a catch - it should be tested not only for correct functioning - but by putting your feet into the end user’s shoes. So once your survey is finalized, test it yourself and also don’t forget to get it tested by others. The factors that should be tracked while testing your online survey are - complexity of questions, logical sequence, language simplicity, design and overall user experience.

7. Less is More

Try to keep your online survey as short as possible. A shorter survey attracts the users as they find the task to be quick and convenient. Try to eliminate less relevant questions. In case if you feel like all the questions are necessary for your objective, try splitting it into two online surveys. Fo dong that, identify the main topics of your questions and form close clusters.

As a rule of thumb, a survey with 10-15 questions is considered to be ideal but anything above 20 questions makes it too long to provide a good user experience.

Ace Your Online Surveys with Formester

Now that you know the best practices needed to deliver a fascinating online survey experience, it’s high time you up your game with an easy yet effective online survey form builder. If you believe creating online survey forms is a complex task, you’ve probably not used the right tool. Formester helps create online forms that are flexible, engaging and adaptive to your use-case environment. From web forms to independently designed survey forms and a lot more, Formester enables you to build online forms in a jiffy.