There’s a big difference between a well-run survey and a poorly run one. A great survey will get you many results and the results will give you answers that you can directly apply to your business. A poor survey may or may not generate many response and the responses you get won’t help guide your business. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for writing surveys.
DO: Establish Goals Before Writing Questions
A survey should have a simple, concise goal in mind before anything else. A good goal, for example, is to figure out “What are students’ biggest problems in college?” A poor goal, for example, is to figure out “What our customer sentiments are towards our brands and products.” It’s too general, too broad and has too many open ends.
DON’T: Use Many Open-Ended Questions
Open-ended questions can give a lot of good information, but they take considerably more effort for someone to answer than merely checking a box. A survey that doesn’t have a prize or incentive needs a maximum of only one or two open-ended questions.
DO: Keep it Short
Keeping your survey short will ensure that more people finish your survey. If your survey is long, people will often abandon the survey before finishing. If your survey is long, you also run the risk of having them scan the survey, see how long it is and decide it’s too much work to even get started. Cut out as many questions as you can, while still ensuring that you answer your primary question.
DON’T: Start with Difficult or Boring Questions
Try to position the most entertaining or interesting questions towards the beginning of your survey. This is so you can “hook” people into the flow of answering the survey. The more complicated or boring questions should be reserved for the end of the survey, when they will likely answer them anyway since they are so close to finishing.
DO: Offer a Prize or Incentive
Run a contest. For example, PayPal often runs cash-prize surveys, where one survey winner will win a certain amount of cash. You can also give away digital products to everyone who answers a survey. That way, there’s no randomness at all and anyone who completest the survey will know they will get something out of it.
DON’T: Use Complicated or Ambiguous Language
Don’t use jargon or write questions that could be interpreted multiple ways. Don’t use long words when you could use short words. In other words, aim to make your survey so simple that a ten-year-old could answer it.
All these do’s and don’ts together will help you run a simple, concise survey that will get you all the responses you need.
