Conducting a marketing survey over the internet is no easy feat. There are many hurdles that will get in your way; specifically, you will have to deal with cantankerous users who find your questions cumbersome, spam filters that block email surveys, and free online survey software that probably is not as visually appealing as you thought it would be. Nevertheless, the fact that there is a free-of-cost option to poll and survey customers is reason enough to still use the online survey as a marketing survey technique.
The important thing to remember is that a free option doesn’t necessarily have to mean that it has to be drab or unappealing. In fact, it is up to you to insure that you make this as enjoyable an experience as you can for your customers. Some of the following pointers must be borne in mind when using web tools to create a survey.
Images are the most important part of any survey. If your product is visual in nature and there is an adequate touch and feel factor to it, then it must be captured as an image and used when doing an online survey.
There are two options that you must seriously consider when using free online survey software and these are the web based and email survey options. Which one should you opt for? This largely depends on factors like: are you polling or doing an elaborate feature based survey? Does the opinion of each and every person count? How large is your survey. The answers to these will decide whether you should go for either medium. The golden rule is that if you want to use a web based survey, it cannot be a long drawn out set of questions. Therefore, use this option only if you want to poll users or ask a few questions. If the survey is a long drawn out set of questions then you need to use the email option; however, ensure that you don’t need each and every person’s opinion because alot of the mails that you will send out might just end up in the spam folder.
Reporting the results of the survey must also be a consideration when using the software. This is the one aspect that most free software compromises on as reports are very basic and require further processing. Try and use free online survey software that allows you to export the results in a file that will allow you to further work on the results.
Online surveys can be compromised by erroneous results, especially from the email survey that you send out. This is probably because respondents rarely expect this. Therefore, even here, keep it short and instead send regular surveys instead of one big one.