How To Conduct an Online Survey? A Comprehensive Guide For Marketers!

The audience and customers are the backbone of the success of any business. So, to get them to do business with you, you have to do some vital market research. However, how to do that? The simple and short answer is to use a research platform to get insight and information on current and future customers. If you want more personalized and detailed data, you must go old-school and conduct an online survey.

Introduction

An online marketing survey helps gain vital information, insights, and characteristics of the target customers. It assists marketers to understand the market and the action plan they need to trigger a purchase. The more information they have, the better they can target and drive sales.

However, marketing surveys are not just about improving sales campaigns. They help understand the audience and gain valuable insights into their behavior, attitude, and likes and dislikes. It can assist at every stage, from initial testing and launch to building brand identity and customer satisfaction. Still, there is much more to online surveys than what meets the eye, which is why we will move on to discuss the importance of online marketing surveys in detail.

Importance of Online Surveys for Marketers

Online surveys for marketers are highly important to reach and engage the audience. Here are the 10 top advantages of online marketing surveys.

• Quick: Online surveys are much faster to conduct and collect results as compared to traditional research methods.
• Cheap: Online questionnaires are cheaper to conduct because they need no time or resources to enter information as the system records responses automatically.
• Accurate: The responses are more accurate because they come directly into the system from the audience or participants.
• Faster Analysis: The results of online surveys are in real-time and you can analyze them at any time, making it easy to create graphs and take action.
• Easily Usable: The online surveys are easy for participants to take part in and easier for researchers to analyze because of real-time accurate data. Also, it is easy to stylize, get the brand message across, and remind the people about the product’s benefits.
• Honest: More people prefer online surveys rather than telephonic or written reviews and provide more honest and detailed answers.
• Personalized: With an online survey, you can pre-screen participants and only authorize those who fall into your target criteria.
• Flexible: Not every question in an online survey is mandatory and is changeable at any time, based on the previous answer.

Survey Types for Marketers

Several types of surveys are available for marketers to conduct according to their target audience, distribution ability, and the questions they want the audience to answer. The following are the different types of surveys.

• Online Surveys: Anyone can take part in the online survey, provided they have an internet connection. You can use survey platforms to create and launch your survey.
• Paper Surveys: You can print paper surveys and have participants fill by hand. It requires time to fill, and the researcher has to manually collect the results.
• Mail Surveys: Mail surveys go out via the post and can cover significant geographical coverage, and the participants must return the survey paper in a pre-paid envelope.
• Telephone Surveys: Telephonic surveys require you to conduct the survey over the phone and although it is convenient for researchers, not everyone may take part in it.
• Face-to-Face Surveys: Face-to-face surveys can prove to be more insightful and valuable because of better interaction.
• Panel Surveys: Panel surveys collect a group of people for researchers to conduct the survey, making it quick and simple.

Marketers can use these types of surveys to collect information and insights into:

• Market Research
• Employee Satisfaction
• Job Satisfaction
• Exit Interview
• Training Evaluation
• Lead Generation
• Event Evaluation

Best Practices and Pitfalls: Do’s and Don’ts

Creating and launching a successful marketing survey is all about knowing what to ask and what not to address. Here are some of the do’s and don’ts of online market surveys.

Do’s of Market Research Survey

• Include a Welcome Message: Start by welcoming your respondents. You can also include the information usage.
• Be Conversational and Sincere: Clearly communicate your survey objectives, use simple language, and be honest. It will yield the best results.
• Use Scales, If Possible: Scales like 0-10 or Very Bad – Excellent, are really helpful, measurable, and generate better responses.
• Ask Situational Questions, If Possible: Situational questions include experiences that a person has not experienced yet, but if you use them right can reduce survey bias.
• Add Enough Response Options: Sometimes people are not sure about what to say about certain questions, which is why it is important that you include response options like don’t know or not applicable.

Don’ts of Market Research Survey

• Avoid Leading Questions: Leading questions suggest an answer to a participant, even if they don’t agree with it. So, it may not provide quality results and insights.
• Don’t Use Double-Barreled Questions: Double-barreled questions include two questions in one that may result in either a negative or no response at all.
• Don’t Include Jargon or Abbreviations: Not everyone can understand jargon or abbreviations, which is why it is better not to include them in your survey.
• Remove Vague Quantifiers: If you want the best answers, you must ask the right questions, and including vague quantifiers is not the way to go.
• Avoid Ambiguous Questions: Ambiguous terms are confusing and may put off some respondents, which is why it is better to avoid their use altogether.

Final Takeaway

Online surveys for marketing are really beneficial and help collect valuable insights and information about your target audience. However, after powerful data, you need effective and efficient analysis, and without that, you cannot get the valuable insights that you need.

So, strategic and detailed marketing research surveys can help drive great results and help build successful marketing campaigns.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How do online surveys help marketing researchers collect useful data?

Online surveys include a list of survey questions that you send out to people to fill out. They provide quick and accurate results and can help build powerful marketing campaigns.

• What are the different survey methods that researchers can use?

The different types of surveys that researchers can use include online surveys, email marketing surveys, paper surveys, telephone surveys, face-to-face surveys, panel surveys, and mail surveys.

• Why surveys are important for a successful marketing strategy?

Surveys help gather valuable, genuine, and accurate insights, information, and data from the target audience. Using this data, marketers and researchers can build powerful marketing campaigns to drive better results and sales.

• How many survey questions make up an ideal marketing persona?

You don’t have to ask about the whole life of your potential customer. Asking 8-10 right questions can give your enough information to build a solid marketing persona.