BLOG

By Kathleen Fusco

Surveys are an excellent way to gather information about customers and prospects in an intelligent and organized manner. Great surveys have clear objectives, deliver accurate and helpful insight and are a valid representation of the larger target audience.

Below are three aspects of ensuring a successful survey:

1. Outline your survey objectives.

It is important that you are precise about what information you are trying gain from your survey. Sometimes when an organization does a survey, other departments start to chime in with questions they want answers to. Stay focused and specific. Talk to the folks in your organization who will be using the data and align your objectives to meet their needs.

Here are some examples of bad survey objectives:
o What are customers thinking about
o Why don’t prospects respond to our marketing efforts
o Maybe we should explore different vertical markets

Good survey objectives:
o Identify the top three concerns our customers have with their service
o Determine the need for extended customer service hours
o Validate our new product features

Once you have your objectives, you can determine if a survey is the best way to get this information. Try to answer your questions through secondary research first. This will help you develop more informed questions and may even provide answers to some of your questions.

2. Survey people whose opinions count.

Make sure that the audience you are polling is your primary target audience. Too often, surveys ask for job title and screen out respondents who are actually your targets. For example, a technology company looking to survey decision makers might only look for CIOs to answer their survey. This is often not the best strategy because they may be excluding decision makers at prospective organizations who don’t hold the title “CIO”, but are still key influencers or buyers.

To make sure you are surveying the appropriate people, ask what their role is in making decisions. So in the example of a tech company looking for decision makers, you might ask questions like:

Please indicate your role in making technology-purchasing decisions for your organization:
I do not play a role (Screen out)
I support decision making (Potentially screen out)
I am responsible for technology purchasing decisions
I make recommendations for technology purchases

3. Ask objective questions in an appropriate order.

In order to ensure your survey is effective, begin with screening questions to route irrelevant people out of the survey. After these, drop in open-ended questions. It is best to have these early on when the surveyor is most alert. This helps avoid “annoying” respondents with asking open-ended questions later on in the survey. Obviously, sometimes this cannot be avoided, but the beginning is a great time to ask a question like: “What, if anything, do you like about xyz?” Getting these opinions early is vital as later questions may influence their original thoughts.

At this point, asking more general questions is a good strategy. These questions can then branch into specific questions depending on how they responded to the general questions. This requires “skip” patterns, which can be applied easily in a online software platforms like Zoomerang.

Follow these specific questions with more demographical questions to profile the respondents, allowing you to cross-tabulate and compare responses. It is a smart strategy to ask these questions at the end of the survey because they are more tedious and at times intrusive.

Lastly, it is always good to ask for final comments and the permission to follow up on a specific item or topic from the survey.

Points to Remember

Sloppy questions will lead to sloppy data. Make sure that your audience isn’t able to determine your view on a specific topic and avoid leading questions like: “What do you like about xyz?” It is better to say “what, if anything, do you like?”

Avoid asking confusing questions like “How would you rank our support and product?”

When asking questions that require a scale, respondents overwhelmingly prefer labeled scales. These also have greater reliability. Five- and 7-point scales have been proven to have the greatest reliability and validity.

Surveys are extremely effective tools for marketing and communications programs. The data revealed in a survey can help support public relations, thought leadership and innovation within an organization. Doing it right the first time will save you time, money and effort.

Kathleen Fusco is a Senior Strategist at 0to5