How do I get the most out of surveys?

Surveys are an excellent tool to get to know your contacts better. Among other purposes, you can use surveys for fine-tuning interests or preferences, for customer feedback on your products, services, customer support or newsletter.

If used correctly, surveys have the power to increase your engagement, save you resources, improve your relationship with your audience, and, ultimately, boost your sales.

But how?

Put pen to paper and write down the most important questions you want to ask your contacts. Are the questions linked? Would they follow one another? Are there questions that seem unrelated? Can you ask those questions to all of your contacts or just some? What does it depend on? Do you have a good reason to ask all of those questions? Can the responses lead to actionable points for you? If you ask that question that way, are you hinting towards a specific (inauthentic) answer?

Create a little flow chart. Start with the most important question in the middle of the page. Write it down like you would ask your contact. Lay down the possible answers. Take a step back and think from the contacts point of view. Maybe you need to add other answers? Would you ask any follow-up questions, depending on the first results?

Your flowchart must have the same question in the beginning. From then on, the logic could follow parallel scenarios, that merge and divide. At the end, all flowlines must come to the same end.

Every parallel flowline in your flowchart requires a scenario flow edit.

Basically, scenarios allow you to skip irrelevant questions for your contacts based on their responses to previous questions. For example, you can ask your contacts if they ever used your customer support and if they have not, you skip the entire section of your survey that covers that matter.

Using scenarios allows you to significantly improve the perceived flow for the contacts that fill it in, while asking all questions that concern you to the relevant audience.

You want to make sure all contacts that receive your survey fill out all the questions and do not give up halfway. You need to be respectful of the time and attention they give you.

All Flexmail surveys automatically generate a completion bar at the bottom, based on the number of pages in your survey. This progress bar works on the basis of how many pages are completed, and not how many questions are completed. Therefore, if you want to give your contact an accurate idea how much is left, try to keep every page containing a similar number of questions.

Give short descriptions per page – tell your content what this section is all about.

While constructing your survey, do not forget that your answers will come in percentages. Will that information be useful for you the way you constructed your question? The way you created your scenario, will comparative survey reports be helpful?

For example, you can use comparative survey reports to compare responses of the same questions, coming from men versus women, from old versus new customers, from customers purchasing one or other series of products.

Do not forget reports are dynamic. Say you launch your survey and you look at the reports for your first responses. Any of your questions doing way different than expected? You go into your survey and edit it to make the question more clear.

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