How do I come up with good survey questions?
I set up a landing page to get sign ups a few months ago. Now that I have a list of users, I want to get some feedback. I started drafting a survey, but I am finding it hard to come up with something short while getting the right feedback. What's the best way to come up with survey questions and what's a good number of questions to ask? Thank you.
Questions should be strictly connected with area of your business. You're right, there are plenty of long "never ending" surveys which are not measurable in terms of sincerity because simply they are too long. If you have many questions better option is first select few the most important questions and then as a last question ask if someone wants to give wider point of his view in other specified for chosen customers survey.
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My survey questions deal with marketing and advertising related questions. Find an area and develop multiple choice questions. The more direct the question the better the answers reliability.10-15 should be enough.
Time the survey, Once you have your questions, answer them and find out how long it takes to complete the answers. Have several people do this and you will be capable of targeting your customer base more appropriately through questions that reveal what you need to know, but that are not so difficult that an inordinate amount of time is spent to reply,
Hi Jack. One great resource for asking questions you can use in a sales funnel is Jeff Walker's "Product Launch Formula." You can purchase his e-book for some ridiculous price and it has some copy for some great single-question emails that are proven to generate a response. I am not affiliated with this product, but used it for a client and she sold $80,000 worth of mascara in one weekend. That was one year ago, but I think this formula still works in today's climate. Check it out for yourself.
A survey question should not be much actually. And since, it is an online survey, your questions should be precise and not more than a line question.
Coming up with a good survey question now depends on the objective of your survey. What exactly do you want to know? Why do you want to know? Who are your target population or respondents? Why should I answer your questions (as a respondent)? etc. You must be able to determine all these before you can set up a good survey questions.
You can actually make the questions easy to answer for the respondents without being bored while trying to answer your questions.
Hi Jack,
There are over 300 example survey questions on http://infoquestcrm.co.uk/sample-customer-satisfaction-survey-questions/
Regards
John
The best way to come up with survey questions is to do the following. As you do the following keep in mind that the questions you ask is a communication/public relations process. What you ask and how well you ask it will reflect back on how people perceive you. Also, response burden is an important consideration: ask only what you need to know.
So, what do you need to know? Take time to consider what is critical before you start writing even one question. Make a list. For example, I will pretend I need to know the person's age and if they might be good lead for my marital relationship therapy service (I made these up to walk you through the basics).
On your list of information needs you have:
1) Age
2) Potential good lead for my therapy service
Notice, you have not written any questions yet, you just listed the information you need/want.
Next Step - Translate each information need into an appropriate question or questions.
I will start with AGE.
Age seems like a simple question to ask. How old are you? Trouble is that people will give different answer depending of gender and their age. Older females tend to round down and young males always round up. This is not really too important for you but what is important is knowing that questions/answers can be influenced by social and individual factors. Also, how precise do you need to be. I can ask your age with one question: How old are you? or with three questions: What is you year of birth? what is your month of birth? what is you day of birth? Don't ask using more precision than is required.
Now lets think about the second piece of information you want - is the person a good lead for my therapy service?
Some information like Age usually only require one question. But tackling this second information need you have some of same considerations to make as you did for AGE. Most importantly, how much precision, validity and reliability do I want? Each of these terms have scientific meanings but you only need to know you want response that works! You will likely need to experiment and learn over time what works best for you. Maybe all you need is one question like "Are you in love with your spouse?". Typically, several question are used when trying to get precision, valid and reliable results for such complex information needs. Maybe a set of questions like: Do you enjoy taking vacations with your spouse? Do you argue often? etc. If you do online search you will often find someone has already developed "Question Sets" to measure what you want. For example, Net Promotor Score (NPS) for customer experience. Personality inventory surveys, etc.
To summarize:
First, do not start by writing questions, start by clearly defining what information you need.
Second, Translate what information you need into one or more questions depending on the precision, validity, reliability you need. Do some research to see if you can steal some ideas or questions already being used.
Third, test your result. The best measure of validity and reliability is that the results are useful to you. Don't be afraid to change your questions, or reduce the number of questions you use. There are lots of examples of scientific valid and reliable surveys that started with 40 or more questions and over time became 10 or fewer questions. The SF-36 is a measure of health status and an abbreviated variant of it, the SF-6D, is now commonly used in health economics.
The answers you are receiving from the group in particular Elaine are all very good guidelines...One trick I used for answering surveys was to include a $2.00 bill in the survey...Then they felt obligated to answer...
Be consistent with rating scales
Ask closed questions as multiple choice
Have a mixture of multiple choice and open response questions
Keep it short and simple
Include a N/A where necessary
I've found it's useful to start with a long list, including what you'd " like" to know as well as what you "need" to know from your site visitors. Try then to parse it down to 3 or possibly 4 short questions. Choose the ones that will yield insights most helpful to your business and likely to be most interesting to your visitors. Make them focused on information you can't readily obtain some other way. (For example, your traffic logs can show where they're located, so no need to ask them that.) Make sure that you closely consider your draft from the perspective of the site visitor : are the questions boring and one sided? Would you want to take the survey yourself? Also consider what's in it for your participants. (Ideas? Some other reward?)
I would like to suggest you for servey question,first of all for a successfull servey you should have hard copy(thats means not compulsary,here i am suggesting merely about more attractive and successfull servey) becoz even i noticed to people during my market research servey,when i met with peoples with hard copy then peoples shows their intrest while i sent this ques on net,they did not fill anymore ,for research ques should not have more than 10 que,ques should be easy nd should be in objective form.
Hi, what you need to do is to know what you want to use the answers to, how will you grow from them - when you know your desired outcome, then you know the answers.
I hope this helps
Best Lotte Aagaard
Without knowing specifics I can only offer general rules...1. Like Errol asked, "what is the purpose of the feedback?" What questions do you want to know the answers to? What is the purpose of your user interaction? The answers to these questions should help frame your questions.
2. With surveys, less is more. I suggest keeping questions focused and brief. Multi-part questions are a good way to dilute your responses or potentially confuse the respondent. The fewer questions the better - just enough to get the feedback you need.
3. The majority of the questions should be specific (e.g. yes or no, or provide a rating/scale and allow the user to enter a value on that scale such as 1 is great, 2 is okay, 3 is not so good).
4. The intro should be a brief call to action including (a) why you are asking for participation, (b) how the feedback will be used, (d) what the participant gains by providing feedback, and (c) thanking participants for their time.
Good luck!
Just depends on what type of data you need Jack. Asking why they signed up can give you some insight to how they engage with your landing page. What was the main reason you signed up? Was it a need? Want? Reaction? We like to know where our leads come from, so that's always a good question. How did you find us? I wish I could give you more but you should ask yourself, "what is the most valuable data that I can get from these users?" Surveys can vary depending on the data you need. 3-5 questions is good. Google Analytics can give you more engagement insights, along with other tools. Feedback is always great, positive and negative. Negative feedback can help you solve issues, so you want to ask the right questions.
Have you tried, Lumin Creative. View the resource link on http://www.scafidi.com/start-online/
The best surveys are short and anonymous. Don't ask for personal details or endless agree/disagree or rating 1 - 5 etc. questions. Just think of 10 general questions plus a few subjective open-ended guided questions. Generalisation can identify key gender, age, preference and other demographics.
The best way to come up with survey questions is to determine what is it you really want to know vs. what would be nice to know. Once you've articulated the critical information you would like to know, make sure you ask those questions first. Once you've got a survey drafted, try it out on some friends or colleagues. If the survey works, stick with it, and resist the urge to tinker too much with it, or you'll lose the ability to compare responses over time
Short answer to the 2nd question is, the minimal number of questions that get you the critical information you need. People can generally complete 2-3 close ended questions per minute, and you probably don't want to ask people to spend more than a minute or two giving feedback. If you have a lot of questions that will take more than a couple of minutes, you might want to consider giving some kind of incentive, but that's a whole other discussion.