Getting feedback is an important part of doing business. It’s good to know what clients are interested in or what they thought about a recent event. With Critical Impact’s survey tool, you can quickly create surveys and send them directly to your subscriber lists. Here are some best practices to make sure your next survey gathers meaningful results.
A good survey has well defined goals. Take a few minutes to decide what the main purpose or goal of the survey will be. What information do you want to learn? Do you want to know more about the customer’s shopping experience, or how to make next year’s conference even better?
Next, decide who you should send the survey to in order to maximize your results. This could be past customers, people who attended an event, or a list of your most active subscribers who read a lot of your newsletters. As you’re thinking about the audience for the survey, also think about how long you’d like the survey to take to complete.
Also, make a plan of action for after the survey is sent. Think about what you are hoping to do with the data after the survey ends.
Based on your goals for the survey, start adding questions to the survey. If you want it to be a quick and easy to answer survey, it’s a good practice to stick to multiple choice questions that are quick to select. For longer surveys, you may want to include more open-ended text response questions to let subscribers write out their thoughts.
For most audiences, it is a good practice to keep the surveys short and easy to take. People are busy, and will probably only want to spend a few minutes taking a survey. This means you’ll want to optimize your questions to the highest impact.
As you create the survey, think about the progression of questions. Make sure they flow together in a logical sequence. However, try to avoid getting biased results: make sure the questions do not bias the results of the next questions.
Using email to send a survey is a direct and effective way of gathering survey results. When you create a survey using Critical Impact’s survey tool, you can easily insert a survey link into a message by clicking the “insert survey” button. As you design the email, make sure the link to the survey is clearly highlighted and draws attention. Consider adding a call-to-action button in a bright color.
It can also be a good idea to briefly explain why someone should take the survey, and approximately how long it will take. For example, you could say something like: “We are so glad you could come to this year’s conference, and value your feedback. Please take this 5 minute survey to help us make next year’s event the best one yet!”
Select the group of subscribers you would like to send the survey to, and make sure to send the email at a time when you know your subscribers are more likely to open the email.
Review the results of your survey carefully. Think about how you can utilize this data to create actionable steps for improvement.
With Critical Impact’s survey tool, you can get results fast with instant response tracking and reporting. View the survey results in real time for individual subscribers or general trends across your list.
The results of a survey can have a powerful impact on the future of your business. We hope these survey strategies help you create a successful survey for your your subscribers.
