Every business or brand wants to know your opinion about its product or service. Many will provide a web survey to get feedback on your experience.
Web surveys are a great way to get an overview of how you are performing as a brand or business. The temptation with surveys is to stuff them with unnecessary questions or ones that you can easily find elsewhere.
Always, whenever possible, keep your surveys as short as possible. If you can get everything you need with a single question, do it. You will get better responses, better results, and have an easier time analyzing the responses.
Here are some other reasons why you should keep your survey questions as short as possible:
- Forces you to have a clear goal for your survey. By having a clear goal for your survey, your survey will generate better results for the question(s) you are seeking from your visitors. Having clear goals will also allow you to better analyze the survey responses and determine the next steps depending on your survey objectives.
- You will ask better questions. Every question in your survey must have a purpose that supports the goals of your survey. If they do not support the overall goals and objectives of your surveys then it is taking up space for a better question. Limit open-ended questions and the number of options for closed-ended questions. Also, avoid asking questions that you can find the answers to in other ways like your analytics reports or other surveys. In many instances, individual demographic data won’t help you draw bigger-picture conclusions and becomes more of a barrier for people completing your surveys.
- More people will complete it. If you ask too many questions, especially long-form answers, you will likely find people skipping the survey altogether or not completing all the answers. People completing the survey are doing so to help you get a better picture of your brand, product, or business. You have to give them a reason to want to fill out the survey because, in many instances, they are not getting anything in return. Here is a basic rule, if it appears someone has to do a lot of work for little or nothing in return, many people will opt to skip it. Make it easy, quick, and to the point and more people will complete the survey.
- You will get more accurate results. Having a clear goal for your survey, asking better questions, limiting the number of questions, and keeping your survey simple will give people more of an incentive to complete the survey. If you have fewer open-ended questions you will get more direct answers than if every question required a long-form response. This, in turn, will give you more accurate results.
- It will help you analyze survey results. Since shorter surveys require you to be more deliberate with your questions, it will be easier to analyze the results. You will be able to easily measure them against the goals of the survey. If you have a lot of questions, some of the results may provide more confusion or lack clarity. the survey may trigger you to ask more follow-up questions or provide the next steps.
Joe Gullo