How To Conduct An Online Survey and Engage Customers In A Dialogue

By Tim Slavin
2006-08-08

Deploy Your Survey

Posting your questions to SurveyMonkey or Votations and building
your survey is a fairly straightforward process. You set up a survey
and define your parameters (for example, where does the customer go
when they complete the survey), then build your questions one by one.
You should take the survey at least once to ensure it works as you need.

The next step is to announce your survey to the audience you want to
have participate and ensure maximum participation. The best way to
ensure you get the minimum responses you need is to advertise to more
people than you need. If you need 100 responses, try to advertise to
200 of your customers. This is not a precise science so you will need
to track what percent of customers notified actually respond.

I would recommend that, whenever possible, you invite customers in
person to participate, as part of an ongoing conversation. Call up the
customers you need, explain the benefit to them and to you, ask if they
need anything to help them participate, then email them the URL for
your online survey.

You also need to be aware of other conflicts that limit
participation: date and time of the week, the environment where the
test is to be taken, holidays, and similar constraints. For example, if
your customers are businesses, sending notice of your survey on Monday
morning is probably less effective than Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday
late morning, times when your customers are less likely to be dealing
with weekend backlog and/or the day's first mail and emails.

If you put your survey up for an extended period of time, you also
should send follow up emails to remind customers who have not
responded. This can be in the form of email, mentions during sales and
phone calls, publishing the survey URL in flyers or other printed
materials, and other means.


Article Pages:
» How To Conduct An Online Survey - Introduction
» The Survey Process
» Define Your Goals
» Pick Your Tools
» Write Your Questions
» Test Your Survey
» Deploy Your Survey
» Measure Your Results
» Final Thoughts: To Pay or Not To Pay For Participation?

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Related Articles:
» User-Friendly Surveys in 5 Simple Steps
» 10 Steps to Creating More Effective Surveys
» Build Better Surveys - Survey Question Types Explained
» Understanding Single Choice Survey Answer Types
» Doing a Corporate Culture Survey
» 14 Tips For Writing An Effective Online Survey

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