Planning and designing surveys

Put away your clipboard: there's no need to pound the streets to interrogate your customers any more. Online surveys are convenient for recipients and deliver your data in a form ready for analysis. What's more, they don't smudge when it rains.

How often have you marvelled at businesses hacking away at their market, apparently oblivious to their customers' real concerns? Using a simple email survey, a firm can discover what delights customers and what they're looking for next. By surveying prospects, companies can spot as-yet-unfulfilled needs that could inspire new products. Throwing the net wider still, surveys can be used to find gaps in the market and analyse the company's competitive position.

This is all valuable intelligence in a competitive world: customers will go where their needs are best met. But surveys can also play a role internally, in assessing training needs or identifying how the company can improve.

We run surveys on behalf of many blue chip companies. Here are our ten top tips for running a successful survey.

1. Have a plan, Stan
You know what they say - those who fail to plan, plan to end up crying, rolling around on the carpet, banging the floor with their fists. The first step is to work out what you want to learn and who can tell you that. Work out where you can find them (are they already in your database?) and what you can offer them in return. A survey without an implementation plan is like a band without a record deal.

2. Don't be nosy, Josie
People have a short attention span and too many questions will switch them off. Only ask what you need to know. And don't make personal questions obligatory - how many companies that make salary a compulsory question can honestly say they trust the answers?

3. Keep it short and sweet, Pete
Don't scare people off with a dazzling number of questions. If your form must be detailed, split it into several pages. But ask yourself whether you can achieve the same with a series of short surveys which are more likely to be completed.

4. Think it through, Hugh
Try to imagine how complete strangers will approach your survey. Double-check your questions to make sure they are unambiguous and don't overstretch people. It's hard work to rate things on a seven point scale - keep it simple with five point scales.

Try to tease out some of the respondents' assumptions. If you're asking people how good something is, you need to ask how important it is to them too. You would be chuffed if 90% say your service is great, but what if only 40% of those who actually depended on it thought it was any good?

5. Be consistent, Vincent
People know how web forms work, so don't confuse them by using them differently. Use radio buttons (the round ones) when they can only select one option. Use tickboxes when they can make multiple selections. Put the button or checkbox on the left of the text, so that they're all in a line and they're right next to their descriptions.

Pulldowns are good for selecting from up to 8 text answers or ranges of numbers. After that, there's the risk people won't notice some of the options.

People will expect ranges to go from bad on the left to good on the right. Don't change your grading scale mid-form. If your form is inconsistent you'll always wonder whether surprising figures are the result of a confusing interface or a deliberate choice.

6. Give feedback, Jack

If the form is more than one page, make sure people can see how they're progressing and how much there is to go.

When the form is submitted, check it to intercept any completion errors but don't overdo it. You have to allow people to skip some questions if they want - in particular, don't force them to reveal personal details or invent opinions they don't have. If people have made a mistake, clearly explain what's wrong and why - ideally, move them to the problem field automatically too. Don't use form checking as an excuse for bad form design - if a password must be eight characters with two numbers, tell them first time around. Reserve red text for telling people about errors.

7. Integrate, Kate
Don't force respondents to fill in information you already hold, such as their name, address, company and job title. It will make it easier for reporting too if you can join up your survey results with the rest of your customer information.

Send personalised emails containing links that tell the form who is visiting it, so it can pre-populate it where appropriate. Record who has responded, so that you can target non-responders a second time.

8. Drive the clicks, Mick
If you need a large number of responses and don't have an email database - or don't have the right people for your survey in it - use offline promotions to drive people to participate. You could use direct mail, leafleting, advertising, or press coverage. It's a good way to boost your database at the same time too.

9. Run the stats, Matt
You need to plan the reports at the beginning, when you're working out what you want to learn. Once all the surveys are in, you can produce the reports and analyse your data so you can put it to work in your business. Remember why you started this exercise in the first place - the survey's pointless if you can't use the data.

10. Send them thanks, Frank
People have usually given up their time to help you out for nothing, so don't forget your manners and send them a thank you email. Reinforce the value of the exercise and let them know you appreciate their help.

So that's the theory - next month we're going to show you how it works in practice. We'll run a survey, through our newsletter, and invite our subscribers to participate. In the October issue of theshot, we'll show you the reports generated by our survey. We haven't decided what it will be about yet - we're running an internal survey to decide that now.