Discover the secrets of successful surveys

It's always easier to see things in action than it is to read about them. That's why we followed up our article on planning and building surveys by running a survey through our newsletter.

Respondents were invited to tell us what they think about completing and running surveys and to share their tips with other readers. Because we used SmartForms, the survey recognised them when they clicked through from the email so they didn't have to type in information we already knew, such as their name and address. Once the votes were counted, we used Fusion to send out an email containing the results. Using automatic database filtering we sent a different message to those who completed the survey to those who didn't.

So what did we learn from the survey?

33% find convincing people to join in is the greatest challenge
The good news is that 60% of people are happy to complete surveys to help companies to improve their products, and as many as 28% can be bribed to join in with the promise of an iPod giveaway. Only 13% considered completing surveys to be a waste of time.

Despite being generally cooperative, people are defensive of their time though: half said that their biggest worry when starting a survey is how long it will take, and 35% were most concerned about how many sales calls and how much spam they'll get.

Porkies
Surprisingly, privacy was less of a concern: 10% said their top worry was who would have access to the data and only 5% were most bothered about how personal the questions would become as the survey progressed. When asked for personal information like their salary, 25% of people just plug it in the form and 15% get irritated but complete it to enter the competition. 45% just abandon the survey and 15% lie. The lesson is clear: if you ask too much, you can expect people to bail out or your data to be full of porkies.

There was strong support (65%) for using surveys to gather information that can be used to improve products, but 30% admitted that their surveys are more about gathering information they can use to sell the same old stuff to more people.

The greatest challenges in running surveys were named as convincing people to join in (33%), putting the collected data to work in the business (20%), running the survey and collecting responses (13%), and designing meaningful questionnaires (10%).

Your top six on surveys
We also asked our readers for their top advice to companies planning to run an email survey and the same six issues came up repeatedly:
  1. Start by working out what you need to find out and how you can use that information in your business. Don't run surveys without a plan to put the data to work.
  2. Keep it short and relevant. Don't do generic surveys that include questions that will be irrelevant to some people.
  3. Be creative. Keep it entertaining and offer variety in input mechanisms. Don't just use radio buttons all the time.
  4. Give participants an incentive to join in. It could be as simple as sharing the data you gather.
  5. Test the survey. Get your own people to try it out so you can refine questions and eliminate those that don't generate meaningful data.
  6. Tell respondents what you're trying to achieve and how you will use the data they're providing.
If you'd like to talk about how we can help you to run surveys that work for your business, call us on 020 7628 4444.