4 Tips For Creating Better Surveys

Using surveys, you can gain valuable insight into your customers’ needs. But remember, you need a quality survey to engage your audience and ensure the data is valid. 

An attractive survey form is not a hassle to fill out and will attract more audiences. So, if you haven't already created your survey, get started with these tips to get a higher response rate and collect high-quality and reliable data. 

1. Make the purpose of your survey clear

If you don't know what to write in the questionnaire, you can use various online tools with ready-to-go templates. 

It would be best to have good surveys acutely focused on your goals and easy to understand. Before preparing the survey form, you need to give yourself some time to identify what you need, such as: 

  • What is the purpose of the survey?
  • Why do you want to create this survey?
  • What will you get at the end of the survey?
  • What will you do with the data you collect?
  • How will this survey help you make decisions? 

2. Create a concise and focused survey

If you want both quality and quantity, you need a survey that contains valid questions and is concise. Surveys that are too long are boring, and people tend to avoid filling out such forms because everyone wants things to be quick and simple these days. 

When focusing on multiple objectives, creating a long survey will turn visitors away, and you won't be able to collect enough data to meet your goal. But a short, and to-the-point survey will grab your audience's attention and boost the response rate. 

3. Follow a consistent rating scale 

When designing your survey, remember to use a consistent rating scale to ensure reliable responses. 

For example, if you have set the rating scale to "1 to 5," such as "5" means "excellent" and "1 " means "poor," then use the same “1 to 5” scale for each section. 

4. Try offering an incentive

Once your audience realizes they are getting something in return for their precious time, the response rate will be higher. Research shows that surveys with incentives tend to achieve a 50% higher response rate than surveys without incentives. 

However, be careful – the incentive should not be too strong, otherwise the respondents could fill in the survey exclusively for getting the incentive and therefore distort the results.

Bottom line

All in all, creating a survey is a bit trickier than it may seem at first glance. But if you follow the simple tips and tricks mentioned above you are one step closer to creating a compelling and receptive survey.