“You can lead a horse to water,
but you can’t make it drink.”
You have designed a great survey. You have considered your target audience carefully. Now there is just one little problem: How do you get your target audience to actually complete the survey? If it acts like a chore, it feels like a chore, then it must be a chore. Getting a human being to pay attention to perceived chores is a lot harder than getting horses to drink (or may be we just underestimate horses!)
So how do we solve that problem? There is no silver bullet – we have to test, test and test.
Here are three ways to test online surveys:
1. Pilot your surveys to a small group of people before you send them out to a larger audience
2. Test the visual appearance of your surveys
3. Test your email templates for better success rates
When conducting a pilot survey, here’s what you need to assess:
1. Are the survey questions clear?
The data you want to gather must be clear in your questions. Take a look at this infographic on ways to craft effective survey questions. Not communicating clearly will only prompt vague or incomplete answers.
2. Does the survey appear visually attractive to the respondent?
Test your selected theme and font on a small survey group to see if they are appealing. If you use email templates when distributing your surveys, make them well designed to grab attention.
3. Does the email template design evoke survey participation?
Beautifully designed email templates really help improve survey response rate. Test your email templates on 50 to 100 contacts and refine your content, font and color choices to see which ones work best. You may be surprised at what you find – for example the color you don’t care for may be the color that your contacts like the most.
The more you test, the more you know.
Testing can help you make your surveys more engaging. Use the data you receive on tests for subsequent analysis and, you’ll put out better surveys because you know what works.
Test! Test! Test! A well presented survey, well designed emails and clarity in your questions will help you get better answers.
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