Before taking advantage of online surveys in your business, be sure that you know how to make them fillable. Follow these 10 rules and increase completion rates.
Building dialogue with customers through online surveys is an efficient and smart approach. Provided that creators make it simple and comfortable to take. In exchange they can gain a few assets:
- precise customer feedback,
- clients contribution in products/services development,
- customer friendly brand image,
- crowdsourcing,
- lead generation – easy to implement email/phone leaving forms,
- self-declared data acquisition,
- counteract to possible crisis/adversities,
- insights – customer experiences, thoughts, and feelings to use in communications, marketing, and sales strategies.
Gaining these competitive edges requires following best practices and proven rules if you create a survey.
1. Point Out Survey Goals
Online surveys are great features. With all that assets described in the previous section, it’s not easy to not overwhelm users with amounts of next ones. This is why planning and setting up goals are essential. Decide what you want to obtain. Choose if you should prioritize data, feedback, or generating leads. Look up at your business objectives. Then watch this demo below.
When you already know youengage possibilities and you are aware of your business priorities, it’s time to matching them. Choose you surveys goals. Make sure that you will be creating interactive content to realize them. Not just for fun. Surveys, quizzes, and polls are one of the most beloved content types. They are also efficient business tools.
2. Select Appropriate Topics For Your Online Surveys
It’s one of the hardest parts of creating and conducting surveys. Choosing topics interesting to the audience and, simultaneously, valuable to brands. Companies too often are wasting their time and money to entertaining their audience (or even worst – a random group of people without any sales perspectives). Being the entertainer is important but should be connected with authentic audience engagement.
So, next time before you start with creating a survey, take into account your survey goals. Then think of topics and threads which allow you to chase them. Point them out and do a little research. Analyze what you know about your audience interests, needs, and preferences. Cross out every topic from the lists, which your audience may find boring. All the fun here is in finding the golden mean between your business objectives and your customer’s engagement.
3. Create Catchy Forms
People hate boring forms. Tons of questions, passive background, and cheesy design are not an auspicious beginning. When choosing online survey tool, check out if there are a few features available:
- different themes,
- preferred fonts,
- background photo uploading,
- blur and brightness adjuster,
- different photos positioning option (fill, fit, tiled, centered),
- various background, answer, answer background, and question colors to choose.
It may look like an unimportant detail but for the overall experience is essential.
4. Add Right Number of Questions
As a marketer, you are aware how valuable are self-declared data. Lack of information and access to insights may force you to build multi-question forms. I would be a serious mistake. Forms like this one sarcastic below are engagement killers.
All that questions before main survey part even start. The best description how to fail. This is why a number of questions should belong to the 5 – 7 interval (9 when it’s more complicated).
5. Diversify Questions Types
Declining attention span obligate online surveys creators to use various types of questions. When selecting your take into account your target group, topic, and which kind helps with making questions fillable. Your survey maker should have (at least) 4 types of questions:
- multiple choice,
- picture choice,
- ratings,
- open forms.
When creating a survey try out your questions in any type – decide which of them allows your audience understand it and express their thoughts.
6. Make a Use of a Different Kind of Content
Your online surveys may gain a lot of awesomeness thanks to the possibility to enrich them with videos, gifs, and audio content. Gifs are great attention grabbers. Especially, these popular and funny ones. Videos and audio content deliver a new quality to your surveys. Allowing to deepen the conversation and ask about many additional aspects.
Follow this guidebook to learn how to add videos, audio content, and gifs to your online surveys.
7. Distribute Online Surveys In a Smart Way
Deployment has a huge influence on online surveys completion rates. As a marketer, you don’t need a sum of different voices from the crowd. Focus on your audience and get their insight. Use available channels to reach out to them:
- embed survey into your website,
- share through your social media channels,
- send a link in email, SMS, a direct message in common messengers,
- embed into your blog posts and articles.
- share in your professional groups and chats.
Make sure that you use channels to contact with your audience, not “building” audience to picture your surveys as popular ones.
8. Generate Leads
A useful advantage of online surveys is an option to add email leaving boxes into the list of questions. You can both:
- generate leads – ask new users about their contacts and turn them into prospects;
- complete your customers info.
Interactive content (surveys, quizzes, polls, assessments) makes generating leads more intuitive. Surveys make a use of taken actions and emails leaving forms implemented in the sequence of motions. It is easier to make third or fourth step than first one. When interesting in gaining leads through interactive content, find out more.
Extra Points
Below you will find additional suggestions if you want to take advantage of integration Engageform with HubSpot, MailChimp, or SALESmanago. When open to link your survey with any extra pages, you should check out point number 10.
9. Integrate Platforms And Use Surveys in Progressive Profiling
Progressive profiling is the way of collecting self-declared data and additional info through many micro-moments and using it in lead nurturing (find out more in this post). Thanks to the integrations with leading marketing platforms, data, and leads obtained through online surveys can be automatically transferred to your preferred software:
- HubSpot – 5 steps guide,
- SALESmanago – 5 steps guide,
- MailChimp – 5 steps guide).
Platforms integration is also the simplest way to make your marketing automation completed. From generating leads, nurturing them to closing deals. You will find additional info in this post.
10. Redirect Your Users Through Exit Links
When finishing your online surveys take into account that in the Design options on the left side you can select Exit link. By adding it you can redirect your users from a survey to your site, eCommerce, social media, or wherever you want. Here are great examples of Engageform users who do that.
These two are examples how to drive sales from interactive content. You can choose the destination which matches with your business goals.
Online surveys are far more useful features than they seem to. With these best practices, you will be able to take out of them as much as it’s only possible.
#Customer Satisfaction Surveys #Online Survey #online survey tools #survey