Online questionnaires allow you to directly reach the people whose opinions matter the most, but only if you ask the right questions. A well designed set of questions can help you cut through the noise of potential answers to provide you with measurable responses and actionable trends.

Clearly considered objectives and awareness of your target audience are the first steps to designing a more effective online questionnaire.

Get-started guide for online questionnaires

Set objectives

What data do you need to collect? A clear set of goals from the start is vital for keeping your questions relevant. As every additional question put to potential respondents can increase the drop-off rate significantly, irrelevant questions hurt your overall response rates. So set a single objective for your questionnaire, and avoid adding questions outside its boundaries. This will help increase the number of people completing your questionnaire and keep the final results concise.

Consider your audience

If you are conducting a survey for customer satisfaction or employee engagement, you may have an extensive list of questions for your target audience. Open-ended questions and advanced logic features make sure respondents are only show relevant questions, increasing both the number and accuracy of responses.

Time

The more information your respondents recall when asked a question, the more accurate your final results. For customer feedback questionnaires in particular, the longer since the customer experience, the more misleading potential answers can be. Always double check that your target audience can still provide you with the information you are looking for.

Avoid common pitfalls

Leading, ambiguous and double-barrelled questions can drastically skew the results of your survey. Avoid asking more than one distinct question at once, using leading language which implies what the answer should be, and questions which assume the reader is aware of a certain subject. Learn more about question types before concluding your questionnaire design.

Open all channels

Make your online questionnaire available on all channels your respondents can access. There are multiple touch points where your survey can be completed, such as a web-based questionnaire, one sent by email or via SMS, or one posted to Social Media. A questionnaire that can be viewed and completed anywhere, at anytime, is far more likely to get responses.

Test before launch

Pilot testing a questionnaire to a small sample audience before launch, gives you valuable feedback on how your larger final audience will answer your questions, and help identify any problems. Consider testing via a Live Consumer Audience before finalizing your online questionnaire.

Some more examples

• Marketing Research Survey
• Hospitality Surveys
• Patient Satisfaction Surveys
• Customer Service Feedback
• Net Promoter® Score (NPS) Surveys
• Offline Surveys
• Web Surveys