We often talk about opinion polls, but are they really useful? If you do them properly, yes, they help you with your marketing strategies. The important thing is that they are appealing to the user. We have selected for you the best platforms to take online surveys: here’s how they work.
Online surveys, that’s what they are for and why it’s worth using them
More or less everyone has taken part in an opinion poll. There are various types: from the telephone, which keeps you glued to your landline for half an hour, to the paper one, which looks like a treaty. Then there are the paid online surveys, from a specialized platform. In general, surveys, opinions, statistics are part of market research. They are based on feedback from the public, which is the “benchmark” of the research.
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The inventor of the polls is an American, George Gallup: from 1932 he began to use them for the election of the US President. By beating, with his method, the Literary Digest, guilty of having chosen the target wrong election to interview! The topics of the polls range from lifestyle to politics, from sport to commerce. At first, the interviewee willingly agrees to answer, but if the surveys are too long they risk the boulder effect. The user loses patience and leaves the test halfway. What must not happen, because the feedback is valuable to build business strategies or policies? And get to success.
A good idea was to give prizes or even cash payments in exchange for answers, especially for online surveys. Yes, because of these, more than the others, the risk that the user quits in a second, distracted from his chores. And that you never come back.
In general, the surveys carried out by specialized research institutes choose the telephone interview, to make sure that the user goes all the way. The operator has the task of asking the questions and entering the answers as soon as possible. In return, the interviewee receives nothing.
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4 Reasons to take an online survey
Online surveys tend to pay you in order to keep you on the platform. There are those who have even made a job of it, a brilliant stratagem to retain mass loyalty and implement Customer-Centric all over the world. The advantage of paid online surveys, in fact, is precisely this: to have an endless reservoir of answers from every connected corner of the Earth. In summary, it is worthwhile to create an online survey if:
- You want to launch a new product on the market that meets customer needs
- You want to grow personal branding
- You have to plan social marketing strategies
- You want to start a marketing business that specializes in market research
Read below how a survey works and what tools are needed to reach your goal.
5 Steps to Creating a Successful Online Survey
You are seriously considering using an online survey for your business. It is an effective tool and you can make it through a platform, for free or for a fee. We give you some tips on how to build it so as not to fail:
- It must be short, with a few closed questions. It means that you have to ask multiple choice direct questions, in order to be able to make a useful statistic for marketing
- Notify the user of the survey results when it has finished. He expects to be involved and the least you can do is inform him
- Give the user a reward for the attention and time they gave you. It can be a coupon, a discount, a cash bonus
- Choose the anonymous form. Think that the user is giving you information about his private life and personal tastes. You may have problems with privacy laws
- Begin the experiment on social networks by exploiting the community you belong to. If it is successful you can move on to a real professional online survey.
The tools for creating a social survey are easy to use for beginners. Here’s what they are:
- Twitter, with Twitter Polls, Allows polls within your tweets. Very short and fast, for targeted questions and answers. Recommended for exploring personal branding
- Facebook polls. Post a few questions such as a status with photos and writings. Recommended if you have a page linked to an online business on a website
- Instagram Stories: When you post them with images or videos, you can place two-answer questions above The advantage is that you evaluate the results in real-time to understand whether or not followers approve of what you are doing.
If you need a more challenging survey to start Customer-Centric, choose a platform, and create your own custom survey. We have selected for you the best platforms to take online surveys: find out what they are!
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The best platforms to do online surveys in your business
Social surveys are not enough for you, you have decided to create an online survey for a statistic to use in the marketing strategies of your business. Excellent idea, but online platforms are wasted on the web and you don’t know which one to choose for your Customer-Centric. We have selected for you the best:
1) SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a Californian company with a modern setting, with offices in the USA, UK, and Australia. The platform has clean and basic graphics. It asks you to create an account and offers you to immediately launch an online survey with ten free questions through four means of your choice:
- Email to send to your customers
- Link to publish online
- The pop-up window for the website
- The pop-up window directly from the blog
The areas of action are really many: they range from classic market research to political research; from feedback on events and courses to academic research to Public Administration services. It offers assistance by explaining the meaning of some tools, such as the Likert Scale for the answer scoring system, and shows you the survey models in preview, divided by sectors. There are two products offered: business survey plan and personal plan, each with a long list of options.
2) SurveyOnline
Danish platform, it has an intuitive interface and various examples – tutorials to teach you how it works. After the free registration, you have a pleasant surprise: among the products, there is also a free Basic survey that lasts one month, with unlimited questions and 350 answers. Furthermore, there is also a free formula for students and teachers. The mobile-optimized surveys are interesting, useful if you are targeting young people. Recommended you that how to register in Wikipedia for those who work in the world of education, publishing, and cultural events.
3) Docs.Google.com
The easiest free system to build customer-facing Google online survey templates. Excellent for evaluating customer satisfaction in an e-commerce or bed & breakfast business. Just select the prepackaged modules in the “Work” section, for event feedback or customer feedback. It also gives you the option to create a new one with the questions studied by you. The advantage is that the modules can be downloaded for free, in formats for PC, Android, iPhone, and iPad. You can work on it by interfacing with Google Drive and G Suite. You have assistance, a guide, and a forum where you tell your survey experiences. Watch out: it doesn’t give you a hand in spreading the survey, instead, it gives you a way to collect the results in downloadable sheets, which you can have an expert analyze.
Conclusion
Online surveys are a great gimmick if you need fast and effective market research. But they are not enough. We recommend that you analyze the results and plan a marketing strategy with an industry expert to be successful