13 tips for crafting an effective customer survey

Business leaders are not omniscient. If they want to find out what customers think about their products and services, or their brand, they need to ask them. And the most common, and seemingly easiest (and cost effective), way to do this is to send out a customer survey.

However, in today’s 24/7 digital world, where people are constantly bombarded with emails, text messages and social media notifications, it can be difficult to get customers to even open your survey, let alone fill it out. So how can your business improve the odds customers will take a minute (or five) to open and take your survey? Following are 10 suggestions from marketing, survey and customer service experts, as well as tips on how to leverage the data.

1. Identify what information you want and who to target

“Before you start writing questions, you need to set clear and measurable objectives,” says Teresa Walsh, marketing executive at Cazana. “What is it that you want from the survey? To identify customer satisfaction? To find out how [customers] are interacting with your new service [or product]? Once you have [determined the] objective,… move onto crafting strategic questions that will get you the answers.”

Similarly, determine who should receive the survey and define your target audience as narrowly as possible.

“For example, you wouldn’t want to send a survey that asks [about a recent] purchasing experience [from] customers that bought from you years ago,” says Josh Brown, content & community manager at Fieldboom. “Similarly, you shouldn’t ask customers who bought [something] yesterday [or very recently] whether they love your customer support, because they probably haven’t even needed help yet.”

2. Keep it short and to the point

“SurveyMonkey research shows that 45 percent of survey takers are willing to spend up to five minutes completing a survey, while only a third are willing to spend up to ten minutes,” says Audra Sorman, content strategist at SurveyMonkey. 

So when crafting your survey, stay focused and don’t bombard survey takers with too many questions.

“A common pitfall is building surveys that ask too much of a respondent at one time,” says Mark Simon, managing director, North America at Toluna. This can lead to respondents not finishing the survey. To increase the likelihood of your survey being completed, ask “targeted questions that are limited in number, ideally between five and 15.”

“We recently sent a three-question survey to a small list of our current customers, and we saw phenomenal engagement,” says Richard Heby, marketing manager at LiquidSpace.

3. Use multiple choice questions

“SurveyMonkey research shows that multiple choice questions received the highest completion rates,” says Laura Wronski, survey research associate at SurveyMonkey.

4. Keep the initial questions general

“It’s best to start your survey with more general questions, then move to very specific questions,” says Wronski. “For example, if you’re a restaurant owner conducting a customer feedback survey, start with a question that asks whether your patrons would recommend your restaurant to others. Then you can move on to questions that ask about the specific things they liked or didn’t like: the food, the service, the atmosphere, etc.”

5. Ask the most important questions first.

“You probably have one or more questions that are very essential to your survey,” says Wronski. “Ask those questions first [or near the beginning]. As people go through your survey, there will always be a few who drop out entirely or skip questions. If you ask your most important questions early in the survey, you’re more likely to get more data on those questions.”

6. Include ‘N/A’ as an answer choice

Not every question is relevant to every survey respondent. So be sure to include N/A (not applicable) as one of the choices (where appropriate).

7. Test your survey

“Take the survey yourself after you make it,” advises Chad Reid, director of Communications at JotForm. Ask yourself, “Does it feel too long? Is it easy to tell how much longer until you’re finished taking it?”

Better yet, “do a pilot test before you go full-scale,” says Lucjan Kierczak, marketing manager at Survicate. “The fact that you understand your questions and follow them easily doesn’t necessarily mean that participants will find them so easy as well.”

“Test [your] survey on a small group of people from your target group (ten is usually enough) and collect their feedback,” he advises. “It’s likely you will need to amend the survey.” However, “a clearer survey translates into higher completion rates and reliability of answers, so it’s worth the effort.”

8. Make sure it’s mobile friendly

“Mobile data usage has exceeded desktop usage, so use a survey provider with a mobile-friendly survey UI and test your survey on a smartphone before launching,” says Adam Sewall, head of Marketing and Partnerships at Wizeline.

9. Tell people why you’re sending them the survey — and how they benefit

In the subject line or first sentence,“tell [people] why they should open your email and complete your survey,” says Heby. “What’s the benefit to them? Surveys often help businesses create better products, [so] saying something as simple as ‘We want your opinion on how we can create a better product’ is useful in driving engagement.”

Another way “to get people to want to complete your survey [is to] express your genuine appreciation for their participation,” says Sorman. “Consider incorporating, ‘We want to know what you think,’ or ‘Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey.’”

10. Offer a reward

“Make it worth [people’s] while to answer your survey,” says Walsh. “One effective way to do this is by having a prize draw for either a cash or prize incentive, such as a free iPad. If you are a consumer goods company, you can offer freebies of your own goods.”

“At my company, we have found that offering branded merchandise, such as t-shirts, at our monthly events in exchange for a completed survey yields a 75 percent success rate,” says Swati Kumar, marketing manager at Cockroach Labs. 

11. Have a good way to sort and analyze the data

“Before you [create your survey], make sure your survey tool integrates with, or already provides, an easy way to analyze the data,” says Reid. “I like having my data sorted in spreadsheets. So I choose to have my surveys automatically populate a spreadsheet in Google Sheets so I can sort through everything as the responses come in.” But there are other tools you can use to analyze the data, including those provided by survey companies/applications.

12. Get respondents’ permission to follow up — and don’t contact them without it

One of customers’ biggest pet peeves with filling out surveys is getting called or emailed by the company about the survey afterward, without their permission.

If you want the option to follow up with survey respondents, get their permission first. If you do not have their explicit permission to contact them, about the survey in general or why they answered a particular question the way they did, do not contact them. Emailing or, worse, calling a survey respondent to harass them about their answers is a sure-fire way to cause them to never fill out one of your surveys — or lose them as a customer.

13. Share the results of your survey

Show customers you value their opinion(s) by sharing survey results with them via a follow-up email. You can also turn survey results into infographics or whitepapers, which can be shared on social media or with reporters.

“We took the data from our survey and turned it into multiple blog posts, a whitepaper, infographic and webinar,” says Derek Miller, content marketing strategist at CopyPress. “We even took the infographic and syndicated it out on more than 30 websites to help drive more attention to our gated assets like the webinar and whitepaper.”