Choosing the Right Free Online Survey Tool
How to choose the right free online survey tool?
- Define the purpose of your online survey
- Design your survey
- Available features
Data collection is important if you are looking for feedback on your business or event. Collecting the right data from people allows you to continuously improve how you deliver a product or service.
Online surveys are becoming the popular choice for gaining insight from people because it is easy to use and reaches a lot of people. Nowadays, more and more sites saying that they have the best online survey tool.
But not all free online survey tools are created equal. A good online survey provides you with reliable, clear, and actionable insight to influence your decision-making.
Good survey tools have higher quality data, higher response rates, and are easy to fill out.
With all the different online survey tools available, here are some tips so you can choose the one that’s right for you.
Define the purpose of your online survey
Conducting research is a luxury not many companies are able to do.
Know what you want to know before you even begin to do your research. Ask yourself what the purpose of the survey is, what you are trying to measure, how many questions you should include, and how you would know that the survey worked.
Incoherent goals lead to incoherent results. The last thing you want to have when conducting your online survey is a set of results that do not provide any decision-enhancing values.
Good surveys have focused objectives and are easily understood. A few minutes of planning could make the difference between receiving quality responses or uninterpretable data.
Design your survey
Keeping your survey short and focused helps with both the quality and quantity of response.
It is always better to focus on a single objective rather than trying to create a survey that covers multiple objectives. Shorter surveys also have the advantage of having higher response rates and lower abandonment rates among respondents. People want things to be quick and easy. Once a respondent loses interest, they tend to give lower quality answers.
Instructions, question directions, and response categories need to be clear, especially with written surveys. Use as few words as possible and avoid the use of words with many syllables in both the question and the alternatives.
Available features
Now that you have established the purpose of your survey and have designed a survey instrument that ensures only good quality data is collected, it’s time for you to choose the online survey tool to use.
Many online survey tools, for the most part, provide the same set of features.
Here you will find features like an unlimited number of questions or answers, a link that can easily be shared, and even data evaluation tools. These features are usually provided for free, but the features that place one online survey tool above the rest most likely can be availed after you pay for them.
Online survey tools are businesses after all. They need to make money to keep their business running. This means that it is up to you if the particular set of features offered by an online survey tool is worth the money they are asking for.
Here are a few features that some online survey tools should be able to offer.
Survey display options
This feature makes it possible to give users the choice where they want to display their survey. Giving users to display the survey on a website, within an email, on a page hosted by the survey company, or anywhere the user sees fit allows the survey to have a wide range.
Branching logic
Also known as skip logic, it enables the user to address different questions according to the answer given by the respondee.
For instance, the question “Did you ever buy a product from us?” could be answered with “Yes” This could then be followed-up with the question “What product did you buy?”. Otherwise, if they answered “No”, then the follow-up question would be skipped.
User segmentation
This is an important feature that allows the business to choose parts of the respondents in a typical survey. A survey can only be shown to new website visitors, only to returning visitors, or to visitors from specific places just to name a few examples. This feature can help finding out valuable information from specific groups.
Different types of answers
This allows your survey to collect even the most granular information.
Common types of answers include unique choice answers, text boxes, grid/matrix answers, and multiple choice answers.
Other key features to look for when choosing your online survey tool are:
- Multiple survey trigger options like on-exit, on-load, on-click, on-scroll, etc
- Advanced customization options like adding a company logo
- Easy to use survey editor
- Change informational text
- Advanced reporting and survey interpretation engine
- Setting a maximum amount which a specific survey can be shown to a specific user.
- Collect leads before ending the survey
- Automatically send the collected leads to an email processor
Key Takeaway
Gathering data is important to any kind of research. There is nothing worse than finding out the data you have gathered is useless, so make sure to only use the best. Many free online survey tools are available for you to use. Choose the best one for your purpose and collect your data in an easy and intuitive way.