We have prepared 10 useful tricks and tips that will help you build even better online surveys, questionnaires, forms, and tests.
1. Use the right questions
Choosing the right questions for the survey is very important. In SurveyLab you can choose from 25 different question types, including choice, matrix, open, NPS, numeric, ranking, or heat-map.
It is important to select the correct question types before starting your survey, as you won’t be able to change it once responses are collected.
For a satisfaction survey, a Choice or Star-rating question is the best way to build a scale. For the NPS survey, select the NPS question. For a multiple-choice test, select a Choice question and set the Multiple choice option. For more information on the available question types, check our online help.
2. Build short surveys
Survey length has a direct impact on the “response rate”, ie the percentage of collected responses in relation to the number of survey participants. This is because we don’t like answering long surveys. Therefore, try to keep your surveys as short as possible.
When building a survey, keep in mind what is your goal and add questions only if they are necessary. For example, if you want to ask specifically about email outreach tools, don’t ask 10s of questions on cold email marketing, trends, and predictions.
3. Use the copy / paste option
If your question has a long list of answer choices, you don’t need to enter them manually. All you have to do is copy them from a Word, Excel, or text file and paste them into the question. The system will automatically divide each answer choice into a separate line.
4. Apply logic
Thanks to the skip logic, you can only display the questions that the respondent should see at the given moment or context. This allows you to shorten the survey and make the respondent’s experience more personal.
Logic can be based on questions, contacts, or metadata such as language, device type, or collector.
5. Use piping
Piping (content inserting) allows you to personalize your questionnaire and the respondent’s experience.
This functionality allows you to grab the content from the survey (provided answers) or contacts and then forward it to another question or survey email invitation.
6. Add languages
Many organizations work in multicultural and multinational organizations. It means that your employees and customers may speak different languages. With SurveyLab you don’t need to create a separate questionnaire for each language. Just add multiple languages to the survey and we will display the correct one using the language preferences of the respondent’s web browser. Additionally, the respondent will be able to change the language himself at any time.
The survey report will contain data for all languages. You will be able to filter it by any language and this way display data for all or only selected languages.
7. Use the question bank
Add any question to the question bank. You will be able to reuse them in the same or a different survey.
The question bank will allow you to create your own question types. It is shared by all users of your account. It’s an easy way to create a list of frequently used questions and thus speed up survey scripting.
8. Set the colors
Survey themes allow you to adjust the appearance of the survey to your preferences. This way, you can change the background color, font format, and size, page and question numbering, or hide the survey footer.
On request, we can also set up your domain to handle your surveys.
9. Use collectors
Collectors allow you to divide your project into segments or waves.
Do you want to repeat the survey for a new period? You don’t need to create a new survey. Just create a new collector. The results will be automatically aggregated to the survey level. You will be able to analyze them individually for each collector or for the entire survey (aggregated data from all collectors).
In the same way, you can break the survey into segments, response channels, or research waves.
10. Metrics
Do you need to calculate a complex satisfaction index or test score? Thanks to the metrics, this task is very simple. All you have to do is select the questions you want to sum up. You can use all or only selected questions. You can also create multiple metrics for a single survey / test.
The metrics will be visible in the survey reports. You can also display the metric at the end of a survey or test, and add an automatic notification for a specific metric value.