Why Pre-Testing Your Online Survey is Important?

Some pre-testing level is a must before you launch a full-scale survey. SSI or Survey Sampling International defines the pre-test as a questionnaire that’s tested on the small sample of the respondents statistically before the full-scale study.

The advantages of pre-testing can’t be overstated whether you go for a soft launch or not. The real problem is, in the industry where time is frequently of the essence as well as findings have to turn around yesterday, it is hard to budget the time into the study to conduct a thorough pre-test. In several cases, one might argue pre-test isn’t necessary for the renewal of a yearly survey or online survey that’s being conducted for a smaller population.

Below are some of the reasons why pre-testing your survey online is necessary. Just remember that some of the advantages will apply also to some methodologies including the phone surveys.

• Estimating the Response Rate

In all likelihood, it’s one of the most common reasons why surveys are pre-tested. Once you send thousands of survey invitations out and acquire thirty-five completes, you know that the response rate will hover around 3.5 percent overall. It helps you guide the future sample purchase and determine the number of invites you have to send to reach the quotas without the need to overspend.

• Estimating the Length of Time in Completing the Survey

Probably, this factor is considered as the second of the two most common reasons why surveys should be pre-tested. Through reviewing time stamps of how long this took the respondent to take surveys, you may determine whether you may add those 2 key questions your clients liked to add or determine once you have to cut back on the scope.

• Fishing Out the Wording Issues or the Questions That Are Hard to Answer

As a survey writer, you must have faced situations where you had spent more time engulfed in the survey that you overlooked or did not catch several minor problems. Through pre-testing your survey, you’re getting a fresh perspective on question language. By doing this on smaller scale, including an email to some colleagues may achieve the same results.

• Understanding the Points of Dropout

You might have discussed about the best engaging survey respondents in the previous blog posts and that advantage speaks directly to this point. You may accomplish it in some different ways. One may look at the data to check the questions which carried the likelihood of dropping out. Another personalized method could be to follow-up with selected survey respondents via phone to discuss their survey experience.

• Enhancing Your Invite Text or Subject Line

Another advantage of the pre-test is testing the subject’s effectiveness of your invite text or subject line. The spam filters are the real concern in terms of online surveys or online poll. Thus, once you have time to pre-test, you might like to think about using some subject lines and see which of these worked flawlessly for you and your surveys.