Multiple Choice Questions VS Open Ended Questions while Conducting Online Polls

The key part of creating successful online polls is the proper use of both open ended questions and multiple choice questions. But, which type of questions to use whenever you are conducting online polls?

Multiple Choice Questions
Multiple choice questions are one of the different close-ended questions you can use for conducting online polls. These questions enable the respondents to provide unanticipated or unique answers, yet instead, they have to pick from a list of various pre-selected options. 

Ways to Use Multiple Choice Questions
Multiple choice questions are conclusive in nature because they’re made to make data that’s quantifiable. The fact that these questions are simple to code makes them useful when trying to prove statistical significance of the results of the survey. In addition to that, the gained information by multiple questions enables the researchers to categorize the respondents into groups that are based on their selected options.

You can also use multiple choice questions for demographic studies. For instance, a designer clothing store’s manager believes that a particular kind of people are more likely to visit the store and buy their clothing. To know which groups are most likely to be the customers, the manager may conduct an online poll. This online poll could include about employment status, age, gender, and some demographic information they want to know. After that, it’d be followed with the questions on how frequent they visit stores and the money they spend yearly. By using multiple choice questions on an online poll, you can easily know the things that you need to serve customers better. 

Open Ended Questions
By nature, open ended questions are explanatory. It enables the respondents to give any answer they choose without forcing them to choose from the concrete options.

Ways to Use Open Ended Questions
Open ended questions offer rich qualitative data. In essence, these offer the researcher a chance to gain insight on every opinion on topics they aren’t familiar with. Nevertheless, being qualitative in nature makes these kinds of questions lack statistical significance required for conclusive research. However, open ended questions are useful in some ways and these include:

• Expert Interviews – Since the open ended questions ask for critical thinking as well as respondent’s uncut opinion, they expect to gain information from the specialists in the field, which researcher is less qualified in.
• Small Population Studies – Questions that are open ended can be beneficial for online polls that are targeting small group of people for the reason that there’s no need for the complex statistical analysis and qualitative questions will provide you more input from every respondent. The rule is the group should be small enough for surveyors to read every unique response and reflect on provided information.
• Respondent Outlet Typically, it’s a good idea in an online poll, regardless of how big to leave open ended comment questions at the end. It’s the case of survey asking close ended questions on behaviors, opinions, and attitudes.

Use Marketing Strategy To Your Survey To Make It More Worthy

An online poll or survey is considered as an effective marketing strategy and assessment tool. An online poll maker gives you a chance to engage with your clients and collect pertinent information for you to stay informed. But, when using a poll creator for business decisions, it is a must that you also promote them to all your target audience to make the most out of your survey and enjoy its real worth.

When you create a survey with an online poll maker, there are several marketing strategies that you can use:

Embed on Your Webpage or Blog

Embedding is among the advanced methods used for sharing and marketing your survey on any page. When you embed a survey, your audience can take the survey directly on your site with no need to leave it. Embedding is perfect when your main purpose is branding since the respondents will take the survey on your website or URL.

Share on Social Media Platforms

It is not a secret that almost all users today have their own social media accounts in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you want to market your survey effectively, sharing it on these platforms is one of the wisest things you can do. With this, you can be sure that you can reach more of your target audience, and there will also be a higher chance that they will see your survey. They will also feel more inclined and interested to check it out.

List Your Survey in Bulletin Boards, Forums, and Groups

These public portals usually have discussion threads allotted for specific subjects. Look for the topic which matches your survey, and post a short invitation or entry. You can get the best results with this particular method if you use forums or groups where in you are member and where you usually post entries which attract the interest of readers.

Create a Press Release

If you want to write a press release, you have to be careful not to make it sound as if it is an ad for your survey. Remember that press releases are meant for piquing interest through offering readers information that is stimulating, sensitive, surprising, or new. You can use your press release for subtly promoting your survey which will ignite curiosity.

Use Incentives

You can use incentives like drawings, giveaways, and contests to interest in your survey and promote its social sharing. Invite more people to participate in your survey and give them an incentive after they complete it. If you go for this method, however, just make sure that you are clear about the details of your incentives. Make sure you also follow through the incentives you offer so people will spread the news about your survey.

It is never enough to just use the best online poll maker. If you really want to make the most out of your survey, using the above marketing strategies can make it more worthy not only for your respondents, but also for you or your company.

How to Impress Your Respondents With Useful Features In Online Poll?

Every time you create survey online, you expect your respondents to be inclined and interested to answer your survey questions. You use the best survey software and double check your survey question order. You learn how to make survey questions in the hopes of attracting more people to provide their answers. But, did you know that there are some useful features which can help you impress your respondents without trying too hard?

Customizing your online poll with several features can give you the perfect chance to highlight the logo of your organization or company, boost your response rate and simply make your poll more fun than ever.

Two of the best ways for customizing your survey can be found easily in the survey itself and you can also make the changes to a deployed survey.

The Power of Logos

Make sure you add your logo to your online poll title which can be used for promoting your brand at the same time. What makes logos great is that aside from improving brand awareness and making it instantly recognizable among your target audience, people tend to be attracted to visual things and the right logo designs and colors can do the trick to impress them right from the get-go.

Choose a Matching Design Theme

Instead of having simple spaces between your questions, why not add some bars to separate theme. Here, there are endless possibilities you can try and you can make it as varied and unique as your surveys are. You can change the color scheme of your online poll or create a whole new theme which suits your poll and your personal preferences as well. Just make sure that you don’t go overboard or else, you might end up distracting your respondents for providing their answers to your survey questions.

Advanced Tips for Survey Customization

Colors and logos are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the opportunity of customizing your survey to impress your respondents with the personal and professional feel of your survey that could lead to increased response rates.

• Email invitation – If you will send to your own email addresses list, it is most likely the very first place where your recipients are going to get information regarding your survey. You can customize the mail with the names of your respondent and make sure that you also include an explanation of who you are and why you seek the opinions of the respondents. This will not just add a more personalized feel for your survey in general but this will also have an added payoff of higher response rate.
• Survey end page – It is the very last page that your respondents are going to see at the end of the survey so you want to ensure that you will leave a good lasting impression. You can customize the pages with imaged, hyperlinked text or redirect your respondents to your own site.

These are just some of the best features you can add to impress your respondents. 

Best Way to Design a Matrix Question in Online Survey

If you take a look at the best survey sites, you will notice how they make use of different questions when they make online survey.

Every online poll is composed of questions that are designed according to the results that the free poll maker or online survey creator wants to get or acquire. Probably among the most common and famous of questions used not only in online surveys but even in traditional pen and paper surveys is none other than the matrix question.

The matrix question is basically multiple questions that are presented on a grid form. For an online survey creator, these bundled questions are easier to write and program. These questions are also generally easier to understand and answer in the case of the respondents since the answer options and scales pretty much stay the same in all the items.

But, it is this very surface simplicity of a matrix question that masks its notable drawbacks. For you to gather high quality data, it is important to be familiar with the main pitfalls of this particular type of question, especially now that more and more surveys are being done and answered using mobile devices.

As it is very easy to create these matrix questions, you will notice how this question type is overused by free poll makers. These provide a lot of response options and a lot of rows or items. This is what makes it hard for the respondents to read and it can even promote a poor behavior in taking surveys. They can opt for straight lining in which the respondents choose the same response for every item without giving each row a careful consideration or they can also randomly choose responses for the reason that they just want to finish everything and escape the matrix.

Simple Tips to Write Good Matrix Questions

• Try to keep the response options as short as possible. These response options are the columns of the possible responses.
• Display just five or even fewer response options.
• Ensure that the item wording is short. These items are the rows.
• Once again, display just five or fewer items.

You don’t have to worry in case your matrix questions don’t follow these guidelines as you can still use every question you have written. You can always improve the overall experience for the respondents and gather better data by doing either of these two things: you can choose to break up the matrix into several individual questions or you can break up the large matrix into smaller matrixes.

You also have to remember the fact that most online surveys are completed using mobile devices. For this reason, matrix questions in horizontal formatting are not great for smartphones so be careful when designing the questions and make them suitable for mobile viewing. This will ensure that you will get the answers that you need while ensuring seamless experience for your respondents. 

Effect of Question Order on the Completion Rate of Online Poll

Whether you use a free poll or a paid online polling tool to create your surveys, the question order you follow can have a direct effect on the responses you will get from your respondents.

This effect is sometimes most evident in the field of politics. When a poll maker asks people about the most important issue faced by the country, the answer they will give will be the object of focus for the answer they give to the next question. When the follow up question is whether they disapprove or approve how the president handles his job, most of the time, the respondents will answer the approval question while they judge the president mainly on how he handles the issue they consider as the most important.

It is a common phenomenon called priming. The respondents are being primed to think of a particular issue while they answer the next question.

Priming will have an effect even when the survey topic is not related to politics or not even controversial at all. For example, if your first question is about the favorite sport of a respondent, this may not be suitable if your next question is if they have any interest in participating on a company basketball team. When basketball is not high on your respondent’s list of favorite sports, they might be tempted to rate their interest lower in being part of the company team than if you ask about the team first before their favorite sport.

One more reason why the order of questions matters is that your respondents may feel the need of being as consistent as possible in their answers. For instance, when you ask a student to ask an extremely mind boggling math problem first before you ask them if they enjoy the math subject, they could be tempted to have a lower interest rate if they had difficulties in solving the math problem.

The response options from an earlier query may also affect subsequent answers. When you ask about their favorite out of four fruits and you ask the amount of fruit they eat in one week, they may focus their attention on just the four items and report a much lower number than if they were to consider a longer list of fruits.

How will you address the effects of question order when you create your poll using a survey creation tool? One feasible option is to randomize the questions in order for your respondents not to answer all the questions in a similar order. You can try question randomization which will let you know exactly just that. You can randomize the questions in order to decrease the effects of question order on your poll.

You see, more than the questions themselves, how you put the questions in order in your survey can either make or break the success of your poll. Make sure that you observe proper order of questions to get the results you need.

Best Ways To Share Online Poll Results To Anyone

Online polls and surveys have proven to be one of the best marketing tools to help a business grow. No matter what your niche is, whether your business is small or big, online polls can offer you several benefits.

If you have an online poll and you like to share the results to anyone, there are basically countless of ways on how you can do it and these are as follows:

Share the Online Poll Results Through Social Media Sites

Almost all people have their own account on different social media sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many more. Therefore, if you want anyone to know more about your online poll results, take advantage of the presence of social media sites. Many people spend most of their time on these websites due to several reasons. Whether your target audience is of a particular age group or the youth, rest assured that social media websites will help you notify others regarding your online poll results.

Today, the most effective way to share online poll results through social media sites is by using hashtags. Consider using hashtags when posting to your social media accounts and see the difference.

Make Use of Online Publications

You may let people to be aware about the online poll results by posting or sharing on some publications over the internet. As of now, there are numerous online publications you can find. However, make sure that these publications have tons of users or members to boost the exposure of your online poll results. It’s just useless if you’ll choose posting an online publication that doesn’t have visitors.

More often than not, some online publications ask for a fee to post on their websites. But, there are also others that will let you share your online poll results for free of charge. The only thing that you should do is to become a member of their publication. If possible, choose an online publication that has relevance to your business.

Post Online Poll Results on Your Blog or Website

If you are managing a website or a blog, you may also consider posting your online poll results on your homepage or in any page you prefer.  Place it to your landing page or homepage. Make sure that it is visible to your visitors so that they can see it easily. You may also post your online poll results to every page of your website. This may help your potential clients or customers to make their final decision when making their transactions with you.

There are other ways to share online poll results to anyone. The choice is yours. Just make sure that you share the results to websites where most of your target audience hang out.

If you want to make most out of online polls, it is wise to learn how to make survey questions. You may also use the best survey software available in the market. However, when creating survey questions, keep your goals or purpose in mind for you to get the results you want.

Basic Reasons To Conduct Online Poll

Have you ever experienced being asked by a certain company to answer their paper surveys about their service or product?

Then and now, there are always online polls conducted to measure employee and customer satisfaction. From marketing survey questions, to employee survey questions, customer satisfaction survey questions and practically other types of survey questions all have one goal and that is to help a business, company or organization to become better.

But, what do they really get from these online polls? What gains can one expect from using the right survey question wordings?

Real Time Data Collection

One of the main purposes of conducting online surveys is for data collection, just like with other traditional survey forms. When you encounter a certain topic that you would like to research on, whether it is on industry trends or a market research for a service or product, you find a good opportunity for conducting an online poll. The best thing about these online surveys is the fact that you can roll them out right away and the moment the results start to flood in, you can check real time answers to your survey questions once your respondents click the submit button.

Be a Thought Leader in Your Industry

Once you carry out surveys regarding industry trends, you’ll enjoy the benefit of getting valuable data. For all you know, the rest of the people who belong to your industry will also find these data valuable as well. Through publishing the data with comprehensive analysis of its implications, you can position yourself as a thought leader on that particular topic.

Turn Data into Tons of Content

If you consider publishing the results of your survey, try unleashing your creativity with the kinds of content you generate. Your accumulated data can’t just be published in the form of press release as you may also use this as a blog post or even a series of posts if you have tons of data. People always love visuals so you might want to add some infographics, charts or graphs.

Learn from Survey Results

The last but definitely not the least reason to conduct online polls is that these are a great mean to collect customer input regarding your service or product. Ask about new feature ideas, send out a survey every few months to know customer satisfaction record general feedback or learn how your customers use your service or product. The secret here is to always use what you learn by putting it into practice. Your customers will appreciate it when they see that their input is put to great use for their benefit.

You see, there are plenty of gains associated with conducting even the simplest of survey with no need for excessive investments in money or time.

If you would like to further improve your business or organization, make sure that you choose the right survey questions to get the appropriate answers you need to benefit you and your respondents alike. 

Using wise polls strategies can help in your business growth

For successful running of your business, knowing your customer's requirement is a crucial step in the entire process. But how to know what your customers are looking for? Afterall you are not a psychic who can read minds. The solution is pretty easy and in front of you, you just need to look at it clearly - Polling! Conducting polls to gather feedback from the customers has always been an effective method in knowing exactly what they want from you. However, with the passage of time, modifications in the method of polling have occurred. Polling that was earlier conducted over telephones or by carrying out in-person interviews is now done online. Nonetheless, the main aim of polling remains the same: to know your customer's perspective. It ensures that you and your customers are on the same page. Moreover, it will help you in marketing your brand actively and turn prospects into customers. Written below are the popular ways to use online polling for your business.

• Know your audience

Is there something on your mind that you'd like to ask your customers before planning new strategies for your business? Go ahead and ask them. It will hardly take few minutes to create an online poll plus you'll get your answers instantly.

• Understand what type of blogs your audience wants to read

This could probably be one of the best use of online polling. Writing and promoting blogs is an effective way of brand promotion. Although it is important to post relevant blogs, what even more important is to pick a topic that your audience is interested to read about. Conduct an online poll before deciding the subject of your blog.

• Avoid social media block

Let's face it, everyone of us has faced the embarrassment of ban on the social media accounts once in a while. To avoid that, conduct an online poll on what kind of posts your audience is looking for on your social pages. Post fresh content regularly on the sites accordingly.

• Evaluate customer experience regarding a product

If you have a launched a new product in the market, getting an early review would help a long way in understanding what changes are needed or if it is exactly what your customers could hope for. Creating a review poll on your business product or service is an efficient way to keep track of your sales.

• Get feedback for your website

Today every business, doesn't matter whether it's big or small, has its own website. Prospects will visit your website before conducting business with you. Therefore, asking your visitors questions regarding the design and content is a must. Conduct a poll online asking about the website content and features, whether they feel the need to change the layout, or if they like the new improvements done,etc.

Just remember that asking the right question to the right customer at the right time can only give you the right result. PollDeep, the ultimate online poll creator can help you design and conduct the most relevant poll for your business. With latest features and technology, PollDeep has everything which makes it a strong and comprehensive poll creator. So trust your intuition and conduct an online poll, your business will never be the same again.

Different Types of Online Poll

Polling has been carried out for centuries now, with the sole aim to get a general opinion of people regarding a particular topic of discussion. Even with the technological advancement brought along in all these years, the only thing that has modified is the medium of conducting a survey/poll. One of the major changes was marked with the dawn of Internet; it has completely reformed the way everything works. Polls and surveys which were earlier conducted by meeting up people and asking them questions in person is now performed online without stepping out. Nonetheless, the reason for which polls were conducted still remains unchanged – research and review. There are different type of polls that can be run for various business, political or personal reasons.

Opinion poll

As the name implies, opinion polls are conducted to gather public opinion on a subject matter. A series of questions are asked to general population and then various possibilities are explored on the basis of results obtained. Traditionally, opinion polls were conducted by targeting a group of people and contacting them with the help of telecommunications or communicating in person. Contrastingly, today opinion polls are carried online where anyone who wishes to participate can vote and contribute in the results. Opinion polls are widely used in the public relations field as well.  

Benchmark poll

Benchmark polls are popularly used for campaigns to gauge a candidate's bid, the success of  his/her message, and where he/she stands in the competition. Justifying its name, benchmark poll is the first poll conducted in the entire campaign to take a survey of the likely voters. It gives a clear idea to the candidate about their position in the campaign. Moreover, it lets the candidate know which type of messages will work best with certain demographics and which should be avoided for successful run in the campaign.   

Tracking poll

Sometimes also called as rolling poll, tracking poll comprises of conducting polls consecutively at a particular frequency (usually weekly, or even daily). The results are then evaluated by calculating an average of the responses obtained over a fixed time window.  For instance, a weekly tracking poll evaluates data only from the previous week and discard all the older data.

Entrance poll

These type of polls are carried out to get a rough idea about the results before the voters cast their votes. Chances of the prospect changing his/her mind later is comparatively less; hence, questions like who voters plan to vote for and other such questions are asked in it.

Exit poll

This type of poll is conducted by private companies to get an early indication about how the results might turn out for the actual poll. Exit polls are conducted right after the main polling has been completed.

Just remember that asking the right question to the right person at the right time can only give you the right result. PollDeep, the ultimate online poll creator can help you design and conduct the most relevant poll for your business. With latest features and technology, PollDeep has everything which makes it a strong and comprehensive poll creator. So trust your intuition and conduct an online poll, your business will never be the same again.