Let's Agree NOT to Use Agree/Disagree Questions in Online Poll

For some weird reason, human nature seems to have it ingrained to stay agreeable and positive even during the toughest situations. But, did you know that this life virtue is also applicable in surveys? The truth is, this particular virtue might even introduce bias in your online survey.

According to studies, there are several ways on how your agree/disagree questions you use in your poll online can urge your respondents to answer them in such a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect their real opinions.

The Problems with Agree/Disagree Questions for Your Online Surveys

Online polling experts have found out that there are two primary types of problem which can arise when you use the usual agree/disagree questions.

• Straightlining

One of the ways that an agree/disagree question can cause problems is through making it easier to go through several questions of your online polling and choose the same answer each and every time even without really reading the choices you provided. Having several questions in a row with almost the same answer options such as agree or disagree might end up boring your respondents. They could still provide their responses to every question but they don’t carefully consider which response is truly the best and most suitable.

• Acquiescence bias

It is almost again human nature for people to say things such as yes to things or even agree with things even when they don’t feel that way. Try to imagine this: If your coworker asks you do like her new dress, you will feel the need to agree with her, right? Studies have revealed that this tendency is also applicable when people answer survey questions as well.

According to experts, item specific questions have options of response which are specific to a certain question. They claim that instead of sticking to a one size fits all scale which will apply to several agree/disagree questions, you can go for a scale with a wording that has been tailored to match the unique wording of the question.

What It Means for Your Online Surveys

If your online poll makes your respondents feel bored when you ask them a series of agree/disagree questions, chances are they will not be that conscientious or focused when they give their response. After all, what will be the point of asking these questions when you know that your respondents will not really even try to answer them well?

While the item specific questions will require an extra effort to answer as compared to the agree/disagree questions, there is no need to worry because their benefits far outweigh their drawbacks. When people exert more effort, it means that they will have more care and concentration when they make their response. This will then lead to a more carefully considered response which translates to more accurate data for you.

Even if you use the best online survey creator, everything will be useless if you cannot get the data you need. If you want the survey experience to be good not just for your respondents but for you as well, let’s agree not to use agree/disagree questions in your next free online surveys.

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.

Why, When and Where Online Survey Respondents Leave?

You prepared your survey questions. You checked the survey question order. You found the best survey software to help you. Then, you started to create survey online. But, even after all the efforts you made, you only found out that your respondents left without you knowing it.

For market research analysts, nothing can beat the disappointment of seeing a high survey dropout rate. They usually end up spending long hours of analyzing the loopholes and causes of this higher dropout rate and thinking of solutions on how to make them lower next time.

By this time, you probably know that it is not just enough to learn how to make survey questions. There are more things required for your survey to really be a success and provide you the results and data you need.

Even if your respondents can answer a specific question, there is a chance that they are not willing to do so. The truth is, there are several reasons why respondents sometimes don’t answer survey questions and leave right there and then.

Unexplained Context

Certain questions might seem inappropriate in specific contexts yet not in others. For instance, questions on leisure activities might be suitable if you conduct a survey for entertainment precincts but not if part of an employee satisfaction survey. Respondents don’t respond to queries which they deem inappropriate for a certain context.

It Needs a Lot of Effort

Many respondents are not willing to devote too much effort to offer information unless you give them an incentive for doing so. For example, the research wants to determine which galleries or museums the respondent visited recently. This is one of the two ways to obtain this information. The researcher can request the respondent to list all things they saw at the gallery or museum or the research can offer a list of exhibitions then ask the respondent to check the applicable ones. The next option is preferred as it needs less effort from the respondents.

Purpose Doesn’t Feel Legitimate

A respondent could be reticent to divulge details they don’t see as serving any legitimate purpose. Why will an organization host a music festival want to know about occupation or income level? Explaining the need for the data can make the request for information look more legitimate and increase the willingness of the respondent to answer.

Too Sensitive Information

There might be an unwillingness on the part of respondents to share any sensitive information since it may cause embarrassment or even threaten their self image. When pressed for an answer, the respondents may provide biased responses, particularly during a personal interview. Sensitive subjects may include religion, money, sexual orientation, family life and involvement in crimes or accidents.

Before you write or prepare your survey, you have to be extra careful about the questions you will include in your survey. Any wrong move with your questions may affect or alienate your respondents and urge them to refuse to give their response or consequently discourage them from completing your survey.

How Can You Make Yourself Customer Sensitive Using Business Polls?

Business polls are no doubt a great way to evaluate your business progress in the competitive world of market. These are also beneficial by helping you determine the other business strategies you may incorporate to meet the needs or requirements of your customers.

Every business poll is needed to have feedback in a form of opinion and it should be structured with the right kind of formats and requires to make it customer sensitive and it might be in the form of questionnaire online or phone calls.

Being a customer sensitive using business polls, you need to remember that customers are sensitive about the cost of any service and product. They always concentrate on getting everything at cheaper rates. Nevertheless, the scenario becomes different when products become popular and demanding. In these cases, the customers concentrate on technological elements instead of the cost alone.

Below are the other tips to make yourself customer sensitive whenever you are using business polls:

• Decide Your Customer Preferences

Before you go to polls, you should ask questions about what customers prefer and what’s the most convenient means of giving opinions is. Depending on the business nature and customer profile, you should decide whether you go social media or count on making the phone calls to have customer engagement and real time feedback.

• Explain Your Purpose

The main purpose of collecting information should be cleared through brief introduction and how information is gathered will be consumed should also be stated to be customer sensitive.

• Update Your Customers

It is important to keep your customers updated so that you will know their opinions on the business polls. You may update them by sending promotional emails or posting some information on social media so that followers are informed of the current situation.

• Consider Using Appropriate Questions

Depending on the business poll’s purpose, you should choose suitable kinds of questions. It may be a closed or open type question, with response in the form of a yes and no question. You can also use multiple type, which will let your customers choose one among the provided options. The scale type once the response comes in a form of rating.

• Consider Incentives

Offering rewards for opinions may be effective for luring customers.

• Assure Your Customers about the Confidentiality of the Information

Guaranteeing the confidentiality of the information that your customers have provided is a way to build confidence and trust. Therefore, people should be assured that there won’t be disclosure of identity.

• Always Stay Relevant

For you to stay customer sensitive when it comes to business polls, you have to take note that relevance is the key. Ask only your customers about relevant questions and never use topics that are not related to what you are servicing or offering.

By keeping those tips in mind, you can guarantee that you will make most of your business polls. When making a business poll, stick with a reliable poll maker.

5 Ways to Share Survey Results That Will Work For Anyone

So, you have finally finished your free poll and you have all the results you need. What’s next? Where you do go from there?

It is always an exciting thing to use an online polling tool to put together your survey, send this out and wait with eagerness for the responses. It becomes even more inspiring once you see that you managed to collect a lot of insightful and high quality information, thanks to the help of a survey creation tool.

However, these results will never have any use unless you communicate them to serve as a resource for all interested parties. For more people to see the real value of your survey results, below are some of the most ideal ways on how you can share them to the public.

Use a Blog Post to Share Results

One of the best ways to make the most out of the results you get from the survey you created using an online polling tool is through a blog post. A blog post is an ideal way to leverage the existing audience for your blog and present the main findings you got from your survey. For example, if you came up with an infographic, you can go ahead and embed this into your blog post to serve as a visual resource.

Create an Infographic for a Visual Presentation of Results

Can you still remember the last time you bothered to read an entire web page from top to bottom? It is found out that on average, site visitors only read about 28 percent of the text on an average visit. Many of these visitors only choose to scan the words on a page instead of actually spending time to read and digest every word. This is because those who are part of the online world are dealing with information overload.

If this is the case, how will you be able to make people more interested with the results you got from your survey just when there is an increased competition and rivalry for full attention? Experts recommend to visually present your data through an infographic in order to boost readership of your survey results by as much as 80 percent. Your audience is going to be more inclined to pay attention to visually appealing image instead of a black and white page filled with words.

Share Survey Results with Social Media

Everyone loves to share facts and details over social media. Just make sure that you direct visitors to a landing page before you share results through social media. In this context, the landing page is a web page which offers more details about your survey, like a blog post.

Share a Web Link

You can also share your survey results from the survey’s analyze section. It is a great choice if you want to share a quick summary of survey results and you like to control how public or private the results will be. The link that you will be sending out can update every 5 to 10 minutes, which means that those who received the link will have updated data.

Send Instant Results to Respondents

If you like to let your respondents check their responses and compare these with other respondents, you can also show them instant results of your survey. Through this, respondents will get real time summary of data collected once they completed your survey.

How To Surpass Your Respondents Expectation In Online Survey?

Survey fatigue is a growing problem that people who make online survey face every time they collect data. If you want to continue getting information from your targeted respondents, you have to ensure that your survey projects are worthy of their time and this means getting rid of the respondent’s expectations from online surveys effectively.

 

Whenever you are designing an online poll or survey, you have to keep your respondents fatigue-free and engaged. Such simple tips will help you surpass your respondent’s expectations in online surveys:

• Never Over Survey Your Respondents

Surveys pop up everywhere these days from the grocery receipt to email inboxes to classic paper survey. There is definitely nothing wrong with many people wanting to collect data, yet the prevalence of surveys presents the challenge of maintaining a good response rate. Therefore, before you start designing surveys, make sure that you are not getting lost in the sea of requests for feedback and overloading your respondents with countless survey requests for a short period of time. If possible, reduce the number of the requests that a person gets from your business or company.

• Tell Them the Value of Your Survey

If your respondents can see how their response will be used, they’re much more likely to donate their time to the survey you have. Therefore, make this clear wherever possible. Regardless of your plans you might have for your survey data, communicate those in the email invitations. If there are some incentives attached for their response, these must definitely be included too. Communicating within the survey can also enhance your response rate and minimize survey taking fatigue.

• Make It Simple to Answer Survey Questions

You have done a good job communicating the value of your survey, so never destroy that goodwill through forcing a hard survey experience on the part of your respondents. You may use logic for skipping over irrelevant questions or get rid of the whole sections of the survey based on the responses to early questions. Take some time to design a survey that provides you relevant data through showing only the most important questions to each of your respondents.

You should also make sure that your survey works properly with mobile devices. If there is any chance that people might take your survey on a tablet or a phone to know the experience on such devices.

• Ask the Right Questions on Your Surveys

When you are writing survey questions, it might be easy to throw in extra ones there and here. It is tempting to want to gather data in one survey, yet you must always concentrate exclusively on the questions that will help you meet your goals on surveys. Collecting a lot of irrelevant data could make action and analysis more difficult and adding some questions puts you at risk of high survey fatigue. Whenever possible, just keep your questions focused on what you need to learn from your surveys or online poll and consider being ruthless when it comes to getting rid of those outside that scope.

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.