Let Us Move On...

It’s been more than a decade since the world moved from paper to the World Wide Web. The shift, this decade, is from internet to mobile phones/tablets. Considering this transition, it only makes sense that we bring surveys to where people mostly are — on smartphones and tablets. Most of the leading online survey brands have already evolved to serve the new-age consumer.

You can now create, launch, and participate in online surveys on mobile and tablet devices — a feature you must ensure your online survey software has before you make that purchase. Though some are only half way through and allow only launch and participation from touch screen devices, most of them have gone the entire mile.

This add-on feature serves another important purpose. Mobile surveys allow respondents to participate while they are outside, say, in a coffee shop, at a mall, or waiting for their turn at the doctor’s. This means that the participant is more relaxed and in a good mood, which in turn means that he will be more willing to do justice to your survey.

To summarize it in the words of one of my favorite music artists, Dido, “Let us move on…”

You Are Invited

You have crafted that perfect survey, and all you have to do now is send it across to potential participants. Is your job done? Not till you draft that invite!
 

Customizing the invitation could translate into an increase in the response rates. Include images in the invite, customize its fonts, add colors and change its background to make it as interesting as possible. The invite should tell the participant what the survey is exactly about. It should explain why it is important for him/her to participate in it

Introduce a call to action in the subject line itself. This will generate a sense of hurry, thereby increasing the changes of participation even more. Make sure you set periodic reminders for those who do not participate. Personalize the invitations further by sending across invites in multiple languages in case your audience belongs to a varied group of ethnicity.

After all, a perfect survey deserves to be preceded by a perfect invitation!

Mind Your Language

Yes we live in a time when almost every other person’s pretty well-versed English, however, to put it in the famous words by Nelson Mandela, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

If it’s a person’s heart you are aiming for you’ve gotta speak the heart’s language. Today’s top online survey software in the market offer the option of launching multilingual surveys or have integration with Bing’s Auto Translation. A very important feature, if you ask me. Yes, it does seem very professional to send across surveys in English language, however, I am sure some of your loyal customers’ first language is not the same. Giving them the option of viewing and answering the survey in their own language will strike a cord, and chances are that they will give you some real and very good feedback.

Put a Lid on it

A survey creator knows the happiness a huge number of responses bring him. But there are times when you do not want as many responses; when you wish to set some limitations to the number of responses pouring in. Confused? Let me explain.

Say you are conducting this survey wherein you’d like to encourage women’s participation. You may not mind some inputs from men. But then how do you go about it. Do you delete some of the men’s responses? If yes, how do you choose? Or take this another case where you’d like only 100 responses. Should you be deleting the rest? And on what basis?

This is where the advanced feature called Automatic Quota Management comes handy. It has several uses. It can be used to withdraw an answer option after obtaining a certain amount of responses or set some parameters to the survey such as the number of survey attendees it will allow or the number of sessions per person it will entertain.

In short, you have the power to control the audience; to gain perspective; to lend an ear to a certain section.