7 Tricks of Online Surveys You Should Know

By Karthik G  |   Submitted On March 31, 2016

  

An online survey is an excellent tool for sourcing vital information directly from a wide audience, with ease and convenience. Yet, despite how easy surveys appear, there is always room for improvement! The idea is to create and implement a well-rounded survey that is simple, easy to understand and yet, packs the punch for your business needs. Here are some important tips and tools that help you get the best out of your online surveys.

1 Avoid long surveys:

One of the benefits of online surveys is that the response is nearly instant, thereby reducing the time taken to collect responses. Businesses tend to exploit this advantage and stretch the length of their online survey with the assumption that respondents do not mind spending time on their surveys. However, just as you hate waiting in a long queue, a long survey tends to bore your online respondents. They may simply drop out or quit responding half-way, stop responding with interest, or worse, get disgruntled and never take up another survey from your brand. Designing a survey and finding the right respondents is resource-crunching; keep your online surveys crisp and to the point to avoid high respondent drop-out rates. A respondent should take no longer than ten minutes to complete your online survey.

2 Ensure consistency in coded values:

Each survey response or option is assigned a numeric code or value that is useful in computing mean, median, range, variance and other analytical calculation on the data that is collected. To ensure accurate computation, values must be coded following a consistent methodology. Typically, the highest value is assigned to the best or most positive outcome and so on. It is a best practice to keep the direction of the scale and the scale points consistent throughout the survey. Ensure that the coding is done accurately, as online responses get recorded automatically into the survey repository of database.

3 Irrelevant questions are a survey faux-pas!:

Irrelevant questions can frustrate your respondents. Employ question routing and survey logic features available on online survey portals or survey creation websites to redirect respondents to questions that are relevant to them or the responses that they had previously provided.

4 Be flexible with your designs:

Online surveys enable creativity to be incorporated into your questionnaires, as compared to traditional print surveys. You can create complex surveys with ease and conduct them through the internet. Mix various types of response formats - close-ended, open-ended, rating scales and so on - to keep your questionnaire interesting to your respondents and to evoke different types of responses from them.

5 Explore free online survey tools:

There is no dearth of free online survey tools! Explore various options and figure out what works best for you in terms of features, flexibility, number of questions and so on. Some of the popular free online survey tools include Survey Monkey, Qualtrics, Google Forms, Typeform and Survey Planet

6 Test your survey:

There are chances that your survey has not been formatted right, or your question routing and survey logic is not on point. Always do test runs on a small sample of people who are willing to help you out; this way you can identify any areas for improvement and polish your survey so that when your respondents receive it, you are sure that they will provide answers in the right format and to the right questions.

7 Place surveys strategically:

Online is probably the only place where surveys can be placed strategically to target a specific audience. For example, you can serve a survey on all people who exit your website after a download, or after buying a certain category of products or after consuming a particular type of content. This feature can help you keep your survey questions specific to derive a specific buying behaviour.

Online surveys work great if you seek to reach a large respondent base. Remember to keep your survey short, simple and to the point, so that you reduce your drop-out rates and get the most out of your investment in designing and implementing the survey.

I am an early adopter and an expert in Digital Business Analysis. Experienced in Inbound Marketing and skilled in Business Development

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Karthik_G/2214698

Email Address Quality - The Benefits of A Clean List

By Keith Reinhardt  |   Submitted On February 22, 2016

  

Whether you realize it or not, there's a price tag attached to every email address in your database. How well you manage the quality of those addresses can mean the difference between:

• A profit or a loss on your email marketing efforts;
• A Rolodex of satisfied customers or a costly lawsuit; and
• A lucrative holiday season or missed sales goals and irate executives.

The Financial Benefits of Proper Email Hygiene

How focused is your company on email address quality? If the answer is "not very", you could be costing your organization a boatload in lost profits. Check out the example from a webinar we spoke at recently.

That's a 65% improvement in revenue generated per dollar spent on email marketing JUST by focusing on email addresses quality.

How is this possible? Sending to undeliverable, unengaged, and problematic addresses costs you money. Let's take a look at how:

The Cost of Poor Email Address Quality

1) Negative Impact on Delivery

Just because an address is deliverable doesn't mean you should send to it. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use both negative and positive metrics to evaluate inbox placement. As a result, deliverable but unengaged addresses hinder your access to the inbox. As engagement drops, so does your ability to avoid the junk folder.

2) Unnecessary Spending

There's a cost associated with every email on your list:

• Your ESP likely bills you based on the size of your list or the number of emails your send; and
• Your acquisition sources charge you on a per email basis.

Why burn money acquiring and sending to dormant contacts that will never engage with your company? It just doesn't make good fiscal sense. Without the proper hygiene protocols in place, this is exactly what you'll be doing.

3) Low Customer Satisfaction

If you can't hit the inbox, you can't reach customers with the information they need. Things like promotions, order confirmations, and billing statements don't hit their intended target. This makes customers angry and what happens next is never good.

• They get annoyed and complain via social media.
• They contact your call center at a potential cost of multiple dollars per inquiry.
• In the worst case, they just up and leave you for a competitor.

4) Data Breach Liability

There's a liability associated with every email address in your house file if a breach occurs. Carrying old, unresponsive email addresses creates an unnecessary risk. Minimize your exposure by purging dormant addresses from your database.

5) WORST CASE SCENARIO - You Get Blocked or Blacklisted

Even the most cautious companies can run into big trouble when it comes to email address quality. We recently spoke with representatives from a leading brand that thought they had all their bases covered. Unfortunately, they didn't conduct any regular hygiene on their database.

This resulted in a deliverability nightmare that forced the company to miss critical seasonal sales goals and took 90 days to clear up and return deliverability to its previous levels.

CONCLUSION

When it comes to email list management and data hygiene, marketers have an obligation to protect their customers and themselves from unnecessary risk. This is especially true when it comes to email list management and data hygiene.

The goal here is to make it impossible for your company to make a mistake. This can only be achieved by implementing a bullet-proof email hygiene strategy.

Keith Reinhardt, http://www.freshaddress.com/home.php

FreshAddress, Inc. helps companies including 25% of the Fortune 100 and many of America's leading nonprofits to build, clean, and update their email databases to maximize revenue and donations. FreshAddress offers services including its SafeToSend Deliverability Solution, patented Email Change of Address (ECOA), and Postal and Email Appending.

Visit my website at http://www.freshaddress.com/home.php

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Keith_Reinhardt/251404