Create An Online Questionnaire: Method And Tools

Have you ever thought about creating an online survey or questionnaire? A questionnaire can be very useful to know your target better, for example, or to carry out internal studies.

Whether you are a professional, an individual, a student or an association, you will most certainly need to complete a questionnaire one day. Let’s discover together the unstoppable method in order to carry out an effective questionnaire!

In Which Cases Should I Create An Online Questionnaire?

Creating an online questionnaire may be necessary for several situations. Let’s see when it is necessary to create one.

Why Create A Questionnaire?

There are many reasons you might want to create your own online questionnaire.

Among them, here are the main reasons:

• Collecting information on your customers and prospects
  A questionnaire is a valuable means of collecting information on your customers and prospects. (email addresses, notices, etc.)
• Understanding Your Market
  When you start a business, it is important to know your market. A study can therefore be carried out for this purpose. It can complement market research.
• Obtaining opinions on your products or services
  A questionnaire can allow you to know the opinion of your customers on the products/services that you offer. So you can analyze what works or not
• Understanding customer frustrations
  A questionnaire can be set up with your customers to understand in more detail their frustrations and what could be improved according to them
• Studying Behaviors
  Whether with customers or even internally, within your team, you can conduct surveys to study behaviours. (purchasing, navigation, etc.)
• Registrations
  With a questionnaire, you can collect the information you need to register for an event, competition, etc. (email, name, first name, phone …) etc.

The advantages of this type of online questionnaire, compared to a face-to-face or telephone questionnaire are numerous.

This allows you to save time and resources, multiply the distribution and better manage the precision of the answers given by the respondents.

The Different Types Of Questionnaire:

Now that you have the main reasons for creating an online questionnaire, let’s take a look at them together.

A questionnaire can take many forms depending on the objective you give it.

• Satisfaction questionnaire: this aims to measure the satisfaction of customers or prospects in relation to a product, service, brand or even functionality …
• Poll: a poll will be carried out to be able to choose between several proposals.
• Marketing study: this type of study can be carried out for the purpose of carrying out market research, before the launch of a product or service. Or even during a change of visual identity
• Registration form: this one aims to fill a form with a good amount of information on the Internet user.
• Survey: a survey aims to find out the behaviour of customers, employees, etc.

As you have seen, there are quite a few online questionnaires.

How to be sure to choose the right one and how to do it efficiently? You see it now.

Online Questionnaire: The Effective Method:

Doing an online questionnaire is not that complicated. You just have to follow the method which follows.

Steps Prior To Creation:

Before starting to create your questionnaire, it is important to carry out these few steps.

Start by defining your goals. Indeed, to create an effective questionnaire, it is essential to clearly define its objectives. If your survey meets too many objectives at the same time, it is advisable to complete more than one, so that respondents do not get lost. By setting your goals, you will easily be able to see what type of quiz you will need.

Who will you send this online questionnaire to? This question should be asked well before starting to build your survey since the questions will differ depending on the target to which you are going to apply it.

Are you going to send your questionnaire to your customers, prospects, employees, etc.? Once your target is chosen, you can easily create your questionnaire and ask the right questions, to the right people.

Finally, you just have to choose a tool adapted to your needs for the creation of your questionnaire. Are you ready to pay for your quiz or not? Do you need a very complete tool, or is a simple form sufficient?

So many questions to ask yourself to choose the right tool for you. We will see a little later the tools essential to the creation of an online questionnaire.

We have seen the steps prior to creating a questionnaire, now let’s practice!

Good Practices Of The Online Questionnaire:

Now let’s see the wording of the questions. There are several writing methods for an effective questionnaire.

The structure of a questionnaire can be done in two different ways:

1. The funnel structure: it consists of starting the questionnaire with very general questions, then moving on to more and more precise questions.
2. The hourglass structure: it starts in the same way as the funnel structure, but ends with general questions.

Once your structure has been defined, you can move on to writing the questionnaire. For this, there are good practices to apply:

• Short questions and closed answers are preferred: with short questions and closed answers, you will be more likely that the targeted people will answer you since it is faster.
• A short questionnaire is better than a long questionnaire: a questionnaire that is too long will tend to discourage Internet users, who will leave even before having seen what the questionnaire was about.
• Your questionnaire should be easy to understand and clear for respondents: work on the clarity of your questions so that users can answer them easily.
• Group the questions by topic: grouping your questions by topic will allow you to keep a certain frame and facilitate your analysis of the answers thereafter
• Choose the type of answer adapted to the questions: for each question, it is essential to select the appropriate answer (scale, simple choice, multiple-choice, etc.)

The Essential Tool For Creating A Questionnaire:

Many tools are available to you for creating online questionnaires. Some of them are free and others are chargeable.

Google Forms is a tool in the Google suite, and therefore free. It allows you to create forms very simply and quickly.

With a pre-filled document, all you have to do is write your questions in the corresponding blocks.

• The advantages: the free tool and it’s very simple handling
• Cons: the limited functionality of the tool

Our Last Tips For Creating A Questionnaire:

You now know a little more about creating online questionnaires. Let us give you our latest tips for an effective investigation.

Mistakes To Avoid:

Doing an online questionnaire seems very simple at first glance. Be careful though not to fall into the traps.

We have listed some mistakes to avoid when writing your online questionnaire.

• Making a questionnaire that is too long
  A survey that is too long will scare away potential respondents.
• Misplacing information
  Placing a very important question at the end of the questionnaire is a bad idea because respondents are more focused at the beginning.
• Use language that is too specific
  The language that is too technical or specific can be misunderstood by respondents and create confusion.
• Offer only open
  ended questions Open-ended questions are much more neglected by users. It is preferable to offer a choice of answers to be ticked, for example.
• Suggesting too wide or imprecise a choice of answers
  When the choice of answers is too long, or imprecise, it can make the questionnaire unclear and the answers you get will be vague.
• Neglecting the design
  The appearance of your questionnaire is an important factor in answering. Take care to take care of your design to make respondents want it.
• Do not test your questionnaire before distribution
  It is essential to test your questionnaire before distributing it to a large audience. Thus, you will realize the problems or remarks that it causes.

Distribution Of Your Questionnaire:

Once your questionnaire has been created and tested, it is time to move on to the distribution. To disseminate and share a survey, there are several ways.

First of all, you will need to know where your target is. This way, you will know where it is important to distribute your online survey.

• The social networks: share a link to your survey on your page, or even your own, as you are sure that your target is above.
• The emailing: send an email or even a newsletter to your customers or your prospects, so you’re sure that your questionnaire will collect responses from them.
• On discussion groups: join groups in the theme you touch and ask people in the group to respond. You will have a strong interest here on their part.
• Via your website: if you have a website, you can also publish your questionnaire in a strategic location, using a call to action for example. We suggest you hire a professional website designer to create an online questionnaire on your website for better user expression.

In Summary, How Does An Online Questionnaire Work?

You are now more familiar with how to complete an online questionnaire.

To carry out an effective survey, all you need to do is follow its methodological points, and match your objectives and your target.

Take the time to choose the right tool and take care of your questionnaire in order to have as many answers as possible and interest in it.

About the Author:

Raunak Pandey is a Mechanical Engineer by qualification & Marketer by passion. He is the founder of Maiden Stride, a leading digital marketing company that provides world-class search engine marketing services and website & application development.

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