Best Survey Examples For Conducting Surveys Like A Pro

Truth be told, surveys command equal love and hate depending on who you ask – marketers love it, and customers dread it, with almost 80% of customers have abandoned a survey midway. In short, surveys are popular for the wrong reasons (think: lengthy, boring, unnecessary, you get the drift, right?). 

“72 percent of customers said surveys interfere with their experience of a website.” – OpinionLab

However, if done right, surveys can act as a helpful and insightful tool to understand what drives your customers and what their current needs look like. In this blog, we will look at interesting examples and ideas for conducting surveys like a pro.

Conducting surveys for anything-and-everything will leave you overwhelmed and frantic due to the sheer volume of data you’ll receive.

Here are some of the best survey examples (ideas) to conduct your next business survey:

Survey Example #1- To Understand The Kind of Content You Should Be Creating

The content marketing industry is exploding. Consider these statistics by the Marketing Insider Group: 

• Content marketing is estimated to become a $300 billion industry by 2020. 
• 86% of B2C companies use content marketing as a part of their marketing strategy. 
• 91% of B2B companies have already implemented content marketing in their strategy.
• The most successful companies spend 40% of their budget on content marketing.  

Related: The Ultimate Guide to B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Imagine all this time, effort, and money went to waste simply because you didn’t target the right audience or if your user group finds the content topics to be boring, or worse, irrelevant. The point we’re driving is fairly obvious. 

Every now-and-then, it helps to survey your readers about what would like to read – hear it from the horse’s mouth (for lack of a better term). One way of encouraging people to speak up is by using the “Comments” section on your blog so that users can leave their feedback:

Alternatively, you can use the following example to provide predefined answers to users and make the feedback process easy from the get-go:

Key Takeaway: Surveys that focus on content marketing efforts can be beneficial for the brand as well as the customer. Users can enjoy a plethora of benefits – From getting clarity on topics to sharing their problems and expecting an instant solution. In other words, users will get the chance to proactively engage with your brand, whereas the brand can create engaging and interesting content that builds brand loyalty.

Related: Easy Ways To Improve Content Marketing

Survey Example #2- To Improve Your Overall Customer Service

Come to think of it, there’s nothing to lose when conducting surveys. From the customer’s standpoint, surveys act as a platform to voice their concerns and make them feel valued by the brand. From the company’s perspective, marketers can gather important data that can help enhance the customer experience as well as fine-tune products/services more to the user’s liking.

Related: How To Use Feature Marketing To Get More Customers 

Eventually, once the users start valuing the brand for its ability to act on user feedback (as brilliantly as Starbucks’ does), they’ll become life-long brand advocates and boost user retention.

Key Takeaway: If enforcing a customer-centric culture is your priority, you need to start surveying targeted users and get the right answers for what needs fixing within your business strategy (to begin with).

Survey Best-Practices To Keep in Mind

• Start with “What,” Proceed with “Why”: As a starting point, ask yourself this question when drafting a survey/poll – “What am I trying to achieve with this survey?” Once you have a clearer understanding of what you wish to gain from the survey, you’ll be in a better position to answer why you’re rolling out the survey in the first place.

• Keep the surveys short and simple: As per research, “52% of respondents will not spend more than three minutes filling out a survey.”

• Roll out surveys where your customers are: It is recommended that you send surveys to your users on devices they prefer, such as smartphones, tablets, etc. According to 68% of market researchers, “They use mobile surveys to engage customers.”

• Go creative: Long, drawn-out survey forms are a thing of the past. Instead, you could use more informal survey tactics like chatbots, blog comments, and social media posts to engage the users.

• Use the right customer feedback survey tool: If you wish to extract real-time insights over the course of your customer’s journey, a customer survey tool can be your best friend. For instance, Acquire live chat can help you roll out customized surveys and improve the overall customer service:

• Always A/B test your surveys: Like with everything else, testing variations of your surveys is key to gathering effective results. You should also ensure that your survey/poll works on multiple devices for wider acceptance and readability.

Survey Example #3- To Understand The Kind of Social Media Marketing You Should Be Engaging In

• Thank your customers for their feedback: The golden rule of all surveys, it is critical that you thank your customers for taking out the time to provide feedback – irrespective of the nature of the feedback.

Posting quality content on social media on a consistent basis is no joke. Neither is finding inspiration to make the posts informative, fun, and engaging. So why not ask your readers directly about what they want to read about via polls and surveys? Plus, remember that you can capture valuable data and connect with users on a more intimate and emotional level.

Here are some real-life examples of brands that are upping the fun quotient to interact with users and drive interactive engagement:

• Instagram Stories with a ‘Poll’ feature is wildly popular today as it allows users to choose their preferred answers in a matter of seconds. Not to mention, it’s fun and interactive:

Related: Instagram Marketing Tips For Business

• Sometimes, the polls can be casual and random as M&M’s post below:

• Tying back to the first point, polls can also provide tips for writing content. Take Starbucks’ example. In a poll, the brand asked customers what brewing method they wanted to learn about – coffee press or Chemex. Depending on the winning vote, the brand churned out relevant content (as shown below) to boost user engagement:

Related: Best Copywriting Tips For Small Business Owners

Key Takeaway: Surveys and polls can add an ‘exciting’ element to your content marketing strategy and add variation to your social media marketing efforts.

Survey Example #4- To Understand How Well Your Website Is Performing

Not analyzing how well your website is performing is like leaving money on the table. From understanding the functional use of the CTA buttons and analyzing the website’s usefulness to gaining insight on whether or not users can navigate the website easily and measuring the efficiency of the landing/product pages, there are a plethora of customer pain-points that can come to light with a strategically-designed survey/poll. Here are some questions you can ask:

• What are my target audience’ demographics? 
• What are their needs and wants, and is the website fulfilling the same?
• What are the challenges they might be facing when using the website? 

Here’s how Headspace surveys participants with a well-written and, more importantly, concise email. Notice how the language is empathetic and pleasing:

Related: Best Website Builders

Key Takeaway: When it comes to survey questions, there’s really not a standard questionnaire that works for companies across the board. Each survey/poll needs to be thoughtfully designed, keeping in mind the end results that you need from the user. You can also think about inserting a survey form on your website, landing page, or a newsletter to optimize your website’s efficacy.

Survey Example #5- To Evaluate A New Product/Service

Every product or service that you launch needs to address either of the following key issues – 

• Is it fulfilling your customer’s current needs?
• Is it addressing their issues and problems thoroughly and effectively?

In the same vein, one of the most sure-footed ways to get accurate and reliable answers is to ask the customers themselves (as Airbnb does):

More importantly, the brand empowers users to choose whether they’d like to give feedback on their recent stay:

Here’s another brilliant example of customer feedback based solely on product development by Slack. Notice that there’s a command within the application where users can talk about what features they would like to use. More importantly, every ticket is responded to making the customer feedback experience professional and foolproof:

Here’s another example of a survey that measure’s a brand’s advertising efficiency:

Here’s a handy tip for you: You can opt for a Net Promoter Score (NPS) when evaluating product/features to get a broader sense of user satisfaction and customer happiness:

Key Takeaway: To drive customer success and user satisfaction, gathering product/service-related feedback is important. 

Survey Example #6- To Figure Out Why Your Customer Churn Rate Is High

Understanding why some customers choose to abandon ship while others wait it out can help your brand enhance its marketing efforts and drive innovation-led product development. 

One of the best aspects of using a survey/poll is that you can quantify your objectives as well as results to see whether you’re on the right track or not. Say your customer churn rate is off the charts. In that case, your survey objective should read something like – “Lower churn rate by 2% in 6 months.” You can then ask yourself the following questions around the said goal, such as:

• Why are my customers abandoning the cart?
• Why is my customer base reducing while they’re still in the onboarding stage?
• What are my customers’ key pain-points, and how can I address them?

This survey is a combination of close-ended for specific answers and open-ended questions to build context. All in all, it focuses on understanding a customer’s experience with the hotel chain. As you can see, the survey is not superficial, and neither is it long enough for the user to get irritated and leave it halfway through. According to data, Hilton’s response rate stands at 30% for online surveys, and the abandonment rate has reduced to 6% in a year.

Key Takeaway: Surveys and polls can help highlight the roadblocks your users might be facing that may be contributing to greater churn. So if you wish to get to the root of the issue, surveys are the way to go. 

Survey Example #7- To Build Your FAQs Resource Base

Every company should empower its customers to self-serve by creating an FAQ section that is informative, easy-to-navigate, and useful. But the real question is – what if it’s not? There’s a direct and easy way to know if your knowledge base is working or not – survey your customers. Based on the answers they provide, you can make changes to your content. Hotjar’s survey is a perfect example of this:

Here’s another handy tip for you: If you’re still unsure of creating a full-fledged survey from scratch, simply comb through the company/product reviews you might be receiving on social media pages, or on your website, or in the blogs section to churn new ideas for FAQs:

Key Takeaway: All things said and done, surveys offer a fresh perspective from users – sometimes even obvious suggestions – that you might miss out on, thanks to the everyday hustle-and-bustle of conducting business. Simply put, surveys focused on FAQ pages can drive user engagement like never before.

Final Thoughts: Steer Clear of Ad-Hoc, Uninvited, & Unnecessary Surveys

“By the 20-minute mark within a survey, the quality of data and the attention of respondents greatly diminish.” – Market research firm, SSI

Here’s my two cents: There are three learnings that you cannot deny about surveys: 

One, they are ubiquitous, not extinct. 

Two, they are necessary, not optional. 

Three, they are fact-driven, not assumption-based. 

That said, what has changed is the nature of surveys and polls. They are increasingly becoming more interactive and informal in content and aesthetics. However, despite the air of casualness, they can offer in-depth insights and invaluable data into a customer’s psyche, needs, desires, the like. 

To wrap up, you can use surveys and polls to understand:

• The kind of content you should be creating.
• How to improve your overall customer service.
• The kind of social media marketing you should be engaging in.
• How well your website is performing.
• How your new product/service is faring.
• Why your customer churn rate is high.
• How to build an in-depth documentation base.

If there’s one thing that you take away from this blog, let it be this: Surveys are a robust tool that offers fact-based data as well as thought-process driven insights into what makes your customer stick or flee. Are you convinced yet? Leave your comments below.

This article is published with insights from Srushti Shah who is an ambitious, passionate and out of the box thinking woman having a vast exposure in Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire.