Learn how to conduct a survey using these five simple steps

Are you wondering how to conduct a survey? If so, here are the five things that you will need to do:

Surveys are useful when you need to make an informed decision that may increase sales, improve your internal workflow or modify your customer base profile.

Overall, conducting surveys helps you discover information regarding the opinions and preferences of a specific demographic. Valuable information like this can help you understand your customers better.  

Understanding the need to conduct surveys is one thing, but knowing how to conduct your own survey is an entirely different challenge. Asking the right questions is key to collecting the information that you want. Asking those questions in the right way is also important. Accomplishing both within your surveys may be more difficult than you would expect. SurveyMonkey makes it easy for survey-makers by providing a catalogue of sample templates for a variety of use cases.

Related reading: Types of survey research methods

The utilisation of surveys can enable you to gain a better understanding of your employees, customers, products, business and competitors. If you have a product or service that no one is buying, perhaps you’re not selling to the right people, or maybe you have a faulty product. Maybe you have a product or service that everyone wants, but it’s not selling. In this case, the problem might be internal. Conducting surveys in the right way can help you gain insight into such issues. 

Related reading: Survey vs. questionnaire: differences and use cases

The first thing you should do before writing a survey is to be clear in your mind why you’re sending it out in the first place. You should ask yourself what type of insights you are looking for and what would help you validate your decisions. This will affect your question types and give you the most accurate data.

For example, let’s suppose that you want to know what people think about milk. The first thing you need to have clear in mind is why you want to know what people think about milk? Is it because you are a dairy farmer who wants to know how many new cows to buy this year? Or is it because you are a drug company gauging the demand for a medicine for lactose-intolerant people? Or is it because you want to market your new soya milk most effectively?

Tip: Create a list of questions about your business that you need to know the answers to. Making a list of any problems that your company may have would also be useful.

To pick the best way to design and distribute your survey, you should decide who you’ll be asking to fill it out. Decide who your target demographic is before you make any decisions about your survey. Do you have more than one demographic? If so, you might require more than one survey.

For example, the questions that an athletic clothing company asks may differ depending on whether they are aimed at males or females. That might mean asking different questions and applying skip logic in your surveys; alternatively, you could send entirely different surveys. 

There are so many options to consider when trying to pinpoint a demographic. Speculating is one option, but it might turn out to be an expensive one if you’re wrong. SurveyMonkey is a great tool to help you build an audience panel that is able to provide you with the answers and results that you truly need.  

Related reading: The complete probability sampling guide

Once you’ve decided who you’re going to ask, the next step involved in conducting a survey is to ensure that you have enough people to ask. Calculating the number of people who you need to respond to your survey (known as the ‘sample size’ in the survey world) will ensure that any analyses you run on your collected data form a strong basis for good decision making. This ‘sample’ of people needs to be big enough to be an accurate estimate of your target demographic. Try our margin of error calculator. 

For example, if you’re asking men in the UK how often they wear ties, enough men in the UK need to respond so that their answers represent what men living the UK generally think. So how many is enough? Well there are some 33 million men in the UK, so to estimate a population of that size you’ll need to survey 385 men living there. Not sure how big your population is? In general, we recommend a default sample size of 400 people. (If you want to know more about the mathematical magic behind these numbers, check out these tips on finding your sample size.)

Selecting the right audience panel is related to the product or service that you’re selling. That product or service might be regionally specific. For instance, sunscreen products will have higher sales on the west coast of North America and in Australia than in Great Britain and the North American Midwest. So, for optimal results regarding sunscreen products, it’s best to survey people who live in non-seasonal regions. 

Tip: How many people from each region should you include in an audience panel? This is where SurveyMonkey can assist. Create a survey with this sample size calculator to determine the size of your panel. 

Exactly when you choose to send out your survey can have a big impact on who ends up responding. This can cost you money, as incorrect survey-launch timing may decrease the percentage of people who respond to your survey. The survey-launch timing may also change the answers that you obtain, which can, in turn, change the decisions that you make. Not sure exactly when the right people might be around? Collecting survey responses for at least a week can ensure that you’re pulling in a broad range of people and opinions.

For example, it’s likely that surveys about designer dress rental services will yield a bigger response in the days surrounding the BAFTAs than at other times of the year. Alternatively, if you’re trying to reach 18–21 year olds who like to go out to nightclubs, sending a survey out on a Friday night is a bad idea as they’ll probably be out. The timing of surveys can also influence the answers that you receive. It’s likely that identical surveys sent out at 9am and 9pm about how tasty people think curries are will not only to be answered by different people but also yield different answers. Similarly, a survey about how much someone wants to quit their job will yield different answers on a Monday and a Friday.

Learning how to conduct surveys requires more than just working out why it’s necessary. Design and distribution is another important step. Get additional ideas about survey creation, such as themes and colours. Let’s revisit some of the best practices that will help you to create the ideal survey: 

Having the right survey software to guide you through crafting the best survey for the information that you need in order to improve your business is key. SurveyMonkey is the world’s leading survey platform because we answer more than 20 million questions daily. Plus, we make it easy by providing you with sample questions and pre-built surveys. 

Your team can offer a fresh perspective that you may not have considered. Get the most out of your survey by including management in the survey-building process to add more value. It’s easy to collaborate on surveys as a team.

If you don’t have any respondents for your surveys, you can build a custom audience panel. This is especially useful if you’re conducting market research. SurveyMonkey Audience has a trusted panel of respondents who are sourced from more than 130 countries across the globe. Alternatively, if you know who you are sending your survey to – such as customers or employees – you can import those contacts directly into SurveyMonkey for response collection, or you can rely on one of our many integrations. 

With the overload of information that is readily available from mobile devices, attention spans can be short. That’s why it’s helpful to create alluring questionnaires. Graphics and multimedia certainly help to keep people’s interest. Make surveys more engaging with these 5 things.

Age, education, gender, income, marital status and ethnicity are the most common types of demographic data collected. It’s best practice to consult an expert who knows how to ask these questions in an inclusive way. Ensure that you add an option for people who don’t feel comfortable answering such questions. For instance, instead of asking how old a person is, provide a range of options that include the option for “Prefer not to answer”. 

The wording of open-ended questions needs to be precise and concise. Asking a question such as “What do you like most about this product?” could result in a long-winded, unfocused response that doesn’t offer any value. Open-ended questions should be used when you’re looking for an opinion about a specific subject. For instance, “What can we do to improve Product X?” narrows down the response and provides relevant feedback. Also, phrasing questions in a way that encourages short, one- or two-word answers is helpful when it’s time to analyse the data.

Related reading: Get better feedback more often with suggestion forms

Closed-ended questions typically require binary answers like “yes” or “no”. This form of questioning is most helpful when collecting demographic information. Offering a select list, radio buttons and tick boxes is beneficial for questions requiring longer answers. It’s also a nifty way to keep answers that might otherwise require longer answers short.  

Once you’ve created a strategic questionnaire with methodical and precise questions for a select demographic audience, it’s time to distribute it. Here, you have options:

Related: 5 common survey question mistakes that will ruin your data

The survey has been completed and distributed to a select audience panel. Now, the responses will come in and the real work will begin.

Survey results start to arrive almost immediately. Suddenly, you have a large amount of data. It might be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be if you’re all set up and ready to receive it. Create a table to analyse your information in order to provide worthwhile insights. Prepare a spreadsheet or use a survey template to organise and manage your survey results.

Start by keeping track of the total number of views and responses. Other metrics will depend on your survey questions. Depending on your business goals, the way in which you utilise your survey results can benefit your company in many ways.

While it’s ultimately down to you how to utilise your survey results most effectively, the best plan of action is to write up a report of your analysis. Next, you should address the feedback reflecting concerns about your business. Once you’ve addressed those concerns, you should follow up with another survey to determine whether the changes that were implemented made a difference.

Now you have these five steps in your arsenal, the challenge of how to conduct a survey should be less daunting! Just make sure that go through these steps diligently. After all, each one of them can influence the responses you get back and the decisions you end up making!