How to Conduct a Survey in 5 Simple Steps

Collect Valuable Data

Surveys give you access to direct and specific information from people who matter to you. As such, they can tell you a lot about what you are doing right, what you need to improve, and where you need to focus your attention.

Learn About Your Audience

Surveys teach you about your audience. They show you who they are, what makes them tick, and how they see the slice of the world that is relevant to you.

Create Unique Content

Surveys provide unique and valuable material for rich content. In fact, in many cases, the results can be as fascinating to your audience as they are to you.

Build Strong Relationships

Whether you aim to generate leads, raise awareness, or simply retrieve data, once the survey is done, you and your audience have gone through something together. After all, you’ve shown interest in them and they’ve gotten involved – you can build on that.

Building a good survey is a process. So, here’s a step-by-step guide that will help you do it right:

Step 1: Make a Plan

Set Your Goal

Define your motivation. In other words, what inspired you to conduct a survey? And what do you want to know and why? The answers to these questions will influence what you ask, who you ask, and how you ask it.

Define Your Target Audience

Who are the people you want to hear from? And what do you already know about them? Find out everything you can: where they hang out online and when, what interests them, which causes are closest to their hearts, and what cultural references could be relevant to them. This will influence your tone of voice, design, sharing strategy, and incentive plan.

Figure Out Your Sample Size

The sample size is the number of people who need to answer your survey in order for the results to be meaningful. In other words, how many members of your target audience do you need to reach to be sure your survey results accurately represent your entire audience?

• Population size – how many people belong to the group you want to learn about? For example, if your target audience is 40-44-year-olds in the US, your population size would be roughly 20 million.

• Confidence level – how many times would you get the same answers if you conducted your survey multiple times? The most commonly used confidence level is 95%. It’s also the industry standard.

• Margin of error – how different will the results you get be from the results you would get from your entire audience? Up to a certain point, your margin of error will shrink as your sample group grows. For instance, if you’re surveying around 50 people, your margin of error will be about 14%, but if you have 1000 respondents, your margin of error will be roughly 3%.

Here’s a calculator you can use to determine your ideal sample size.

Find the Right Time

When is the right time to launch your survey and for how long should it run? Well, once you know who your audience is, and how many of them you need to reach, you can determine the timing quite easily. You should also consider the context of your survey. For example, if it’s about Christmas gifts, your response rate will be higher during the holiday season.

Step 2: Build Your Survey

Now that you have a clear picture of your goals and audience you can start building your survey. There are many different types of survey questions one can ask: open-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, yes/no questions, rating scale questions, and more. Different questions suit different topics, needs, and audiences. Following are a few tips to keep in mind:

Be Concise

Short surveys have a greater chance of being completed. So, ask only what you really need to know.

Be Clear

Confusion leads to frustration, which leads to drop-offs. So, keep your questions short, simple, and clear. Additionally, build your survey gradually, starting with the easiest questions and building up to the more complex ones.

Be Nice

People will stay with you if they’re having fun. So, consider your audience’s convenience and be friendly. You can also make your survey beautiful by using cool and relevant images and color schemes. We’ve created dozens of survey templates that can help you get started.

Be Respectful

If built correctly, a survey can feel like a personal conversation. So, use skip logic to direct respondents through different question paths based on their answers. In addition, make sure you’re not asking any redundant questions, and that there are no gaps or overlaps in your structure. It’s worth the effort.

Be Bold

If it makes sense in the context of your survey, take your relationship with your audience to the next level by adding a lead generation form.

Step 3: Test and Iterate

Once you’ve built your survey, you may want to test it on a small sample of your target audience. You can use our visual analytics dashboard to see what works and what doesn’t. This will give you an opportunity to make some improvements before launching.

You could, for example, check how many people opened it, where they dropped off, and how long the process took them. As a result, you may find there are questions that could be made clearer or shorter. Ask yourself whether there is anything you should leave out, if you should add some images, or rearrange the order.

Step 4: Share Your Survey

Now that your survey is ready, it’s time to share it. At this point, you should remind yourself who you’re dealing with. To do so, go back to your goals, sample size, and most importantly your target audience. Where would you have the greatest chances of getting their attention?

The options are endless. For example, you can make it a landing page survey, a Facebook survey, or a WhatsApp survey, share a link to it on social media, invite people to your personal survey page on our site, or embed the survey on your website.

The fact that you can receive live updates makes it easy to follow the response rate because you can see early on if your sharing strategy is working. If not, don’t panic, just try a new channel or a different time. You’ll figure it out eventually.

You may want to incentivize your audience to participate in the survey. In some cases, your mere interest in their opinion is enough of an incentive. But sometimes, offering a giveaway or the opportunity to participate in a prize-bearing competition can go a long way.

You could also promise to share the results and conclusions with your respondents before you make them public. Be creative, just make sure that the incentive doesn’t create bias. That would be counterproductive…

Step 5: Present the Results

You’ve done it! You know how to conduct a survey. Your questions are out there and people are responding. At this point, you’ve probably clicked the refresh button on your survey dashboard a hundred times, getting a rush of adrenalin whenever an answer comes in.

Once you reach your full sample group – and you will – it’s time to put on your investigator’s cap and look at the data you have collected:

Check Your Goals

Go back to your goals and motivations in order to recall why you decided to ask what you asked.

Examine the Data

Analyze your visual dashboard for different perspectives on the results. As you’ll see, there are loads of visualizations there to learn from.

Reach Insights

What have you learned from your survey? Do you have any new questions to ask or action items to implement? Formulate your conclusions based on the data, and apply or report them internally.

Get Creative

You can tell so many captivating stories with data. Use your insights and data visualizations to create rich, original, and useful content based on the results.

Every End Is Also a Beginning

Now that you have successfully concluded your survey you can start on an even more challenging and fascinating journey – implementing all the insights you have collected.