The Art of Asking Questions: Tips for Creating Engaging Surveys

Creating the correct questions and finding the right language to use is the most challenging aspect of surveying. Understanding the psychology of your target audience is necessary to answer your question. Your question’s wording is essential. It calls for ability, aptitude, and practice—lots of practice. So let’s impart our experience and offer some pointers and best practices to assist you in creating better survey questions, which will significantly increase survey response rates. 

How poor surveys affect the findings

Even though poorly worded survey questions might hurt your efforts and potentially distort your findings, especially in single-question surveys, they can also assist you in achieving your goals. Weak questions can range from those perplexing respondents to biased ones or sway them to give a specific answer.

Weak survey questions can lower response rates and make it more challenging to collect valid data. Simple multiple-choice questions might be the cornerstone for creating practical survey questions that provide reliable data. The bottom conclusion is that you must get it right if you’re running an online survey with only one question.

To increase the legitimacy of your polls in the eyes of the respondents, use customization features. You may ensure your target audience will recognize the questionnaire by designing it with your logo, brand colors, or a unique topic.

1. Describe the survey’s goal.

You must establish the aim of your survey questions before you even consider writing them. The objective of the survey should be obvious, doable, and pertinent. You could want to know why customer involvement is decreasing amid the sales process. Then, you may state as your objective, “I want to understand the key factors that cause engagement to dip in the middle of the sales process, including both internal and external elements.”

You may want to comprehend post-sale consumer happiness. If so, your survey’s objective can be: “I want to understand how customer satisfaction is influenced by customer service and support post-sale, including through online and offline channels.” The purpose is to develop a clear, quantifiable, pertinent survey goal. Doing this ensures that your questions are relevant to your objectives and that the data you collect can be compared to them.

2. Be clear of difficult queries

Readability is increased by conciseness. It’s preferable to use fewer words. Hiring a professional copywriter could be a smart option if you struggle with writing. They will review the questions and check that each word is properly located. Additionally, they have a good eye for catching any typos or grammatical mistakes you could have made because they seriously undermine the validity of the survey. You may also use one of our professionally designed survey templates that market researchers produced.

3. Don’t ask inquiries unless you are certain of the answers.

It seems very clear. It is! Yet many polls defy this rule, particularly those that focus on customer happiness. Through social media, customer relationship management systems, and loyalty programs, businesses already have a wealth of information about their target market, but they seldom use this information in surveys. Consider how frequently you’ve been prompted to provide your name, age, and gender in a survey. By now, I’m sure most businesses know who their clients are!

Our main message is to avoid filling out surveys with pointless questions to which you already know the answers. Please avoid asking respondents to mention their most recent purchase because most retail establishments keep track of everything they buy. By eliminating any pointless inquiries, you free up time and space for inquiries that will add something fresh and worthwhile to the conversation. Keep in mind that the duration of the survey is the main cause of respondent churn.

4. Avoid requesting two things at once.

Both confusing respondents and influencing their responses are detrimental. In both situations, they’ll select an answer that doesn’t accurately reflect their tastes and ideas.

The double-barreled inquiry is a frequent offender in the bewilderment department. Respondents are tasked with simultaneously evaluating two different items. For instance, “How would you rate our product quality and customer service?”

Product dependability and customer service are two different issues. Including both in one question may cause the respondent to analyze only one or ignore it entirely. In any case, receiving a helpful or pertinent response will be challenging. Despite your products’ high level of dependability, a respondent’s thoughts are currently focused on a recent negative customer service encounter.

Fortunately, this is a simple problem to solve. You can ask each subject separately in a closed-ended question, such as “How would you rate our customer service?” or “How trustworthy do you think our product is?”

With this method, you can see where you need to catch up or surpass consumer expectations and identify issue areas.

5. Make each inquiry matter.

Every question should directly contribute to achieving the goal of your survey questionnaire, which is to gather crucial information. Aim for survey replies relevant to your study objectives and that each question offers value. Ask, for instance, if your participant’s specific age or residence state is important to your findings. If not, skip it to save time for you and your respondents.

It’s ideal to organize your survey by deciding what information you need to gather, and only then should you write your questions. You can also use multiple-choice questions to elicit a range of replies that offer more detail than a simple yes or no. There are shades of gray sometimes. Check out Survey Questions 101 for a closer look at the technique and art of creating survey questions.

6. Disaggregate lengthy matrix survey questions

Multiple-choice questions arranged in a matrix are excellent for gathering many questions on a single subject. They are simple to write for the survey developers. Since the scales and response options are consistent across all questions, respondents find them typically simple to read and react to.

Still, use caution. Matrix questions tend to grow quite long and wide very rapidly due to their visual presentation. This might not seem like a major difficulty on a desktop, but on a tablet or phone (1 in 4 respondents use a mobile device), it is clearly a problem. Another factor contributing to mobile responders leaving the survey is having to scroll down too far. So be careful to keep the number of matrix questions to a minimum. Before going live, test your survey on the phone. If necessary, divide any difficult matrix problems into two or more independent questions.

7. Add ‘Don’t know’ or ‘Not applicable’ to the list of answer possibilities.

Multiple choice questions can be made more flexible by allowing respondents to submit their own answers or simply stating that they are unsure of the solution by adding ‘Don’t know’ or ‘Not Applicable.’ Respondents can add their own comments under “Other,” which provides a fantastic opportunity for business learning. In any event, these choices guarantee an acceptable response for everyone, improving the survey data’s quality.

8. One question at a time

While it’s crucial to keep your survey as brief and straightforward as possible, it does not need to repeat any questions. More information should be crammed into a single question to avoid confusion and inaccurate answers.

Examine your survey’s questions more closely if they contain the word “and” because this might signify that they have two components. Which of these cell phone service companies offers the best customer care and dependability? This is a challenge since a responder may believe that one provider is more dependable, but another offers superior customer service.

How to create a survey for you 

Do you want to perform market research, audience research, business lead generation, idea testing, or research for a paper? Why venture elsewhere? With Survey Maker, you may choose from various question types, including multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions. Make sure your survey has a distinct look and feel to match the branding and design of your website. You may include surveys anywhere on your website, including in your articles, pages, and sidebars. You may also set up your surveys to show up in reaction to specific triggers, such as the depth of the scroll or the amount of time spent on a page.

Survey plugin WordPress is a powerful yet user-friendly WordPress plugin for collecting and evaluating data from a particular population. Add the survey’s shortcode to your website after creating a list of questions and specifying the choices for each one. Then start receiving survey replies!

Create surveys for your website with this WordPress plugin. It is a great tool with many choices, including 22 different sorts of inquiries. Think about the User History, Conditional Results, and Emails, and Send Mail To Users’ shortcodes. In such instances, your website offers Multi-Page surveys, Logic Jump, Unlimited Surveys and Submissions, and Submission Analytics (Charts).

Why should you choose our WordPress survey plugin above others? They are merely experts at making surveys! This company’s skilled development team is putting a lot of effort into creating a feature-rich, essential survey builder that will perfectly meet your needs. The survey plugin offers a variety of options that may be used. Check out the more useful and effective plugins we’ve created using a related methodology: Create personality tests maker and polls.