If your enterprise has made the wise decision to harness the immense marketing potential of online surveys, then it is only natural that you will want to utilize their full potential from the very start. Here are a few points to ensure that your online surveys follow what industry experts consider to be best practices in this field:

First principles

It is essential to have a well-designed online survey, but even before this, there are key decisions to be made. Be sure to know what goals you have in mind before making any move toward a computer screen – be sure what you wish to learn from the survey and what you expect to do with the data you harvest. This will itself begin to show the way when it comes to deciding what questions you wish to ask. You should also be aware of the importance of continuous feedback, using the right marketing software to track responses and monitor trends.

Designing the survey

There are numerous hints and tips concerning the proper design of an online survey and rightly so, because this is probably the most important part of getting it right. A great way to get off to a flying start is to take advantage of the excellent templates available from experts such as www.dotsurvey.com. Once you are well underway, it is simply a matter of observing the golden rules: Keep the survey brief; avoid open-ended questions, keep things simple and try to gather appropriate personal data about respondents, to make future online marketing even more effective.

Unleashing your survey’s power

Even the best-designed online survey needs to be well implemented to reap its rewards, and this is why you should thoroughly put it through its paces using test groups – drawn from your own staff or from outside – to do the survey, and by completing it yourself. Offer respondents incentives such as discount vouchers for completing the survey and make sure that your survey software can spot negative feedback immediately and act on it, by sending a personalized email to the customer in question.

Bearing all of the above in mind, there is no reason why your first online survey should not yield excellent results!