Here we are with another lengthy data-driven guide – this time on surveys. Based on our experiences with WatuPRO and results of our customers, there are some quite interesting conclusions that will help you be more successful with your surveys.

How To Construct The Survey

Of course the main part of your work on every survey is actually creating the questions. This is super individual and depends a lot on your specific needs, niche and goals. There are however some general tips which you should follow to increase the usefulness and the visitor-to-response ratio:

• Always collect some kind of pivot / demographic information. You need to know some basics about your respondents that you can later segment on. Typically demographics like age, sex, location, and so on. Most surveys are useful if you can break down your users on at least one criteria, usually at least 2 or 3. This is not an absolute requirement but you will almost never see a deep survey that does not segment the respondents by some kind of demographic or other pivot criteria.
• When defining the demographic questions, consider the expected volume of the responses. Of course you can’t always know in advance how many responses you are going to get. But if you are running a survey on a small site without any advertising budget or a private survey in a membership site you might be happy with a few hundred responses. In this case splitting your demographics in too many pieces wouldn’t make sense because it will give you statistically insignificant information. On the other hand a survey with hundreds of thousands responses can allow you to do super precise segmentation. For example by age – having the user type the exact age instead of selecting a range. Still, even if this case you need to think how useful the data will be in such format and how easy to read.
• Enough questions. As with other quizzes there are no strict rules here. The most important thing is that you ask enough questions to collect the data you need. Try to stick to the lower number to avoid annoying your respondents.
• Sections. Longer surveys do need to be paginated and split into question categories. This is extremely important to avoid losing user’s attention. Surveys with thematic sections tend to perform best.
• Simpler questions. Unlike knowledge quizzes which usually benefit of using versatile question types, surveys are doing much better with simpler questions. In fact one of the best performing surveys contain only single choice / multiple choice questions or a likert scale. So, stick to simplicity in most cases. Slider questions work good though.
• Quantitative questions. Surveys are used mostly to analyze volumes of data and draw conclusions. So you should in general avoid questions like essays, fill the blanks, and similar. You need responses that can be summarized and that allow you to run reports on them and probably draw charts.

This is by no means a complete list but should be enough to help you create a survey which is better than most others.

Marketing The Survey

Image by deepak pal

Ideally you will have an existing audience to run your survey on. This could be social media followers, blog subscribers, existing customers, demo users, free product users, mailing lists subscribers…

Surveys usually do not directly generate revenue so marketing them with a hard earned cash is usually not done by small businesses  and individual entrepreneurs.

When the survey is sent to an existing audience it’s also usually getting good percentage of responses. Of course only if it’s intriguing as a topic and type of questions.

PPC and regular ads are typically out of question for most of us. There are some paid services focused explicitly on surveys where each response may cost you a dollar or so. This can still be expensive if you need a couple of thousands of replies and the quality won’t be always good because the respondents are paid to take surveys. So it’s much preferred if you can get a free and organic reach to really interested participants.

Here are several  posts with ideas how to promote your survey:

• • 9 Marketing Strategies To Promote Your Research Survey – a LinkedIn post, not exactly giving you ideas where to get those visitors from. Still useful.
  • 5 ways to get the survey data you want – basic advice by SurveyMonkey.
  • 10 ways to get more responses to your next survey

If you decide to spend money on attracting participants make sure to monitor closely the quality of their responses. Quickly stop spending if it looks like you are paying for answers from bots or people who just randomly click on the answers so they “complete” the survey and get a few cents for the “work”.

Provide Some Incentives

Photo credit

Surveys are typically most useful for the one who runs them and less for the respondent. Unlike quizzes where the user learns something about them or completes a course, gets a certificate, etc, the survey respondent typically gets a thank you 🙂 And sometimes but not always they can see the result of the survey up to this moment – or later when it’s considered completed and published.

For this reason you may get low responses on surveys. Incentives help to increase the survey responses. Here are some ideas:

• Direct payment. I would avoid it. Not only because it may cost you a lot but also because people who respond to surveys to get paid have one primary motive – to get paid. They are often more interested to respond fast and get the money rather than to provide good meaningful responses.
• Discount codes. This is much better. First, you will hopefully make some sales. Second, the survey will be taken by users who are interested in your products or services. And this is what you usually want – not some general answers from the whole internet.
• Lottery prizes / giveaway. This is slightly better than making a direct payment because you’ll spend less money. Better give a free product or service rather than money. Again, mostly because you’ll attract better respondents.
• A personality result or personalized advice. Now, this is not always possible but maybe you can combine your survey with a personality result. And have it calculate some kind of a personality type or advice to the user based on their responses. Bingo! You’ll receive excellent answers and will get them for free. Think along the lines “answer this survey and find out what’s the best… for you”.
• Certification. Sometimes you can combine the survey with a knowledge test. This works best if the goal of your survey is to figure out how knowledgeable are the respondents on a given topic but may also work to collect demographic or opinions data. If you can do such a combination, the certification for the taken test is your incentive. And the best of it is that  users will answer really carefully.

If you have experience with other incentives – either as a survey runner or a respondent, please share in the comments.

How to make the survey more attractive: ask for an opinion

This is in line with incentives but not exactly. Here the incentive itself is to give an opinion 🙂 People love doing it. So surveys that ask for opinions perform best: voting surveys, surveys that evaluate trust in political figures, sport forecasts or financial forecasts, etc. Make people feel their opinion is important and they’ll be happy to answer your survey.

Even if you don’t need the opinion for your analysis it’s always a good idea to include some questions that ask for it. This won’t hurt your data but will make people eager to participate. In fact more surveys do need exactly user’s opinion: their preferences to specific products or services, the likelihood to do something, their personal habits, and so on.

Get the most of these leads

Even though you probably don’t think about the survey respondents as “leads” in fact they are. The fact that they spent the time and attention into your survey prove that they like you (or your site/company, etc) and are interested in what you have to offer. Unless you paid them to participate in the survey of course – which is why, again, I don’t like the idea to pay for survey responses.

So treat these people as leads. Ask for their email address and for agreement to contact them. One of the easiest ways to get their agreement is to promise sending them the survey findings when the analysis is done (and of course, fulfill your promise!). These people spent the time to answer the survey – of course they want to know how everyone responded to it!

Then later you can send them any kind of offers related to the survey topic. Send them another survey, incentives, anything. Use the survey as your marketing funnel for other stuff that you have to offer.

The most important ways of survey data analysis

There are a lot of very elaborated ways you can extract data from a survey. Also, you won’t need most of them 🙂 Usually unless you are running some kind of quite complicated science you’ll need some of these analysis:

• Cumulative data per question. This will show you how many and what percentage of users have selected each answer on each question. So if a question contains 3 answers you need to know how many of the respondents selected A, B, and C. This is a typical feature of most survey softwares (yes, available in WatuPRO survey bundles) and it is one of the most useful ones.
• List of answers per question. In addition to see everyone’s individual answer sheet you may want to have a look at a list of everyone’s answers on every question.
• Cross-tabulation stats. This is one of the most useful advanced analysis methods. It will show you the intersection of the different questions and answers. Said simpler, you would usually use it to see what percentages of each demographic segment of your respondents have selected the different answers on a selected question. You can of course segment on any criteria like interest, income, product used, and so on.
• Statistics per question category if your survey has different categories.
• Points collected and point averages. Not all surveys assign points to answers but sometimes this is an extremely useful method to run quantitative stats on questions or question categories. For example if you use slider questions the averages can give you insights – about customer’s satisfaction with some features or products, about the level of interest for different services, and so on.

You can find some ideas for specific survey analysis here.

Quick links: Personality Tests | Knowledge Tests | Quizzes for Marketing | Chained Quizzes | Surveys | Lead Generation

It’s always a good idea to get the most out of your investment. (If you have purchased or planning to purchase a versatile quiz software like WatuPRO you may want to think about all the possible use cases of it.)

The utilization of tests and quizzes on your site can lead to many positive outcomes like:

• Higher user engagement
• More social network promotion and inbound links
• Collecting useful data that then can be used to create high-quality linkable content
• Gaining insights about your site visitors
• Direct monetization by selling paid tests, certifications, online education
• Gains on the marketing front – quizzes are super powerful interactive method of promoting products
• And a lot more.

But let’s be a bit more specific and see how you can actually achieve this. There are various use cases of running a software for tests or surveys. Let’s elaborate:

1. Personality Tests

Usually the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions “quiz”. See a very simple example of a fun personality quiz here.

These quizzes are used mostly in psychology with the idea to identify the user’s personality: are you shy or communicative, what is the best career for you, which country should you live in, and so on.

Personality quizzes range from… well, just dumb and funny, to very serious psychological tests like Myers/Briggs type indicators. (And yes, WatuPRO is capable to create such tests. Learn how here).

Personality tests typically cause a lot of sharing on social networks because people like to talk about themselves and share their results. If done well, these quizzes often lead to a good inflow of external links to your site – which is excellent for SEO.

They also give you amazing opportunities to promote products related to the results on the quiz. Super powerful.

If you are interested to create high quality personality test(s) on your site (or why not a whole site with such quizzes), let me help you with some ideas:

• This Pinterest collection, although a bit chaotic, gives you a lot and a lot of ideas
• A collection of the best personality tests – useful for inspiration if you are willing to put more work into creating a deeper test.
• The SAPA Projects is an excellent example how serious this matter can be and how you could base a quiz on scientific research.

Take a break. We have a lot more to cover.

2. Knowledge Tests

Knowledge exam

The largest part of the customers who have purchased our plugin are using it for knowledge tests (this is not a surprise considering it has the most elaborated grading system in the WP world). And that’s probably the largest part of tests created in general.

Knowledge tests evaluate user’s knowledge or competence in various areas by assigning points to the correct answers of the questions. Although you could evaluate test based entirely on correct/incorrect answers, usually you would want to give more weight to some questions or answers. For this using points for your grading, or the percentage of points collected vs. maximum possible points could be more precise way of grading.

There are limitless ways to grade a knowledge exam: from passed/failed, to ABCDEF, numeric systems, and so on.

Knowledge tests are super powerful and can be used in many ways:

• In online education – either alone of in conjunction with an LMS. For example WatuPRO is integrated in the free Namaste! LMS in a way that lessons can require a selected exam to be completed in order to continue.
• All kinds of certification. Completing a test or tests can be considered a qualification for certain knowledge and even lead to issuing printable certificate.
• In human resources / by recruiters. Knowledge tests are often the most important part of work interviews.
• For lead generation. You can pre seed customers for various products based on their knowledge. See some ideas here.
• For providing a proper offer. For example financial service companies are often required to examine their customers in order to qualify them for some regulated services.

With a good quiz tool you can create very elaborate knowledge tests including different types of questions: single-choice, multiple-choices, free text answer questions, slider/rating, match/matrix, sortable questions, “fill the blanks”… This way your test will not only be very engaging but will also provide solid grounds for robust grading.

The more elaborated tests usually have questions in different categories and often provide results per category along with charts and a “final grade”.

3. Using Quizzes for Marketing

Photo by diego.rendeiro

While quizzes are good for marketing per se (already said: more engagement, social sharing, inbound links!), there is a very powerful way to get the most of the two types of tests listed above. It is to offer a related product or service based on the test result.

It doesn’t matter if you are building a fun quiz, a knowledge assessment, or a survey: you can always have a “result” that will invite the respondent to check a product, to receive a free report, to sign up for a newsletter, and so on. It’s very likely that you are reading this article because you have signed up for our newsletter after taking one of our demo quizzes!

Quizzes let you target your marketing offering based on the responses of the quiz taker. The “grades” (results) can be used to include specific targeted offers. Examples:

• A personality quiz can refer the people to a book/video/webinar/education based on the type of personality they received. A shy person can be offered a course for building confidence, while someone highly extrovert can be offered a completely different product.
• A knowledge test can offer the respondent further education for beginners if they don’t score well and an advanced course if they got a good result.
• A survey can suggest products or services directly depending on the interest expressed by the user.
• A test that scores different categories of questions can list different offerings for each category depending on how the user performed.
• And so on… use your imagination.

The focus here is that you are having a way to provide a really targeted offer. Much more targeted than compared to someone who is just reading an article on your site – when you don’t know for sure what exactly their intent, needs and interests are.

Now, if you combine a targeted offer in the quiz with a targeted advertising campaign, for example in Google Ads… it’s possible to get very strong results.

4. Chained Quizzes

This is a very specific type of quizzes where the next question depends on the answer of the previous question. Why is this so important? Because it allows you to give individual experience to each of your respondents instead of giving them the same questions.

Such a quiz can work as an interactive landing page for any marketing campaign or direct product sales. Users are a lot more likely to follow your call to action when you are presenting them targeted options depending on their previous answers.

Speaking about WordPress, Chained Quiz is probably the only plugin capable of doing this along with WatuPRO. Give it a try, it’s amazing how much this can increase your conversions.

Of course, there is also the option that you chain whole tests. Typically you would do it with tests that are just a few questions long. At the end of each quiz you can offer the next one depending on the achieved result/grade. If your quiz software supports automated redirection, this may happen automatically and the user may not even notice they are taking multiple tests.

Chaining quizzes can be useful in education too. Creating dependencies – when one exam can be accessed only if the previous one is completed successfully – may help gradual learning and certification.

5. Surveys

Photo by GotCredit

Surveys are a huge matter. If you are not running at least one survey, you should. Here is why:

• Surveys give you super useful insights – who are your visitors, what are they looking for, what products or services they are interested in, what you can offer them.
• Surveys are an excellent source of genuine data for research content. Regardless of what kind of a site you run: good, high quality content attracts links, search engine love, traffic, and sales. One of the easiest ways to collect real and unique data that can be used for creating a high quality research content is by running surveys. Instead of rehashing information found online, collecting data from your site visitors will give you something real to base your content on.
• Surveys are an excellent source for visualizations. You already know that infographics are one of the most powerful and attractive forms of content online.  The usual problem with creating them is having data. Well, surveys will give you data. Cheap and fast. Even a simple chart  generated by your survey plugin can have a really big impact over how your content is liked, shared, and linked.

You can go even further with surveys and run data science reports like cross-tabulation analysis both for your own use and for publishing various conclusions.

If you are looking for good tips for creating successful surveys, check out this page.

6. Use Questionnaires For Lead Generation

Although we partly covered this above, lets focus a bit more on this super important topic. How you can actually get the most of a quiz to generate leads?

1. Lead the respondent to an individualized offer. Just like you would do if you are selling a product: don’t send everyone to the same newsletter or auto responder series. Use the quiz result / grade to point the user to a laser focused marketing campaign.
2. Pre-qualify leads. If you are offering something that requires specific knowledge, or demography, location, etc, you can use a quiz or survey to pre-qualify your leads and not waste money on those who won’t convert.
3. Use for engagement. Someone who completed a relatively long quiz is a lot more likely to continue paying attention to what you have to offer. You know that once they have invested their time, they are also more likely to continue to invest in your knowledge, products, or services – and that means both time and money.

The primary reason why quizzes and surveys are so effective for lead generation is that they are  converting users who already shown interest. So after pre-qualifying them and laser focusing the further marketing effort on them you can expect very good results. Much better than these from a general marketing campaign or even a CPC campaign (proof needed here – we are working on it!).

If you are running WordPress I will obviously recommend you our tool for running quizzes, exams, and surveys – WatuPRO, because it can create all of the above test types and then some more. Hands down, it is the most powerful WordPress tool for this work.

Already tried running quizzes and can share your story? Let me know in the comments.