The Framework of Survey Design in Growth Marketing

Last week, I discussed all I learned on how to research and test for conversion optimization from the CXL Growth Marketing Mini Degree. This week, I delve into the foundations of designing effective surveys and conducting optimal A/B tests.

Survey Design Theory and Best Practices

Survey design is an essential part of growth marketing as it serves as one of the sources with growth marketers gather validated data about their product, users, and competitions.

Conducting surveys that record a high rate of responses is often a big challenge to marketing professionals and research analysts. The reason a lot of marketing research surveys don’t often receive a significant amount of relevant data that is required to develop validated insights is that a lot of times, the design processes are flawed with common but avoidable errors and inconsistencies.

How do you conduct survey researches that gather and receive relevant enormous response rates?

Let’s take a quick look into what survey design is again even though you are familiar with the definition.

Survey design is the process of creating surveys with the goal of receiving maximum insights from survey research.

It involves the planning of the whole survey project and outlining the steps to take when conducting the survey. These steps start from the formulation of the survey goals and end at the interpretation of the survey results.

A properly conducted survey helps us to:

• Understanding our audience’s attitudes towards our brands
• Evaluate new products
• Stay aware of competitors

Survey Design Strategies

Use the following strategies to design surveys that give effective market research responses.

1. Focus more on what customers want or what they want rather than what your brand wants to do or want.
2. Ensure the questionnaire is a closed-ended type. More often, a close-end research form records more responses than an open-end form because people ordinarily feel reluctant to participate in researches especially when there are little to no relevant incentives to motivate them.
3. Ask in a way that is not leading. If you are going to be conducting research with an open-end form then ensure the questions are such that only requires the audience to provide short answers and does not lead them into providing long details or writing long answers.
4. Know much about your competitors as much as you know yourself

Common Survey Design Mistakes

1. Scaling error — non-intuitive scales
2. Mixing questions of attitude with questions of behavior
3. Asking questions that focus on the brand alone rather than the audience
4. Use of technical or industry jargon
5. Too long surveys: Place your surveys in between 5 to 10 questions
6. Forcing people to answer questions
7. Seeking personal information such as email, phone numbers, etc.
8. Using an only open-ended format
9. Poor formatting and readability
10. Conducting a survey with no specific goal or purpose
11. Not keeping a neutral learning point

Conducting in House Surveys

When conducting an in-house survey, survey people who have once bought from you while also keeping the questions as short as possible.

Only ask about 10–15 questions with a sample size of at least 100. Don’t assume the product knowledge of your customers, that is, don’t assume that all of your customers know your product that much.

Always ask them what they know about you. You might be shocked to discover what some of them think you do or who you are.

Lastly, ensure to speak in the language your audience understands because people easily pick up on things.

Customer Survey via Emails

When conducting surveys via email, the following are lists of best practices to follow to see better results.

Send out surveys promptly to discover friction or the distraction they make while making a purchase or while they were performing a relevant action. Conduct the survey within the first day to 1 week that they made the purchase or performed the action.

Any survey conducted during this period ensures the questions are still fresh in their mind such that they can easily recollect their experiences. Any other time beyond this, the customer may find it difficult to remember the most important details of the journey they went through while engaging with the website.

Factors that Determine Survey Response Rate

1. Relationship with users: A survey sent to an audience you already have an existing relationship with will gain more attention and response compared to the one that is sent to a group of audiences that doesn’t know you.

Having a relationship with the audience or users may be simple business relationships such as the audience being your fans on social media platforms or being part of your email lists etc.

2. Incentives: People tend to be reluctant towards committing their time to respond to research surveys. To get people to respond to a survey, ensure to add some form of incentives that get the audience motivated to fill the survey and provide their honest answers.

Examples of incentives that can be offered with participating in a research survey could be giving out an Amazon gift card, including the participants’ names as contributors to the published reports, or acknowledging their inputs and sharing the results of the research with them.

Offering money as an incentive may flaw the entire research results as monetary incentives will only attract not only the right respondent but also the wrong respondents.

Generally Ideal Questions to Ask in a Survey

The only time you should use a closed-end question form is probably when you want to segment users with their responses. But when you plan to make improvements on the product such as features or pricing, etc. then the best type of question to ask is an open-ended question.

Additionally, clearly define the purpose of the survey to the respondents as this shows them the goal and importance of the survey and encourages them more to want to participate in the exercise.

Conclusion

When designing the survey questions, ask respondents questions such as the following:

• Ask them about themselves
• Ask what made them sign up or buy the product
• Ask what kind of doubts or hesitations they had that stopped or could have them from buying
• Ask how many websites they had visited before finally landing on your website

To increase the survey response rate, shorten survey completion time and survey length, send email reminders to respondents, provide incentives, focus only on the most important questions and do away with nice-to-have questions.