Do you feel overwhelmed and unsure where to begin with your market research survey tools? You don’t have to be. You can quickly and easily create amazing surveys with the right set of tools. Try some of these out and you’ll be able to get so much more out of your surveys.
What Is an Online Survey?
Market research provides invaluable direction to almost every aspect of a business, especially product or service design, marketing, and sales. Solid data on who your customers are, what they like and hate, and how they feel about things important to your company can literally shape how you run your business. One of the core mechanisms for gathering this kind of data is the online survey, which today has become available via multiple channels, including, of course, your website, but also email, digital and physical events, and social media. Careful use of an online survey can provide data for any aspect of your business that intersects with an audience, whether customers or partners. That can include digital marketing campaigns, customer service and help desk, employee satisfaction, political polling, event feedback, and many other purposes.
To a survey taker, a survey may seem like a simple progression of questions. However, while some surveys can be as short as a single question, others can be complex webs of question blocks and conditions that sometimes include actual scripting. And even if they don’t go quite that far, many surveys call for navigation rules and other choices that can provide not only a better experience for respondents but also for more precise data collection, which can be critical when that data later transitions to business analysis tools. Fortunately, the latest survey tools focus strongly on combining this positive experience with ever more sophisticated data collection and parsing features. The result is that online surveys have remained among the most popular tools used by market researchers for the last several years.
Online Survey Tool Components
When considering an online survey tool, one great way to get acquainted with a product’s capabilities is by taking its free version for a spin. These often allow the creation of simple surveys, some of which will even allow unlimited questions and respondents. However, if you’re just trying to get some consensus from a group of friends or co-workers regarding a lunch restaurant preference, then you may not need to wade into the waters of dedicated online survey tools because simple polls are already built into Facebook and Twitter. Google Forms is also a free and easy-to-use web product from the omnipresent entity that is ideal for sending out a few simple questions and charting the results—or even tracking them in Google Sheets.
Virtually all modern online survey tools include at least three main components: questionnaire design, distribution, and reporting. More on each of these components below:
1. Questionnaire Design. This is the section on which different types of questions are added, edited, and arranged; answer choices are provided, and logic is constructed. Some questionnaire designers have the ability to import skeletal questionnaires from Microsoft Word. However, they offer tools that are commonly used among survey designers. Most products include skip logic, which is the ability to skip over certain parts of a survey and continue at a future question. For example, if respondents answers a phone ownership question saying they have an iPhone, then you might want to skip a question that followed it that asks for their phone brand since you already know it’s Apple.
Some products also include display logic, which is the ability to show or hide a question or section of a survey based on conditions that occurred before it. This can require far less upfront planning, although a few products in our review roundup implemented it very poorly, preventing question order from changing after setting it up. On the other hand, some packages that can accommodate particularly long and complex surveys can divide questions into sets or blocks; this can make it much easier to keep track of questions that pertain to a similar subtopic, for example.
Other tools that provide for more flexibility include piping, which is the ability to insert information from previous questions. For example, if a respondent had a Samsung phone in one question, then a follow-up question could be personalized by using that information. It could be phrased as, “You said you had a Samsung phone. What influenced that purchase?” as opposed to simply, “What influenced the purchase of your phone brand?”
Another aid to smarter survey design is “masking” or “carry-forward” answers. For example, if one were to ask the same respondents to select the top three reasons why they chose a Samsung phone, then there might be another question in which one asks them to rank only the three features they chose.
Often, question-building facilities will have options for customizing the look of the survey via themes, while at other times this will be a separate section of the tool. There will also often be a facility for previewing or testing the survey.
I tended to emphasize the questionnaire designer in my online survey tool reviews. All surveyed products can provide at least one survey link and export their data for further analysis beyond their own reporting features. However, there is no real alternative to the user interface (UI) or functionality of a survey package’s questionnaire editor.
2. Distribution. Once a questionnaire is complete, it is ready to be let out into the world or at least into the small part of it you wish to survey. At the very least, all packages will provide a web link that can be posted on a website or social media. Some packages will go the extra step by providing direct links into a range of social media networks, and some will include integrated contact managers and email campaign trackers. While this can make it easier to track how particular respondents answered in a non-anonymous survey, many offerings will require extra payment once an email list gets too large, whereas generic links can be shared with no respondent limit.
Another way survey packages can make it easier to track different groups of respondents is via multiple “collector” links. These are simply different links to the same survey that can be broken out in analysis later. For example, if you wanted to field a survey to both Facebook and Twitter users, then posting different collector links on each network would let you track from which social network different respondents came.
3. Reporting. As survey responses come in or after a survey is complete, you’ll want to see how people responded. All products have the ability to see how individual respondents answered all questions. They can also generate at least basic bar and pie charts to provide simple visualization along with some way to export both the data (often in a spreadsheet-ready form) and the charts [often in a format such as PDF or Microsoft PowerPoint. More advanced products can augment these charts with various measures such as averages and response count, and then filter the results based on the responses to different questions. Or they can produce crosstabs, share customized reports with colleagues, and even dip into more analyses that require a bit of statistics expertise.
In addition, some of the advanced packages include functionality such as support for embedding HTML into questions, using their own scripting language or JavaScript to customize functionality and appearance, and integrations with a number of other enterprise tools—notably Salesforce—by using their own application programming interface (API). Typically, this level of access is available only at the highest pricing tier.
Indeed, these web apps are available with multiple (typically three) pricing plans and generally offer significant discounts if access is paid for one year in advance. A key feature or even question type that the product supports may not be available in a pricing tier that matches your budget even if the survey package supports it. Unfortunately, some products have feature list comparisons among their pricing tiers that are long enough to induce dizziness, so it’s worth a call or email inquiry to the company to ensure that a package meets your requirements at a specific plan spending level.
That said, with surveys often being iterative projects, it is sometimes difficult to anticipate this in advance, so also inquire whether it is possible to upgrade or downgrade. In general, I looked at feature sets that tended to be available at two pricing tiers: basic tiers at approximately $300 per year and advanced tiers at approximately $1,000 per year. However, there are bargains to be found among the field, particularly if you’re willing to endure some UI or feature compromises.
Here then are the best survey tools, to allow you to reach out to your customers and improve your understanding not just of what they want, but how to deliver a better business experience to them.
1. SurveyMonkey
The leading survey tools provider
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Free to start+100 expert templates+Can collate online, or on mobile
REASONS TO AVOID
-Has seen successive price hikes
One of the most successful survey solutions around with over 40 million registered customers, SurveyMonkey offers a comprehensive questionnaire building solution and metric analysis tools.
It allows those without any coding skills to create complex question sets and then process the responses easily and efficiently.
You can sign up for free and create a survey within minutes. However, you can’t access the data collected in CSV or Excel XLS until you’ve signed up for a paid option. And the price goes up more if you expect more than 1000 responses per month or want to use any of the sophisticated branching and pipeline features.
A number of pricing tiers are available, with Team Advantage being the cheapest. This allows control over survey sharing, team analysis, shared asset library, custom graphics, as well as easy data exporting.
The next tier, Team Premier, adds features such as benchmarks, industry tools, and multilingual surveys. The Enterprise plan offers extra security and compliance features, as well as admin management and migration as required.
2. Typeform
Personalized customer survey tools
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Customers love it+Scalable pricing+Excellent customer service
Where other survey tools focus on how complicated a questionnaire can be, or how much data you can extract, Typeform takes a wholly different approach.
Its focus is user interaction, believing that the way to get the best responses is to engage the end user and through that get better responses. The Typeform methodology appears to work well, getting on average four times the completion rate over what the industry considers standard.
Service begins with the Essentials package, which offers a basic range of features. Upgrade to the Professional plan and not only do you get up to 5,000 responses but also unlimited logic jumps as well as conversion tracking and HubSpot integration. However, if paid yearly the Professional plan is discounted.
Each of these is restricted to a single user, though Enterprise deals are available.
3. JotForm
An easy to use form builder
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REASONS TO BUY
+Easy to use+Inexpensive
REASONS TO AVOID
-Limited technical supportAdvertisement
JotForm is an online web and email survey building solution that aims to undercut Typeform while being even easier to use.
A coding-free solution that most marketing people should be able to master quickly and generate the leads or feedback that they need.
In the past 12 years, JotForm has built a customer base of 2 million regular customers, creating forms in 177 countries and 12 languages.
A Start plan is free to use, and offers up to 100 submissions, 100MB of online storage, as well as 5 forms and 1,000 form views. Paid plans – when paid yearly – start with the Bronze and increases monthly submissions to 1,000, and as well as storage space to 10GB, as well as 25 forms and 10,000 views.
The Silver plan introduces HPIAA compliance as well as increasing views to 10,000, storage to 100GB, up to 100 forms, and unlimited views. The Gold plan increases submissions to 100,000, 1TB of storage, and unlimited forms and views.
4. AskNicely
Survey tools with built-in NPS
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REASONS TO BUY
+Integrations+Good support team+NPS solution
REASONS TO AVOID
-Not always
AskNicely’s unique selling point is that it can collect live information based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is an excellent way to gauge the strength of customer relationships for a business, and this tool was designed to track that dynamic.
It also integrates with many customer workflow options that include Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Zendesk, MailChimp and Zapier amongst many others.
With these connections, surveys can target specific customer groups, and their reaction to new products and services can be collected to present real-time to live dashboards.
AskNicely used to advertise plans which were expensive but packed with features – however, the website no longer displays pricing information and instead asks for potential customers to contact them directly for a quote.
5. Formstack
A jack of all trades of form creation
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+User-friendly+Flexible solution
REASONS TO AVOID
-Can be idiosyncratic
Formstack is a good example of a survey product with a very wide remit. The online form tool allows the creation of sophisticated surveys and their responses to be data harvested. But it can also be used for straightforward customer feedback panels on websites and social media.Advertisement
Many companies use it to process leads and analyze their rate of conversion by integrating it into other sales management solutions. It works with MailChimp to enable targeted information gathering and feedback from existing customer databases.
As a survey tool, it works well enough, though it doesn’t have the templates that some competitor products offer.
Costing has four levels; Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. The Bronze package offers a single user solution with basic forms and no application integration. At the other end of this scale, the Platinum plan has a ten user license with the scope for 1,000 forms and 100,000 submissions per month.
6. Google Forms
Simple and affordable survey tools
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Free+Easy to use
REASONS TO AVOID
-Very limited template types-Can’t easily track users
Many business people don’t need anything exotic or complicated. Maybe a simple form to ask their customers if they enjoyed the last seminar and how to make it better is sufficient.Advertisement
For them, the free to use Google Forms is a perfectly adequate tool that requires little skill or experience to use, and is available for free as a personal edition or as part of the G Suite for business platform.
Responses are stored automatically into Google Sheets, allowing them to be easily transferred to an Excel spreadsheet or a database later.
The key weakness of Google Forms is that unless recipients have a Google Account and are willing to log in with it, they can fill out a survey multiple times.
As it is free before you spend big, it might be worth seeing if it will do enough, or at least hint what bought product features you might want.
Choosing an online survey platform
A major difference between traditional market research platforms and the latest generation of online surveys is the amount of information they can extract from open-ended questions and unstructured language data. Such data is critical for capturing the kinds of free-flowing thoughts from the respondent that yield the most relevant customer insights. Online surveys that use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have streamlined delivery of these kinds of high-value insights and make them available immediately, without any post-processing or further data manipulation.
Historically, to hear the voice of customer at scale, researchers have asked closed-ended multiple-choice questions in surveys rather than open-ended ones. The former is easier to tabulate than having to read and organize free-text answers, but it dramatically reduces the depth of the resulting data. As an example, a streaming music service wanted to understand consumer behavior but could only glean minimal information by using traditional close-ended survey approach. Only when the company converted the survey to open-ended questions about why respondents listened to music could it start describing their customers in more meaningful behavioral and attitudinal terms ranging from the deeply spiritual (“I connect with God through music”) to the practical and behavioral (“Music allows me to focus while I’m working”).Advertisement
Without AI technology, projects like this music survey with 10,000 participants might require days of manual data review, cleaning and organizing and still come up short on insights. In contrast, the next generation online surveys use AI and NLP to automatically perform a first-pass clean-up of text answers, in real time. Some platforms even use respondents’ collective intelligence to further validate and classify language data by interacting with it while it is being collected. Within a few minutes, researchers have a treasure trove of unfiltered and organic sentiments in respondents’ own voice, and in real-time.
An important added benefit of such a gamified interactive process is that respondents enjoy it more. More engaged and attentive respondents in turn result in higher-quality responses. Furthermore, the statistically validated qualitative data can be used in quantitative models, such as net promoter score (NPS), segmentation, or pricing studies, where natural text data can now become categorical variables in quantitative models.
The combination of AI and NLP technologies that smartly integrate into online surveys is making lasting inroads into the traditional market research toolkit. They are moving the insights industry toward free-flowing natural conversations with respondents, at speed and at scale. This is creating an opportunity for researchers to integrate unstructured customer data more directly into insights and statistical models that support them.
Conclusion
You probably already know that market research is important to your business. But you may not know exactly what market research questions to ask. And if you’re like me, you certainly don’t enjoy sitting in focus groups and asking (sometimes uncomfortable) questions. Thankfully there is a much better way — you can use online survey tools to ask people to fill in a survey for you and then get the results in the form of a report at the end! Just imagine all the time and money you can save and how much insight and knowledge this provides you with.