You have been toying with the idea of launching a new product for a while now, and you’re wondering what your customers will think of it when it comes out. You can’t just push it out to the market and see how it goes because it might turn out to be a flop. Why risk the disaster of investing in a product that’s going to fail when you can avert it with one survey?
For many, surveys are about passing countless leaves of print to random strangers and collecting them for a grand tedious sifting session after they’ve been filled. This is the picture that comes to many minds; not surprisingly, it scares a lot of people off from doing the survey thing. Some businesses may outsource surveying to more daring individuals and companies, but it’s not always certain that the contract survey conductors will make an honest job of it.
Thankfully, you actually don’t need to print tons of questionnaires and sweat your way to getting them filled. There are online tools you can use to create and distribute surveys across multiple channels to respondents. Think stitching up a questionnaire in a few minutes and sending it to numerous people over unrestricted distances, at the click of a button. The great thing is, you can do this for free.
These are five widely used online survey tools you can deploy for market research (and other purposes).
- Google Forms
This is part of Google’s family of web-based solutions, and it works as brilliantly as you’d expect a Google product to. It allows you create and style surveys to your taste, send them to your target respondents via email, social media or your website, and track responses. Users can fix up surveys that bear their company’s logo and peculiar designs or create something with already available themes from the platform.
With Google Forms, you can create and send out an unlimited number of surveys, and get real-time analysis of results in easy-to-understand charts. There’s the extra benefit of being able to export survey results to Google Sheets, where they can be viewed in greater detail. There are no restrictions on the number of questions that can be included in the survey, and no limits on the number of people you can send them to or receive responses from.
- SurveyMonkey
Over thirty million users worldwide trust SurveyMonkey with their survey creation and dispensing processes. There’s at least one reason for this: it’s quite easy to use. Whether you want to collect information about which of your products your customers prefer or construct a detailed picture of your target market’s buying motivations, you’ll find SurveyMonkey a very helpful tool for getting these done.
Apart from the luxury of choosing from many question types, SurveyMonkey also lets its users share links to the survey page on social media or via email. Users can embed the survey on their websites as well- which means that visitors to their sites don’t have to leave the website to take part in the survey. Responses can be monitored on the go, and custom made reports produced quite easily.
A downside to this tool is that you can only fit in a maximum of ten questions into any single survey, and you can’t have more than a hundred respondents per survey. But it’s great for market research and customer satisfaction polls; the fact that a lot of people love it probably says a good deal about its benefits.
- Typeform
Typeform’s selling point is its ‘human’ touch, or its appeal to survey respondent’s need to not get tired out by a seemingly unending series of survey questions. They promise “a user experience that makes your questions stand out.” This quality is observable in Typeform’s array of survey design options, including drop-down lists, short and long text responses, multiple choice and yes/no questions, question groups, opinion scales and several others. These allow you create forms that reflect your company’s style and get your respondents cozied up to answering your questions.
While there are no limits to the number of surveys you can conduct with Typeform, it can only collect and analyze a maximum of a hundred individual responses per month.
- Polldaddy
You can put up Polldaddy surveys on your website if your site is hosted by WordPress. You can also share links to your Polldaddy survey page through emails or posts on social media, and collect responses from these channels. This tool helps you generate reader-friendly survey reports as well.
Other Polldaddy features exist, but you’ll have to subscribe to its paid plans to access them. These features include the option of exporting survey data to Excel, Google Sheets or PDF, replacing the Polldaddy logo with your company’s, and getting email support services. But the free plan does let you carry out as many surveys as you want and receive feedback from as many people as you like.
- SurveyPlanet
This one has things in it for people who aren’t up to writing surveys and using official logos or designs. If you’re not in the mood to draft questions, you can select them from a pool of preexisting ones. In addition, there are ten survey themes you can choose from; custom themes may also be fashioned by users, with their own colors, text style, and images.
Because SurveyPlanet’s survey pages are accessible through different devices, you’ll have to be sure that the survey format you design or choose looks fine on those devices. Fortunately, you can see how a survey layout appears on multiple device types when creating and using it, so you’ll know what edits you need to carry out if you have to.
However, if you want to be able to create customized survey designs or export data, you’ll have to upgrade to SurveyPlanet’s paid plans.
Conclusion
Market research doesn’t have to be utter drudgery. When you have to ask customers and potential clients the questions that’ll let you into their buying minds, you have a good crop of solutions to choose from. We’ve just presented you with the best of them.
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This article was first published on 7th February 2018
ikenna-nwachukwu
Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.
Comments (1)
Thanks.
Exactly what I was looking for. I almost opted for the Google Forms but I then I have to use a paid SurveyMonkey it’s more professional than google forms. Nice list here