Have you considered adding a survey page to your website? Or adding an email survey invitation to your marketing portfolio? Implementing an online survey needs a sincere marketing strategy behind it in order for it to be an effective business tool with usable results. It’s a great idea to measure the level of customer satisfaction with your products and/or services and you want your survey to have a positive impact on your customer as well as your business. You want this marketing tactic to be planned out completely with everything thought through, it’s among the top most effective and affordable marketing tactics available, so make it count.

Here are some design tips to consider while creating your online customer survey:

• Start with your objectives. Clearly define what you want to accomplish. Do you want to; spot trends, know your customer satisfaction rate, or improve your product/service.
• Have clear concise questions and answer options. Use specific close-ended questions with 6 or less radio button answers to make the process fast and easy on the customer.
• Introduce your survey. In a polite tone, tell you customer why you are asking the questions; how long it will take, and explain what you’ll be doing with the results. For a high response rate allow your survey to take 5 minutes or less to complete and offer incentives. Incentives can generally increase responses by 50%.
• Test you survey. You can send the survey to a select employee group first, make changes as necessary, and then send to a sample test group before announcing or sending the survey to your full marketing list of customers.
• Share the results. Once all of the survey data has been collected and analyzed, post your findings and the action your company will be taking. Customers will be more responsive in the future. People love knowing their opinion makes a difference.

Additionally, the best days to send out surveys are Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursday. Test it; you will see what day of the week works best for the responses you would like to have. Also, depending on your response timeline, using a reminder can boost the number of responses. If you are looking for an out of the box online survey analytics company, try: http://www.surveymonkey.com/, http://www.zoomerang.com/, or http://www.questionpro.com/.

3 Cheers for an Online Customer Survey! Hip, Hip, Hooray! Hip, Hip, Hooray! Hip, Hip, Hooray to Online Customer Surveys!