Survey Best Practices

Here are ten of the most common types of survey research and what they can help you learn:

• Consumer Survey, Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey, and Brand Equity Survey: What your customers, clients, and employees think about you matters – these surveys can quantify the value of your brand and how your audience perceives it.
• Market Penetration Survey: Not sure how prevalent your product or service is in the industry? By asking broad questions about familiarity and usage, you can obtain responses that help you gauge market share.
• Competitive Analysis Survey: How does your product or service stack up against those of competitors? How is market share shifting? What criteria are customers using to make their decisions? All these questions are crucial to understanding how you should position your wares. A competitive analysis survey is designed to obtain such insights.
• Channel Check Survey: Instead of taking a direct approach to evaluating a company, you can use supply chains and distribution networks as proxies. When you understand how a vendor or how a logistics partner views a product, you gain a more comprehensive view of your target company and how it operates and performs in its industry.
• Conjoint Analysis Survey:  A conjoint analysis survey creates hypothetical product and price scenarios for respondents and helps uncover the impact of feature or price changes on customer preference. This survey is particularly useful for product teams tasked with scoping out what product features matter most to customers as well as how much they might pay them.
• Product Concept Testing Survey: Are you unsure if a new product concept will resonate with your target audience? A concept testing survey can help you validate customer interest by giving quantifiable customer feedback on new value propositions and product ideas, significantly reduce common innovation risks found in new product development.
• Evaluation Survey: How are things going? What’s working? What’s not working? All such questions can be answered and analyzed quickly and easily. Evaluation surveys are most often used within companies to gauge performance and engagement levels, to gain feedback about various initiatives, and to solicit recommendations.
• Pricing Survey: With growing global volatility and uncertain customer demand, a pricing survey can help you optimize margins without deterring customers. This type of survey has respondents make choices based on fixed product descriptions and varying prices ultimately giving insights into a customer’s overall willingness to pay for different products as well as their key switching behaviors. GLG’s Price CheX, a proprietary tool, goes beyond just the survey data and enables.
• Strategic Planning Survey: Like an evaluation survey, a strategic planning survey can gather feedback on proposed initiatives and provide a forum for recommendations. The main difference is that strategic planning surveys are almost exclusively internal. Respondents can rate and rank the relative importance of strategic initiatives. The respondent will perceive the survey differently than he perceives an evaluation survey. With strategic planning surveys, the respondent is made to feel a part of advancing the business.
• Message Testing Survey: You’ve curated the perfect marketing message – but is it clear and easy for your audience to understand? Does it stand out among competitors? A message testing survey tests your message with your target audience to ensure that it is clear, relevant, competitive, and compelling.

Read our article, What Type of Survey Do You Need, to dive deeper into the types of surveys and what they can help you learn.

• Online or Web Surveys: We live in a tech-focused world, so it’s not surprising that online surveys are the preferred – and often default – survey research method.
• Phone Surveys: In the ways that online surveys can fall short, phone surveys are surprisingly effective. Phone surveys are still facilitated by an online survey platform, but in this case, a call representative uses a script to talk a respondent through the survey and collect their responses digitally.
• In-Person Surveys: Used most prevalently in academic and clinical settings, in-person surveys still benefit from technology, but they add a more human element that can elicit a deeper level of connection and, subsequently, a deeper level of insight from those taking the survey.
• Paper Surveys: While not as prevalent as they once were, paper surveys are worth mentioning because they’re the progenitor of current formal survey methods.

Most surveys conducted within the corporate environment will either be online or phone surveys. When choosing the best contact method for your next survey, consider the unique traits and habits of your target population, weigh the pros and cons of each survey method, then meet your respondents in their preferred environments – the uptick in your response rates might just surprise you.

Read Survey Research Methods: The Right Way to Reach Respondents to learn more about the pros and cons of these survey methods and when to use them.

Survey design is the practice of creating a structured questionnaire that captures valuable insights and data from respondents. Tactical survey design methodology and using proper survey design best practices can mean the difference between a great survey experience and a truly terrible one.

When designing your survey, use these simple survey design best practices:

• Clearly Define Your Objective: Your objective is your guiding star. It informs how you structure your questions, the specific language you use, and ultimately what data you get at the end.
• Include Survey Screening Questions: Whether you are surveying CEOs or consumers, screening questions that include defining factors that make an ideal respondent will help ensure that you are getting the right people to answer the right questions.
• Implement Survey Logic: Sound survey logic improves a respondent’s experience dramatically. Survey logic allows respondents to only see questions and/or answer choices that are relevant to them, based on how they answered previous questions.
• Use Mutually Exclusive & Comprehensive Answer Questions: It should never be ambiguous about how to answer a question. All answer choices should be clearly defined, comprehensive in nature, and mutually exclusive. There should always be a relevant answer choice.
• Use Consistent Scales: For surveys that contain multiple rating questions, keep the scales consistent. Each type of scale has its own merit, whether it’s a four-point scale, a seven-point scale, or a 10-point scale (or any other type of scale, for that matter).
• Use Simple Language: Keep it simple! It works in many other areas of life and works in surveys, too. Remember that your population will define what “simple” language means.
• Take Advantage of Varied Question Types: Single-select, multi-select, rating, ranking, grid, dropdowns – the list goes on. There are many ways to ask a question but knowing the right application of each is the differentiating factor. The right question type is easy to interpret and provides data that is easy to analyze.
• Be Thoughtful on the Amount of Questions: Your survey should ask the least number of questions possible that will still allow you to gain meaningful insight into your research objective. That number may be five questions, it may be 35 questions. Different populations have different tolerances for the length of a survey.

Read our article Survey Design Best Practices for a deeper dive on how to optimize your survey design and maximize your insights.

What is a Screener Section and Why is it Important?

It’s always important to find the right person for the job. When we want a doctor’s opinion, we do our research and find the doctor with the right specialization. When we want a contractor’s opinion, we ask around for referrals to find one with the right skills.

It’s no different when it comes to running a survey; it’s just not as easy to identify all the right people before your survey hits the field. Well-written survey screening questions can help you usher in the right people and exclude those who are unable to effectively answer the questions in the main body of the survey,

Pro Tips for Designing Strong Screener Surveys

• Mask the true survey topic as much as possible. This makes it harder to game the survey by clicking what are perceived to be the “right” answers. For instance, if you want to survey consumers of Folgers coffee, first ask what types of beverages they purchase for their household (milk, juice, coffee, energy drinks, etc.), then follow up with those who purchase coffee to ask what brands of coffee they purchase (Maxwell House, Folgers, Peet’s, Green Mountain, etc.). At no point will the respondent know the correct answer path that will gain them entry into the survey.
• Avoid asking questions with “Yes”/“No” answer choices. Instead, offer a range of potential answers and allow the respondent to qualify by selecting the correct response. For example, instead of asking, “Are you a CISO?” you could ask, “What is your role?” and have CISO listed among four to five other roles. As in the example above, perhaps more than one answer can qualify.
• Include one or two “red herring” responses. These are fake answer options designed to catch respondents who are either not paying attention or trying to choose options they perceive as more likely to qualify.
• Start with the broadest questions and funnel down. Your screening section should terminate more respondents in each subsequent question. In this way, the information tells a sequential story that can more easily highlight where low response rates might be originating. Quickly diagnosing and adjusting for issues is critically important in surveys.
• Be intentional and succinct. To reduce respondent fatigue, every question in your screener section should include termination logic. Make this section as brief as possible and include a comment at the end of the screener section to affirm that they have qualified for the survey.
• Bonus tip: Use screeners to assess market share. If one of the objectives of your survey is to assess market penetration, your screener section can accomplish that. If you design your survey to be statistically representative, you can compare the number of terminated respondents to the number of qualified respondents to understand market penetration among the broader population.

Read Writing Effective Survey Screening Questions to dive deeper into the various types of survey screening questions and how to use them.

There are three basic types of survey questions – single-select, multi-select, and open-ended questions. Out of these three categories, you can build more complex questions: e.g., ranking or matrix.

• Single-Select Survey Questions: Single-select questions are used when you need a single response.
  • Basic — a simple “select one of the below” option
  • NPS/Rating — more of a metric question inquiring of opinion (typically 1–5, 1–7, 1–10)
  • Matrix/Grid — combining either of the above options across a few subjects (e.g., “select your rating of the below fast-food chains on a scale of 1–5” with the options as rows and ratings as columns)
• Multi-Select Survey Questions: Multi-select questions are best used when you need multiple responses for a topic.
  • Basic — a simple “select all that apply” question
  • Ranking — a multi-select question that requires comparison across a state dimension for a subset of the options presented (e.g., “rank your top three choices for a CRM solution during your last evaluation cycle out of the list below”)
  • Matrix/Grid — using a multi-select question across a few subjects (e.g., “For the below providers, please select the products that are included in your subscription”)
• Open-Ended Survey Questions: Open ended survey questions are best used when either 1) you do not know what the answer options should be or 2) a robust opinion or view is required.
  • Full Essay — requiring multi-sentence response
  • Brief Statement — aiming for a few words or a phrase
  • Follow-Up — pertaining to a closed-ended question that was just asked (e.g., first question being “Please rate your experience with XYZ on a scale of 1–10 with 10 being the highest” followed up by “What interaction impacted your experience to select this rating?”)
  • Other (Please Specify) – providing a small text box within a single or multi-select question to gain insights into options/choices not listed

GLG’s Types of Survey Questions and When to Use Them article digs deeper into these question types, common combinations, and rules of thumb for writing questions.

Quality checks are simple to incorporate into your survey and assist in safeguarding your data quality to give you higher confidence in your final data set. The main types of quality checks include:

• Knowledge Checks: These help ensure each respondent is familiar with and educated on a topic. Content knowledge checks can include asking a respondent to pick correct definitions, define various acronyms, or provide other information. These should be included in a screening  section.
• Attention Checks: This one is self-explanatory; it is designed to make sure the respondent is paying attention, and in the case of large-scale consumer surveys, catch bots. The question will have one obvious correct answer.
• Red Herrings: These are like content knowledge checks but are used to confirm a respondent’s familiarity with a subject or industry. You can test for this by inserting a red herring option in your question (e.g., adding a fake vendor to a list of real companies). Be careful not to make your fake options sound close to an actual one.

The Using Quality Checks to Improve Your Survey Data article breaks down the types of quality checks you can use to improve the quality of your survey results.

These are a small sample of GLG’s research survey articles.

To see the entire set, click here.