Creating user surveys: Surveymonkey
August 28th, 2008
Once your website is up and running it’s important to get feedback on aspects of the customer experience that just can’t be quantified by analytics alone. An online survey is even a great tool for folks thinking of starting a business to gain important market intelligence before jumping in. We run surveys on our sites from time to time when we have specific questions - like what our paid members think of our service offerings or user interface tweaks - and our tool of choice is Surveymonkey.
You can use Surveymonkey to create simple to complex online surveys and it’s free if you have less than 10 questions and 100 respondents. Otherwise most businesses can get by with the $20 a month plan that lets you send unlimited surveys to a predetermined number of respondents. Unfortunately there’s no ala carte option so if you run surveys infrequently like we do you’ll want to cancel your survey subscription once you’ve gathered your responses.
Surveymonkey even provides email tools to help you send out a survey link to you customers - just upload an excel file with your email addresses and it’s done! The analyticial tools provided online are adequate but if you want to do in depth statistical analysis I recommend popping your data into Excel. Even the online interface at Surveymonkey.com is superb - one of the best we’ve used.
A well designed survey is a great way to gather market intelligence that can give you a leg up on the competition while improving your online business. With powerful and easy to use tools like Surveymonkey anyone can get results quickly and cheaply.
