7 benefits of online surveys

Online surveys are the fastest and cheapest way to ask your customers, employees or partners and get answers you can work with right away. They save time and money, adapt themselves to what the respondent has answered, show results as they come in and evaluate themselves without Excel. In this article we go through seven benefits that online surveys bring compared to a telephone or face to face survey, and for each one we show how to use it in Quanda.

In a nutshell

1. You create and send an online questionnaire within hours and see the first answers within minutes.
2. It is the cheapest form of survey: no interviewers, no call centre, no transcribing of answers.
3. You do not have to start from scratch, ready made templates and help with the questions are part of the service.
4. The questionnaire branches questions by answer on its own, so the respondent only sees what applies to them.
5. You see the results as they come in and can work with them before the survey ends.
6. You filter answers by contact data without a single extra question and create a report with charts without Excel.

In short: what you get, who it is for, what you need and what is at stake

• What you get: answers from customers, employees or partners within days instead of weeks, at a fraction of the cost of a telephone or face to face survey and with an evaluation you do not have to do by hand.
• Who it is for: any company that has an e-mail address for its respondents and wants to make decisions based on what people actually say, not on assumptions.
• What you need: a clear survey goal, a few questions and a tool that sends the questionnaire, recognises the respondents and evaluates the answers. In Quanda that is the Surveys module.
• What is at stake: without a survey you write copy, offers and campaigns based on what you think about your customers. If you are wrong, you only find out from the sales figures.

What has changed since this article was published: The article was published in 2016. The seven benefits still apply, but surveys in Quanda have since gone through a major overhaul: they offer 22 question types including NPS, satisfaction scales and tables, branching by answer, tags by answer and a final report in PDF. We have therefore updated the text to match the current offering and added, for each benefit, where you will find it in Quanda.

What an online questionnaire is and why it pays off

An online questionnaire is a set of questions that respondents fill in on the internet, most often after clicking a link in an e-mail, on a website or on social networks. Answers are saved as they come in and closed questions are evaluated automatically. An online survey is then a survey that uses such a questionnaire instead of interviewers in the streets or operators in a call centre.

The difference from a paper or telephone survey is not only in where the respondent answers. An online questionnaire also does the work that costs the most time and money in the other forms: sending it out, collecting the answers, transcribing and evaluating them. That is exactly where the seven benefits we are about to go through come from. If you are still considering surveys, start with the article Online questionnaires or online survey: yes or no?, and when you want to build your first questionnaire, 6 steps how to create a survey will help you.

1. Online surveys save you time

An online questionnaire is the fastest way to create a survey, send it by e-mail or share it on social networks and websites. While you are doing your work, the respondents are filling in the questionnaire. Within a few days it is done and you have the results.

You usually see the first results in just a few hours, which is why online surveys can also help with decisions during a meeting or a consultation. Online surveys are the fastest form of surveying potential or regular customers, suppliers or partners.

In Quanda you build a questionnaire from a template in the Questionnaire library in tens of minutes. In the Distribution step you switch it to the state Ready to use, insert the generated link into an e-mail campaign as a link or a button and send it. The procedure is described in the guide Distribution.

Tip: Nothing slows a survey down more than a long questionnaire. Ask only what you need for the decision. Templates in the Questionnaire library usually have 7 to 13 questions, a short evaluation after a completed job gets by with one to three.

2. Online surveys save you money

Online surveys are the cheapest form of survey. Compared to surveys carried out by telephone or in person, there are no interviewers, no call centre operators and no manual transcribing of answers. You only pay for the tool in which you build, send and evaluate the questionnaire.

In Quanda, surveys are a separate module that you switch on alongside e-mail campaigns. In the Standard plan they start from €23 per month excluding VAT with yearly billing, and the pricing page calculates the exact amount for your number of contacts. How the price is made up is explained in the article How much does Quanda cost.

3. You get help putting the questions together

Help is very valuable, and every good provider of an online survey solution will be happy to help you build, send and evaluate the questionnaire. The beginnings are not easy, so you will appreciate having someone you can call and consult with. Choose a supplier who provides telephone support and who can help you when creating an online questionnaire.

In Quanda you have three options. Ready made templates in the Questionnaire library cover customer and employee satisfaction, service, website or project evaluation, lead qualification, retention, upsell and company event planning. In a free consultation we go through the goal of the survey and the choice of questions with you. And in the online course Working with questionnaires and collecting feedback you go through the whole procedure at your own pace.

4. You will not ask unnecessary questions

Survey branching is a feature that changes the order and selection of questions according to how the respondent answered. Someone who states that they do not use your product will not get questions about using it. Someone who gives a 9 or a 10 in an NPS question can get a request for a reference, while a critic gets a question about what disappointed them.

With a questionnaire in your hand or in a telephone survey, this option is nowhere near as convenient as with online questionnaires. Good systems let you branch the questionnaire, end it based on an answer, skip questions and much more.

In Quanda you set up branching for a question in the Logic tab: depending on the answer the respondent chose, you redirect them to another page of the questionnaire or end the questionnaire. Each branch therefore has to be on a separate page. More details in the guide Creating and setting up an online survey.

5. You see the results immediately

The great thing about online surveys is that you see the results immediately. Very often you see the first answers, the first completed questionnaires, within a few minutes. It is an exciting feeling when you send out the invitations and several completed questionnaires come back within the first 10 minutes.

In Quanda you follow the progress in the Analysis of answers section: for every question you see how many people answered and how many skipped it, and you open the individual answers in the list of Completed surveys.

6. You do not have to be a data analysis expert

Advanced systems for creating online questionnaires expect that you do not just want to collect a pile of data, but that you want to draw conclusions from it. Such systems have data analysis tools built right in. Some of them, thanks to the connection between online surveys and e-mail marketing, recognise the respondent automatically without having to ask for their personal data.

Thanks to these features, the whole survey turns into much more than "just tables and charts". Using filters, you can look at the survey results from all sorts of angles. You can find out how men or women answered, how people of different ages answered, how people from different cities or regions answered, and combine all of these, without a single extra question in the questionnaire.

The condition is that you send the questionnaire in an e-mail campaign from Quanda. Quanda then recognises which contact answered, and in the Analysis of answers you can filter the answers by other questions as well as by data stored with the contact or company. On top of that, based on the answer you can automatically add a tag to the contact and follow up with another campaign, see the guide Automation in a survey.

Warning: You only recognise respondents from invitations sent from Quanda. Answers coming from a public link on a website or on social networks are anonymous, unless you add a question that creates a contact to the questionnaire. On the first page of the questionnaire, tell respondents whether the survey is anonymous and what you will use the answers for.

7. You do not have to use Excel to process data and create charts

Do you dislike Excel? Never mind. If you find a good system for online surveys, not only will you be rid of all the worries about creating charts in Excel, you will also create all the charts and comments within a few minutes and easily turn them into a good looking and detailed report with the overall results of the survey.

In Quanda you add a chart with labelled axes and a comment to every question in the Analysis of answers. From the results prepared in this way you then compile a final report with your logo, a cover page and an overall summary, download it as a PDF or send it straight to a colleague or a client by e-mail.

The seven benefits at a glance

How to recognise a good online survey tool

Before you choose a tool, go through this list. Each point corresponds to one of the benefits above.

• It sends the questionnaire by e-mail directly from the tool and recognises which contact answered.
• It offers ready made templates and support you can call.
• It can branch questions by answer and end the questionnaire based on logic.
• It shows the results as they come in, not only after the collection ends.
• It filters answers by contact data without extra questions.
• It creates charts and a final report without exporting to Excel.
• It can follow up on an answer automatically: with a tag, an e-mail or a notification.

In conclusion

Online surveys bring answers faster, cheaper and with less effort than any other form of survey. The main benefit, however, lies elsewhere: you stop guessing what your customers think and start making decisions based on what they told you themselves. How to turn answers into campaigns and business opportunities is shown in the article How surveys turn B2B marketing from guesswork into certainty.

You can go through the whole procedure, from questions to evaluation, in the online course Working with questionnaires and collecting feedback, which is free. And if you are not sure how to approach your first survey, get in touch with us. We will be happy to help you with it.

I am keeping my fingers crossed for you!