When you’re conducting online surveys, whether it’s for market research, customer satisfaction polls or other ends, there are a number of best practices that can help boost your response rate and produce more dependable findings. In this How-To, we outline what you need to keep in mind, from survey creation to dissemination to data collection — all with an eye on making analysis easy. Discover 10 best practices to creating useful surveys, the 3 types of questions to use, and 6 tactics for boosting your response rate.1. Know your objective. This seems obvious, yet few people take the time to write out a clear objective to any survey. The fact that surveys can be used to gather customer feedback, benchmark an industry, or research a potential market for a new product means that marketers sometimes confuse two objectives in one. A written statement can help guard against scope creep, and should be at the top of the document where you brainstorm/formulate your questions.You should also have a fairly good idea of what you’re going to do with the responses you receive, i.e., are you going to make tables, bar charts or line graphs.Keep in mind that while pie charts are nearly ubiquitous in market research, especially B2B research, the human eye has an easier time understanding comparative values when they’re in a bar graph vs. a pie chart.2. Determine the Sample Size you need. If you plan on running any sort of statistical analysis on the data you receive, you’ll want a 95% – 99% confidence level with no more than 5% margin of error (i.e., confidence interval). It’s best to establish what sort of confidence level you want, the size of the population you intend to sample and then determine the number of responses you’ll need for a representative sample. (Reversing the process by sampling a population and then determining how representative your sample is of the population is just messy and often leads to unrepresentative data).You can use an online calculator to determine number of responses you’ll need, but here are some general benchmarks:As you can see, you need a rather large percentage of a small population to produce generalizable results, but after 50,000, you only need between 380 and 390 respondents to have solid data. Of course, if you’re not running significance tests or any statistics, you can work with smaller sample sizes. But your data will then be anecdotal, not generalizable, and should be interpreted with caution.** Be advised that online surveys are particularly susceptible to non-response bias, that is, the bias that is introduced when respondents to a survey are different from those who did not respond in terms of demographics or attitudes. For example, younger doctors are more likely to respond to online surveys than older ones, but that also makes them less experienced as physicians, so a company looking to collect information on physician expertise will get biased results through an online survey. Similarly, your customers are often not representative of the larger market you serve.Also, as a general rule of thumb, your survey response rate will be less than your open and clickthrough rates for email marketing, but you should get more than a 1% response rate. The tactics below will help you boost that number.3. Write clear questions. That means clear syntax and not combining ideas that could be interpreted differently. So-called compound questions are hard to answer accurately and generate inaccurate responses. For example:From which types of sites do you get your news and entertainment? is better phrased as two, shorter questions:Where do you get your news online?What sites do you visit for entertainment?At the same time, you may sometimes need to use longer phrases to convey clarity. For example,” Where do you get your news online?” can prompt responses from websites to social