Market research used to be a prohibitively expensive endeavor, especially for independent publications. But online survey software has made market research, industry benchmarking and even customer satisfaction polling much easier.However, the ease of using such software doesn’t mean everyone uses it well.In this week’s Members-Only How-To on Subscription Site Insider, we detail the 10 best practices you need to observe to create an effective survey, as well as six ways to boost your response rate in order to get a representative number of respondents.But if there’s one word I could use to sum up most of those best practices it’s BREVITY.As the chart below shows (data courtesy Vovici), abandonment rates to surveys increased as a function of the number of questions, with an steep spike after 45 questions.
That’s why it’s best to create short surveys with closed, not open-ended, questions.But brevity also applies to other factors in survey creation, from question wording and Likert scale options (note: never use a 10-point scale).You can read about the many ways in which brevity informs survey creation, from answer space length to logical ordering, by joining Subscription Site Insider today for just $1.
