Do Your Surveys Really Produce Valuable Insights?

Like most marketers I’ve produced my fair share of surveys over the years.  And like many consumers / customers I’ve responded to a large number of surveys and abandoned some part way through.

The most frequent reason for abandonment is generally assumed to be excessive length of the survey.  But I think there’s another factor that plays a significant role in whether a respondent abandons a survey.  People are influenced to take a survey because they want to express their opinions on the issue.  But many surveys are constructed in such an inside-out manner that part way through the survey the respondent realizes that the questions and answer options don’t allow them to express their real opinion in the survey – so they abandon it.

How many times have you taken a survey and wished there were additional answer choices for the questions?

On the other side of the fence, marketers tend to construct surveys in order to achieve a specific set of results.  The questions and answer options are formulated in a manner that supports the specific outcome objective.  So the survey respondents provide responses based on the inside-out perspective of how the survey was constructed and the limited choice of inside-out answers.  Are the results from these types of surveys as insightful as they could be?

I would argue that most surveys don’t produce as much really valuable insights as thought because of the survey construction and inability for respondents to really express their opinion.  Some surveys will produce misleading results that companies use as the basis to make plans and take action.

One way to overcome this potential problem with surveys is to take more of an outside-in approach during the survey design, construction and testing process.  Involve a small representative group from your target survey audience (customers, prospective buyers, etc.) in the process.  Have them review the questions and answers to provide input from their perspective.  Have them do a test of the survey and provide feedback on suggested changes to better connect with the respondent’s perspective.

Taking these extra steps could produce markedly better surveys, lower abandonment rates, produce more trustworthy results and more valuable insights for your business.

I’ll share another approach for getting more valuable insights from customer and prospective buyer surveys in my next blog post.

What are your thoughts about the quality and relevance of surveys and how to improve the results and insights from surveys?  Your comments are always welcome.
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