How to create engaging surveys?

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:

• Understand the Importance of Engaging surveys.
• Identify Strategies & Traps involved while designing engaging surveys.
• Create Engaging Surveys to gather accurate information & improve response rates from respondents.

1. Why are engaging surveys important?

Engaging surveys are crucial because they allow you to gather accurate and actionable feedback from your target audience. When surveys are engaging, respondents are more likely to participate, provide thoughtful answers, and stay motivated. This leads to higher response rates, more reliable data, and a better understanding of your audience's needs, preferences, and pain points.

How often have you received very few responses to your survey? You must have experienced this often. Receiving sufficient answers for a survey is a challenge in itself.

If you are a business owner, a research student, a marketing professional, or anyone needing to create engaging surveys, this lesson will help you.

This lesson discusses ideas that will help you create engaging forms and surveys. It details the dos for creating engaging surveys & disengaging surveys.

2. What to do to create engaging surveys?

In this section, you will learn points to consider while creating engaging surveys.

2.1 Use an Interactive design

It usually feels monotonous to answer surveys with only textboxes or multiple choices. A more interactive version of your survey will improve engagement.

Using interactive elements like sliders and drag-and-drop will increase the engagement rate of your survey. Sliders help answer rating questions, and drag-and-drop help answer ranking questions.

Adding a welcome screen at the beginning of the survey and a thank you screen at the end further improves engagement.

BlockSurvey provides a wide range of interactive question types to make your survey more engaging. Explore the BlockSurvey builder to discover all the interactive features.

2.2 Include Progress indicator

Now, imagine a survey with 10 questions. The respondent fills out the survey up to the 9th question. Then, he assumes the survey may have more than 20 questions. He feels overwhelmed by the length of the survey and aborts it. He just needs to take the 10th question to complete the survey.

In the above case, how will the respondent know the survey length in advance? How does the respondent get the big picture of the survey? By the way, the respondent is a person who takes your survey.

The solution to this problem is a “Progress Indicator”.

Progress indicators help you find where you are in the survey.

By default, all surveys have progress indicators in BlockSurvey.

2.3 Enable Personalization

All walks of life require personalization for a better experience, and surveys are no exception. The one-size-fits-all approach does not work while creating engaging surveys. Asking generic questions to your target audience sometimes leads to survey fatigue and disengagement.

To me, the future is personalization. - Marissa Mayer

Knowing demographic data like name, age, location, profession, etc., lets you ask your target audience more personalized questions.

You can use the answer to the previous question in the current question. This level of personalization is possible with the recall option in BlockSurvey.

Use skip logic, and not everyone has to answer all the questions in the survey. For example in a restaurant survey example, you can skip all non-vegetarian related questions if the respondent chose to be vegetarian.

With personalization, the respondents will have a sense of belonging when they take the survey.

2.4 Incentivize participation

When you provide incentives to respondents, it improves engagement as it values respondents' time and effort.

The incentive can be a discount, gift card, or cash reward. Here are a few examples that encourage them to take the survey.

• 10% discount on their next purchase
• An Amazon gift card
• An e-book
• A cash prize
• Free one-month access to your product.

It is essential to ensure that the value of the incentive aligns with the time and effort required to complete the survey. If the survey is long and complex, a larger incentive may be necessary to motivate respondents.

By offering incentives, you increase the number of respondents and also boost the completion rate, leading to more valuable data for your business.

2.5 Optimize for Mobile

All websites created these days work on mobile devices without glitches. Therefore, your Survey needs to be optimized for mobile.

Ensure that the mobile user interface is intuitive and friendly.

Further, the increased usage of Mobile phones ensures more people take your surveys, when it is optimized for mobile.

Mobile surveys help receive more in-the-moment responses, improving the response quality.

BlockSurvey is fully mobile responsive. This means your surveys work best on any mobile device.

2.6 Use Branding

Engaging visuals enhance the look of your surveys. Use your brand assets like logo, colors, and font consistently while designing the survey. This makes the survey presentable and creates trust among your respondents.

Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touchpoints. - Jonah Sachs

When a survey is hosted on a domain associated with your brand, respondents take it seriously and complete it. They trust the dependability of the survey hosted on the brand’s domain.

Branded surveys are more professional, which can help increase engagement.

2.7 Provide Feedback

Feedback allows respondents to understand the survey results immediately, which can trigger their interest and increase engagement.

Providing a score at the end of a quiz can make respondents feel accomplished and valued for their time and effort.

Giving answers to a self-assessment immediately after it's completed can help respondents understand where they stand and what areas they need to improve on.

Including fun facts & quotes relevant to the survey topic at the end of the survey can make the survey more enjoyable, surprising, and engaging.

It's about providing value to the respondents; feedback is a great way to do this.

2.8 Give a Call to action

A clear call to action (CTA) at the end of a survey is helpful. It guides respondents on what they should do next. This can increase engagement and participation.

A CTA can motivate respondents to take additional actions, like visiting a website, accessing related resources, signing up for a newsletter, or sharing the survey with others.

CTA gives a sense of closure to the survey.

3. What to do to create disengaging surveys?

In this section, you will learn things you must do to create disengaging surveys.

3.1 Run Lengthy Surveys

Would respondents complete your survey if it took a long time? Give it a thought. Lengthy surveys have a lower completion rate.

Unless your survey requires a lot of questions, only design a short survey.

Always remember to reduce the number of questions in your survey to the maximum possible extent. Your Survey respondents will not be overwhelmed while taking shorter surveys. Don’t overwhelm them with lengthy surveys.

Shorter surveys have a higher completion rate.

Keep your surveys lengthy; you will begin experiencing a fall in completion rate.

3.2 Have Complex Questions

Say you own a restaurant. Now, you want to run a customer feedback survey on the quality of food and dining experience at your restaurant.

While creating this feedback survey, if you include restaurant-specific terms like Dead plate (A dead plate is a food that is not served due to poor appearance or quality), Totes (Totes are plastic containers used to deliver fish), etc., in your survey question, you will have a lower completion rate.

Lower completion rate because your customers are people who just dined at your restaurant and cannot understand restaurant jargon. The respondent will have a hard time understanding the restaurant-specific term and will become puzzled.

Use simple layman's terms that anyone taking the survey can easily understand.

On the other hand, have complex questions if you need to create disengaging surveys.

3.3 Have Leading questions

Leading questions leave the respondents confused or surprised. Data collected through leading questions leads to skewed results.

Leading questions are created based on assumptions. It also results in lower survey completion rates.

In a restaurant survey, a question like, “Why do you like our Bread Toast?” is an example of a leading question. This question is created with the assumption that the customer already likes your Bread Toast.

Instead, the question should be, “Do you like our Bread Toast?” which is more straightforward and is not created under any assumption.

Use leading questions to achieve lower survey engagement rates, which no survey creator wants to.

3.4 Have Inadequate Options

Multiple option question types should be created with adequate responses.

When you ask the question, “Do you like our Bread Toast?” with the options “Yes” or “No”, it is inadequate in most cases. The respondent may like to answer, “Prefer not to say”, which should also be one of the options.

The “Other” option with a text box is also helpful. For respondents who would like to answer “A little salt needed” or “Should be a little spicier” or any other feedback, the other option helps provide a response in their own words. The respondents will continue to take the survey with interest, with the assurance that they are being heard.

Therefore, provide adequate response options, considering all possible scenarios under which respondents take the survey.

3.5 Use Many Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions tend to give comprehensive answers. However, too many open-ended questions lead to lower engagement rates. The reason behind this is that open-ended questions take a longer time to respond to.

Too many open-ended questions mean respondents need more time to complete the survey. This naturally leads to lower engagement.

Including only one open-ended question at the end is safe. Research surveys can have more than one open-ended question serving their academic purposes.

Use Many Open-ended questions for lower survey engagement.

Test Your Knowledge

Key Takeaways

• Engaging surveys lead to higher response rates.
• Use interactive question types, progress indicators, and branding for engaging surveys.
• Have lengthy surveys & leading questions for creating disengaging surveys.

Congratulations! You have completed this lesson.