How to Conduct an Online Market Research Survey

How to Conduct an Online Market Research Survey

Learn how to create and conduct an online market research survey.

Online market research surveys can be created and conducted quickly and inexpensively with software, templates and tools.

How Online Survey Research Works

1. Choose the online research tool/service you want to use

Top Online Research Suppliers

2. Create your market research screener. This is a market research term for the people who you want to participate in market research. You want to screen out the people whose responses won't be relevant.

How to create a market research screener

3. Find people to participate in your market research survey

You can send a market research survey to your customers via email and have them complete the survey online.

If you want to conduct research among prospective customers/clients or among a larger population of people, then you'll need to find people to participate in market research.

How many people should be interviewed? Online surveys can be statistically valid and projectable if you gather results from enough people.

Most research companies believe that each test cell (group of customers that will be analyzed) needs to be at least 100 people for the analysis for that group to be statistically valid.

One hundred people doesn’t sound like a lot of people, but when you consider that the industry average is 1% for people to complete market research surveys, it requires contacting 10,000 potentially qualified respondents to get 100 completed surveys.

Know this: the biggest challenge in conducting quantitative online survey research will be getting enough “sample” (a market research industry term for contact information for people who are qualified and who will respond to market research surveys). You need a very large list of qualified respondents to complete a quantitative research study. There are companies that specialize in recruiting people to participate in research and sell access to these people.

How to find people to participate in market research

4. Create the market research survey online

The online survey companies offer software, templates and examples of survey questions. Or you can create your own survey questions or use sample questions in templates provided by survey companies.

Questions can be multiple choice, ratings or open boxes for people to type their answers.

Make questions required or optional and determine what error messages will be.

Set up what's called "skip logic" to show relevant questions based on the answer to a previous question.

Add your logo, company name or send the survey "blind" so respondents won't know who it's from.

TIP: Keep your survey short (under five minutes for someone to complete). Focus on asking questions that are actionable vs. nice to know the answer to. Include some "open end" questions where people can type in a response. It's very useful to see the words they use and what they consider to be most important. This also makes the online survey seem less like "a test" and more like a dialog with a person. There are some very innovative new techniques being used to make market research surveys much more interactive and engaging for respondents to complete.

5. Test the survey with a few people

Know this: don't create a survey and send it out to everyone. Inevitably some question won't be clear, some link won't work, there will be a typo, the survey will be too long or an important question will be missing. Create the survey and then send it to five people who you know who meet and ask them to take the survey and give you feedback. This is the "quality control" step that you'll be very glad you chose to do.

6. Send the survey

Some online survey companies have technology so surveys can be launched on Twitter, Facebook, a blog or website. Most online surveys are sent via email or posted on a website for people to complete.

7. Gather responses

People reply online and results are tallied real-time. You choose when you want to shut off the survey so no more people can respond. You can set up an automated thank you to people who reply.

7. Analyze the results

The online survey suppliers have tools so you can analyze the data by creating cross-tabs and filtering the responses to see answers from different groups of respondents.

You may want to create graphs and charts to visually summarize results and findings. You can also download the data into an Excel spreadsheet to analyze further. The online survey companies automatically generate some reports. You may want to customize them further.

You don't want a "data dump" of the findings. Instead you want to draw out the most actionable insights.

8. Determine your action plan based on the findings

Types of online surveys

These are examples of online surveys for marketing:

Customer satisfaction surveys.
Product research surveys that are done with 100 or more people.
Ad testing is specialized research to assess how effective an ad concept or finished ad is.
Opinion polls.
Employee satisfaction research

Who can help with online surveys?

Top Online Research Suppliers covers who the top suppliers are and what their costs are. Read feedback from MarketingZone members about their experiences with the suppliers to help you choose who you want to work with.

You can hire a freelancer who is an independent contractor with expertise in market research to write your survey and manage the process, analyze the data and write the report. Look for someone with experience in your industry and type of business so they will be able to apply their accumulated knowledge.

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Top Online Survey Suppliers
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Ad Testing
Customer Satisfaction Surveys - how to create effective surveys with actionable results. Recommendations on what questions to ask.
How to Find Market Research Participants
Market Research Screeners - how to qualify people before you ask them questions
Mystery Shopping - how it works, how you can do this yourself or hire experts

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