Cvent Survey

Communication is a very important part of conducting a survey online. How to inform the invitees about the survey, how to make sure they read the email survey invitation and respond to the survey. This totally depends upon what kind of email is sent to the invitee so they respond to your call to action (aka answer the survey). Here are a few online survey tips that will be helpful when you create survey invitation emails.

Send your invitations out automatically: After you have tested the email invitation, you are ready to send it out in bulk to all of your invitees. We recommend you switch the How to Send option on the Edit Settings page to the Send By Date.

Making No responses or Visited respondents take the survey: send reminder emails. Some people will take your survey right away. You will get increased responses, however, if you send follow-up email reminders with the survey link included. We recommend sending a minimum of two reminder emails depending on how long your survey will be running. Be sure to use our Partial Response reminders in addition to the No Response reminders.

Use HTML emails instead of plain text emails. To send an HTML email, go to the email you are sending out and then click on the HTML Email tab. Click on the Edit button, and you can create your HTML email, adding any images you want to include and formatting the text to emphasize your main points. Make sure to click on the Save and Update Plain Text Email button, so that your HTML email message and your plain text email message both convey the same information.

Feedback: Seek advice & suggestions from your respondents. If you are new to conducting surveys or have surveyed the same people for years, ask them what they like and do not like about participating in your surveys. Add a question or two to ask why they take the surveys and what would improve the questionnaires.

Thank your respondents. At the end of the survey, be courteous and thank your respondents for taking time out of their busy schedule to complete the survey. Also, if the survey is a collect respondent contact information survey, turn on the completion email and thank your respondents for their time in an email as well.

Back when the economy was flourishing and consumer spending was at an all-time high, many businesses were content with customers that were merely satisfied, not truly engaged.  Today, money is much tighter across the board, and these same businesses are realizing the importance of building strong and healthy relationships with existing customers AND employees.  Research shows that an organization's health directly correlates to how well they engage these two groups.

So how do you ensure your business is retaining clients and not losing them to competitors?  Perhaps the most important facet is providing exceptional customer service, and this level of service stems from employees who are passionate about their job role and their company.  They know that employee opinions are valued when management makes decisions. They are loyal, often times reccomending their organization when asked about their job.

Because these employees are guiding the customer experience, it is critical to keep them engaged.  Passionate and dedicated employees make for passionate and dedicated customers who are willing to purchase more and promote your business.  Companies who have such an engaged workforce are constantly collecting and analyzing employee feedback about their day to day experiences on the job.

In addition to collecting feedback from employees, it is extremely important to gain customer insights about their thoughts and experiences.  This information can help you make important business decisions, but can also help you to win back the favor of clients who may have had a recent negative experience.  Keeping a pulse on your client base to ensure high customer retention is simple and easy through the use of survey forms.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the data alone that will help you to retain your clients and employees.  Being able to synthesize the information and make the appropriate adjustments is the key to improving employee morale and client satisfaction.

We all have that momentary feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we launch a survey form online that there could be a mistake we missed somewhere. It never seems to go away no matter how many campaigns I launch. Fortunately, I found this 12 question survey checklist to help ease that dreaded feeling a little bit.


If you say No to any of these questions, you need to go back and look at the survey created for this project again. once you can answer Yes to all twelve questions, your survey campaign should be in pretty good shape. Still feeling a little uneasy? Here are some more tips for what to look for in Test Mode as one final check.

Market researchers are called upon to provide fresh, current information about a target market and/or product. For example, a study might be conducted to find out if people are planning to upgrade their cell phone in the next year, and what kind of phones they are looking to buy.

Naturally, you will decide on a data collection method and send out surveys or conduct focus groups. In this instance, a combination of online survey and in-person focus groups might be chosen. It is a good idea to supplement these methods with some external research.

This will add weight to whatever is discovered through the online survey and focus groups. For example, if 70% of online web survey respondents and 84% of focus group participants say they plan on upgrading to a smartphone like the iPhone or Blackberry, that makes a strong statement in favor of smartphones. You can supplement this finding with market information on smartphone sales. If the research shows steady increases in sales of smartphones, that strengthens the market research finding. However, if it shows declining sales, it provides additional insight. It might even indicate a need to broaden the target group for the survey – perhaps they are early adopters and very technology conscious.

If you do use external research to supplement or add insight into your findings, be sure to use reputable sources and cite them correctly.

I’ve previously emphasized how important it is to consider survey reporting not only after you’ve collected data, but at the beginning and throughout a survey project.  Another central tenet of good survey reporting is tailoring your report or presentation to your audience.

The formatting of your market research reports and presentations can vary dramatically depending upon who is going to receive them.  Even the content will differ based on the audience(s) who will read the report or view the presentation.  Here are two big questions to ask yourself about your audience, so you can tailor your reporting tasks accordingly:

1) Is this a lay or technical group of people? 
The more professional your audience is, the more technical you want to be when describing the results.  For example, if you are sending survey results back to respondents, you probably don’t need to go into statistical and methodological detail.  If you are presenting to market research colleagues, on the other hand, you would go into fairly deep detail regarding topics such as statistical significance, margin of error/confidence level, as well as include prior research citations and an abstract of your project.

2) Am I presenting this to senior officials and/or executive decision-makers?
Usually, the higher-up the ladder your audience is, the less time you spend on detail.  So if your answer to the above question is "yes," I like to use a five-minute rule: if someone had to make major business decisions based on your survey results, what could you present in five minutes that would help them make good strategic decisions?  What would be the “take-home” message (i.e., two or three data-driven recommendations based on your results)?

Although surveys are usually single point-in-time snapshots, it’s good to draw basic conclusions unless it would be inappropriate to do so... after all, you’ve likely spent considerable time and effort for the survey project to generate useful insights!

Measuring customer satisfaction is nothing new, neither is benchmarking that data and tracking improvements. It's typically easy to find dissatisfied customers. When you're looking for customer feedback, dissatisfied customers often come out of the wood work to let you know you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Sometimes understanding why those customers are unhappy can be a challenge.

If you have a well designed survey form with strongly written questions, answering Why suddenly becomes a lot easier. Here's my best suggestion: Read the comments. Comments are often where you're going to find the most customer insights. You'll also be able to see trends emerge as you read through. Training, missing features, poor support, issues with the sales process, they'll all begin to emerge. If you have dissatisfied customers, they usually will let you know how you can fix it and transform them to happy customers.

In the past, I told you that as part of any customer satisfaction survey you should be categorizing customers to better focus your energy and bring in more revenue for your organization. As part of that categorization, consider grouping customers into buckets based on why they're unhappy. From there you can create action items for how to improve the overall satisfaction of your customer base. If it's not clear why a customer is unhappy, reach out to them to find out more. If you want to make things better and understand where you went wrong, chances are your customers are going to be happy to help - so let them.

Just last week I shared how expensive conducting paper surveys can be, particularly if it's a survey project run every quarter for benchmarking or trending analysis. But cost isn't the only benefit online survey questionnaires can have over the old fashion mail questionnaire. Here are a few other things to consider next time you're debating between an instant survey online and it's paper-based equivalent:

• Speed: Creating surveys online offers instant distribution via web links posted on your website and email survey invitations. When you make surveys online, you can see the responses begin rolling in immediately - not trickle in a week or two after you first put them in the mail. Don't discount how much quicker you can analyze survey data either, since response are collected online, there's no manual data entry.

• Efficiency: This benefit goes right along with speed. It's more efficient to design a survey online and collect feedback using the internet. It's also easier to copy, or clone, your surveys for repeat deployment. 

• More Thorough Responses: By utilizing survey technologies like email survey invitations, and survey reminders for both non-respondents and partial respondents, you can collect more thorough responses and improve the accuracy and validity of your survey data.

• Randomization of Answers: We shared our thoughts on the benefits of randomizing answer earlier today. To get caught up, read this post on when you should randomize answers. But in summary, randomizing answers helps decrease certain types of survey bias and makes your survey results more reliable.

• Improved experience: Paper surveys limit you in providing a less than excellent survey respondent experience. Remember, every interaction with a customer impact the overall customer experience - this includes completing surveys! Designing surveys online gives you the ability to use survey question logic such as skip, branch, link logic or other types of  advanced logic that improves the overall experience. Instead of having to write survey questions like, If yes, when was the last time you purchased Agent ABC? Instead, that question only shows when the respondent indicates they have purchased Agent ABC. Couple these types of question logic with pipe logic that makes the survey even more engaging (remember, more relevant and engaging the survey is, the higher he response rate will be).

Unfortunately for the mail survey, they just don't have these types of functionality. Luckily for all online survey builders out there, you can simply select a survey designing software (like the Cvent Web Surveys application), and start improving your survey programs while cutting costs.

Sometimes we forget we can't be everything to everyone all the time. It's just not possible. It wouldn't make sense for a shoe designer to start creating hard hats just because a customer wrote on a comment card in response to a retail survey that she wished the designer also made hard hats because the her husband worked in construction. It seems obvious to most people, going into the hard hat market would be a bad call on the shoe designer's part. So why don't organizations have the same clarity when it comes to their business?

It can be hard to say no to customers, particularly when they have good ideas. But just because an idea is a good one, it doesn't necessarily mean it's right for your business model. Take the example many organizations have to face in their life time: where do they belong? Is it in the high end of the market, the mid-market or the bottom feeders? Most people when you ask them don't want to admit to being a bottom feeder, but there's a market need there that can be very profitable. The organization that can fulfill that need is very rarely, if ever, the same organization that can fill the need at the high end of the market. This just points out, again, that we can't ever be everything to everyone. I remember my marketing classes in college always told us you could only be two of the three things: good, fast or cheap. You can never be all three. Good and fast is expensive; fast and cheap is inferior; good and cheap is slow. It's because we can't be everything to everyone.

So how do you figure out what you should be? Your organization's mission should be a start, but missions can change and transform over time. One place you can start is to ask your employees, survey staff to see what they think the organization is and where they should be going. Employees have stellar ideas, but this may sound like a trick question so make sure to follow these tips for employee opinion surveys.

You should also ask for customer feedback. Your customers will help point you in the direction you should be heading. Sure you'll have the one off cases like with the shoe designer who's customer wants her to create hard hats for construction works, but chances are, no one else will respond that way on her customer questionnaire. And then, at the end of the day, you should be armed with the information you need to support your decision. As you're reading through survey comments, you'll notice that everyone doesn't want you to be everything.

In a paper survey, a question asking for an email address or a phone number normally looks like this:

Even though respondents would not intentionally put in incorrect information here, you have no control when a respondent who just wants to get to the next page in a hurry puts in random text, which is useless to you. The problem becomes a little more real in cases when survey creators ask for figures like:

How do you make sure everyone enters numbers and currencies in the same format? Some might put the answer in words and make any calculations on the data (such as average income) extremely difficult. This is where Cvent Web Surveys software offers you a massive advantage over paper surveys. For your open ended (non-choice) questions, you can specify whether respondents put in Number/Currency/General text/Phone number/Email address. Additionally when selecting formats such as number, you can specify whether a number should be greater/less than a certain number, or even lie in a specific range.

You can even design your open ended questions to take answers in date or date and time format. Additionally, you can decide whether the date should be on or after or on or before a certain date. In other words, you ensure that respondents enter in exactly what they’re supposed to. If you decide to put in a calendar asking people what date they will attend a multi-day conference, you can make sure each respondent can only select one of those three dates. You can even make this question required so survey respondents can’t skip it and move forward. You will always get exactly the information you need and all of your responses will be meaningful.

This power of being able to control what responses you receive is not limited to open ended questions only; for multiple response questions you can determine the maximum and/or minimum number of options that respondents can choose.

Over the past year, I have run into many new Cvent Web Surveys clients with the same issues or problems with their employee satisfaction surveys.  Most of the clients have the same story: in the past, using a different online survey solution, they released an employee satisfaction survey and were not able to follow up in a timely manner. 

The workplace employee surveys were conducted in a number of different fashions: paper-based, with different online survey tools, and even website survey forms.  All of these previous methods had one tragic flaw: reporting.  The survey administrators waited untill the survey was closed to run survey reports or review the paper surveys.  The problem inherit in this approach is time.  They would wait weeks before pulling reporting and discovering an employee had a problem in the workplace or in the case of paper based methods, sometimes months before they scanned the surveys.

When they finally discovered a problem that needed attention they would act, but what they discovered was:

Both of these resolutions are horrible.  If the employee solves the problem themselves they feel the organization is powerless and does not care about their situation.  If they quit, we all know that it costs 10 times more to train a new employee than to retain the old one.

A simple solution to these problems is a feature that Cvent's online survey solution embodies: Triggered Email Alerts.  Most other survey tools out there do not contain this feature.

The beauty of this feature is the survey administrator can have an email alert sent to whomever they designate; Human Resource Manager, Employee Liaison, etc...  In this manner as soon as an employee answers the appropriate question and then clicks finish on the survey an email is sent to the designated person, who in turn can then immediately follow up with the employee and solve the problem.  Thus, boosting employee retention rates, making them feel like a needed part of the organization, instilling employee loyalty, and finally creating a better work environment.

The triggered email alert feature in Cvent's survey solution solved these client's employee retention nightmares and resulted in a better workplace and a more cost effective future.

Last time we discussed in detail about the Graphical Survey Templates offered to Cvent Web Survey software users. Today, I wanted to share with you another marvelous feature available in Cvent’s online survey tool: Cvent Web Surveys Question Library. The question library is home to a list of customer service, demographics, event, HR/training, and marketing/sales survey questions you can utilize when creating surveys online.

Here’s a Sneak Preview:

Customer Service Survey Questions:
1. Did the representative answer your question adequately?
2. Did the representative respond to your phone call or email in a timely fashion?
3. How likely will you be to continue service with our company?

HR Survey Questions and Training Survey Questions:
1. Did this training meet your expectations?
2. Do you have all of the necessary resources available to you to perform your job?
3. Do you have any comments about what might improve your work experience at the company in the coming year?

Marketing Survey Questions and Sales Survey Questions:
1. How does this product's pricing compare to other similar products?
2. How likely are you to return to our site in the next 30 days?
3. How often do you use this product?

If you are new to the survey tool and need help with designing online surveys, I certainly recommend you to make use of these wonderful features. You can also call our award winning Client Services Team at 866-318-4357 for additional help.

Conducting an online web survey should really be no different than any other kind of survey form, save for the medium. But all too often, normally restrained market research companies lose all sense of decorum when conducting an online survey. Suddenly it’s OK to plague potential respondents with multiple email survey reminders to take their electronic surveys.

It’s not. You must be mindful of how often you are communicating to potential respondents. I’ve even seen companies send out reminders to an entire respondent pool, some of whom have already taken the survey. If your survey is not getting enough respondents, there are probably issues that will not be fixed by several reminders. Perhaps you have fallen into some common traps not discussed previously – not explaining things clearly, no enticement, computer glitches or countless other things. The issue could also lie with the list you are sending it to and not the respondents themselves. If it is a list you have purchased, make sure the information is accurate. Always check out companies who sell lists thoroughly to ensure they are scrupulous.

It is important to check out all these potential avenues before sending out multiple reminders. Receiving unsolicited email reminders can irritate your potential respondent pool. All too often, I have seen this backfire when recipients unsubscribe from the email list. By sending out multiple email reminders for electronic surveys, you could be losing out on the ability to contact hundreds of potential respondents for future surveys. Once they have opted out, you can’t get them back.

With the emergence of widespread internet usage and powerful online survey software, the web has become the survey method of choice for many project managers and market research professionals.  Utilizing an online web survey design allows for levels of efficiency unheard of in traditional mail questionnaire projects, but it also poses new challenges for business survey researchers.  One of the questions that is asked often is, Is my customer feedback sample and/or survey data skewed because I used an online survey?

The answer could be either no, yes, or maybe, depending upon your specific research issues and target demographics.  The demographic that use the internet (and newer technologies in general) the most are younger people.  Those who are new to online technologies, or those who are not tech-savvy, might be intimidated or confused by a web survey form or an email survey invitation from an unknown sender, which can decrease your rates of nonresponse.  Also, you can run into the issue of coverage error for those who do not have internet access, which is more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals.

But overall, the reliability and validity of online survey results can be on par with or better than other modes, especially if you know your target audience well, including their rates of internet usage.  According to a September 2009 survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77% of all adults - and 93% of those ages 18-29 - use the internet “at least occasionally.”  Less than half of those aged 65 and older use the internet or send and receive email, however.

So while there are drawbacks to online questionnaire designs of which you should be mindful (as there are with any survey modes, such as interviewer bias, etc.), the efficiency and reduced costs are more than enough rationale for most to employ online data collection techniques, either exclusively or as part of a multi-mode survey design.  Knowing and understanding your target audience is the best way to be sure that your chosen mode will produce quality data.

Randomizing your online survey form or your answer options within a survey questionnaire, means that the listed items are not asked in the same order for each survey respondent.

So, participant A may see their question in this manner:


While participant B may see the question in this order:


With the advent of electronic surveys, this feature can now be done in an easy and cost-effective manner!

For many survey questions, rotating the order in which answer choices are viewed by your participants will minimize potential within-item bias. Say for example, customer service survey respondents tend to remember (and choose) the last option they read from a list, or conversely, the first option they read from a list, rotating the order of the options means that each option is read last as often as all the other options available. Ensuring that any potential bias is spread out across the options.

By randomizing your answer options for certain questions, you can be more confident that your results aren't over-estimating the number or frequency of participants who prefer dogs, to say, ferrets.

Read more about this topic to learn important tips on when you shouldn't use randomization of your answer options.

Quota sampling is frequently used in survey designs, and especially in market research projects.  This technique is a form of "convenience sampling," where respondents are chosen not at random, but because they are available or easier to reach.  A probability-based sampling design is not employed, due to decisions made by the researcher based upon various reasons: the population frame cannot be known, contact information for respondents is unavailable, or even because the time, effort and costs are simply too high for the budget.

Quota sampling is a way that you can gather completed questionnaires, producing adequate amounts of data, from people with different demographic attributes.  Often, market researchers want to ensure they get roughly equal amounts of data from males and females, may be interested only in a specific age range (i.e., their target market/demographic), or would like to know if preferences differ by other characteristics such as ethnicity and income level.

So where does the “quota” come into play?  Well, just as in stratified sampling, the population is divided into mutually exclusive subgroubs, often based on demographic characteristics.  The researcher sets a quota for each subgroup (100 females and 100 males, for example), collects data until the quotas are met, then stops data collection and begins data analysis.  The reason that quota sampling is not a probability-based sampling technique, thereby limiting your ability to generalize, is because respondents are not selected at random.  Quota sampling does go a step further than simply selecting whomever is available without regard to any criteria, and that's why it is used so often.

While this entry is tailored to online survey best practices, these tips can also be applied to other market research methods.


For any survey type whether you're surveying customers, collecting employee feedback or conducting a product market research study, exercise caution and good sense in order to get results that are applicable and trustworthy.

When conducting market research, either through survey forms or another mode, the method of sending a survey pre-notification letter can be a tempting one.

For some time now survey methodologists have been conducting studies of pre-notification letters to determine if they have any affect, either positively or negatively, on survey response rates. An overall analysis of these various independent studies revealed an increase in response rate of approximately 8% when compared against studies where no pre-notification letter was sent.

No one can say for sure exactly why pre-notice survey letters seem to assist in increasing the number of survey responses, but perhaps they help to establish the legitimacy of a survey, contributing to a respondent's feeling of trust and the credibility of the organization conducting the research. Another possibility is that a pre-notice letter builds expectation of arriving mail (be it electronic, paper, or in-person). A third possibility is that a potential respondent is less likely to disregard the survey when it arrives if they are aware it is arriving shortly.

Although survey pre-notification letters are an excellent (but sometimes expensive) way to increase response rates, they are seldom used in marketing research surveys. Each researcher needs to weigh the additional cost of sending out a pre-notice to potential respondents against the probability of a lower response rate.

It's worthwhile to take your population's survey sample size into consideration when coming to this decision. When your sample sizes are small, each individual response affects your survey results even more. Increasing those responses through utilizing a pre-notice letter may counterbalance the increased cost of sending them out to your participants.

In the past, I've shared online survey best practice tips you should keep in mind when designing a questionnaire to ensure quality survey data. We like to always share survey best practices, and today is no exception. Here are six more notable online survey tips.

Keep your email survey invitations short: Email marketing best practices always tell us to keep emails short and simple, with one clear call to action. In the case of survey emails, your call to action is the link to access the online web survey form. Be sure to include these important points to help recipients make an informed decision about whether or not to complete the survey:
Send personalized email survey invitations: Emails with a personal salutation result in increased response rates. Send your education survey as "Dear Mr. Wright" or “Hi John,” rather than "Dear Valued Alumni." In addition, you can insert other contact fields like organization names, work cities, amount they last gave, etc. throughout the body of the email, in order to make it highly personalized for each recipient.

Include the survey link in the email: Be sure to use the appropriate link in your outgoing emails. The default link in the emails {[S-RSVP LINK]} takes your respondents to the first page of the survey and skips the Welcome page. However, you might want to change this link to {[S-HOMEPAGE LINK]} if you have added important information on the Welcome page.

Incorporate an opt out link in all emails: Cvent requires that each email contain an opt out clause for all external surveys. It is very important that all of customers maintain compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Launch survey invitations automatically: After you have tested the email invitation and your survey, you are ready to send it out in bulk to all of your invitees. We recommend that you switch the How to Send option on the Edit Settings page to the Send By Date.

Remember: Timing is everything: In order to make sure your email invitations are opened and read, avoid certain days and times. Never send out an email over the weekend or on Monday morning. This is when people’s mailboxes are full, especially with dreaded spam. We recommend sending emails in the middle of the week and the middle of the day.

In today’s competitive world, most of us find ourselves asking, What more do I get out of our online survey management software besides the obvious?

Well here’s one extraordinary feature you get along with the Cvent Web Surveys tool: A Robust Address Book. The Cvent Address Book is where you can store all you contacts; you can manually add new contacts if you need to update your records with just a handful of contacts or you can use our 4 Step Import Wizard to add bulk contacts in one go.

You can also export contacts out of the survey software if you need to update your personal database. For example, you want to be able to update contacts in your CRM system that attended your conference and completed your post-event survey so sales can follow up appropriately with attendees. Using the Cvent Address Book you can also merge duplicate contacts, create contact groups to help manage the Address Book more efficiently, or edit existing contacts to keep your records up to date.

Wait! There is more. In the Cvent Web Surveys application, you can not only run different reports to pull up information based on your address book, but also run reports to pull up information from your address book. Here is a list of some of our Address Book Reports:


If you are interested in knowing more about the benefits you can enjoy with Cvent Web Surveys, go ahead and sign up for a free trial account!

While designing a web surveys is fairly simple, make sure you are aware of common online survey pitfalls so you can avoid them:

• Plan the correct date and time to send survey invitation emails and consider your target audience. If your survey sample is office workers, it would be best to send it out during the work week when they will be at a computer most of each day. Do a little research on what the best day is – while it is widely known that Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are not optimal, there is always new information on this topic. Don’t forget to consider the time zone of recipients too – if you are sending something that will land at 7 p.m. their time, it will likely be buried or forgotten by morning.

• Create your questions carefully. In an online web survey, the respondents are obviously on their own. You can’t clarify things for them. Make sure the questions are clear and easy to understand.

• Keep the open-ended questions to a minimum or you will be poring through the answers for hours. Respondents tend to be more forthcoming with electronic surveys, and this is a positive thing. But just because you can get all those open-ended responses, you may not really want them. Always be thinking ahead to how you will analyze survey data and present findings.

• Entice the respondents to take the survey. Many times online surveys fail to offer enough incentive. Even though online surveys are more convenient, the respondents are still volunteering their time and should be rewarded.