Marketing Surveys

In yesterday's post we looked at how your survey question items, if worded improperly, may be biased, resulting in unusable or incorrect results. Now we know how survey questions shouldn't look, let's delve deeper into why those previous examples were poorly worded, and how with just a few small adjustments you can easily start to hone question items within your survey forms.

When you design internet surveys, how do you write objective questions that won't bias your results one way or the other?

Here are a few main points:


These first few points are a great starting place when you're designing a questionnaire. The final post in this series will look at a few final survey best practice tips for writing great survey questions and the benefits you'll gain from crafting quality items. In the meantime, questions previously stored in our question library already come properly worded and ready for use!

Marketing departments love client testimonials and customer quotes. They're great to share with the sales team when prospects need referrals, they're helpful to put in powerpoint presentations, and can be a critical piece of any marketing website. Getting those sound bites from clients can be a challenge, however. As you can imagine, the challenge only gets bigger if your organization sells consumer products. Admittedly, the growth of social media has made finding people who are saying good things about your product, services or organization has gotten a little bit easier. But, it could be easier still.

Imagine a world where you had a plethora of client sound bites and quotes to share with the outside world. A marketers dream. No more tracking down sales reps to talk to their clients and mangle their words. Everything is already done for you. Well, if you're conducting client satisfaction surveys or consumer surveys, you should be gathering those sound bites already. You can even consider using website polls and website usability surveys to get those sound bites. Depending on the online questionnaire design, you may still need to contact the customer to get permission to use their quote, but the hard part is still done. You have the quote.

Question remains, how do you pull these customer quotes out of your survey web form? You make sure to add an additional comment box. Customers who love you will typically share those sentiments in the additional comments area, particularly if there are not other open ended questions in the survey for them to share why they like an organization.

Still wondering why your marketing department needs sound bites? Opinions for others is one of the driving forces behind purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about the importance of customer reviews, check out this past post. It's also worth mentioning, this same idea can work for employee surveys and your HR department for recruiting purposes.

Vocus, a leading provider of on-demand public relations management software, released the results of a recent public relations and marketing survey they conducted. The survey sample was made up of 1,800 marketing and PR professionals. Among Vocus's key findings was the response of 80% respondents that social media would be a key focus for them in 2010. Vocus shared that they believe social media has been a catalyst for the change in the PR industry, where PR is becoming increasingly more important.

How is the PR industry dealing with the fact they're being asked to do more with less? Investing in technology. Sounds like a familiar story, right? Marketers turn to email survey tools to send out email survey invitations instead of having to manually send all email marketing messages through Outlook. Accounting departments use software to help them manage finances instead of the old way of paper, pencils and ledgers. Technology is often used to help professionals manage their work loads, and PR industry is doing the same thing.

Here are some of the other key findings Vocus shared from it's marketing survey:


You can learn more about the survey results by viewing the recording of webinar Vocus hosted yesterday, PR Planning Considerations for 2010.

The benefits of online and email surveys are numerous. This is not to discount other survey methods but merely to point out the advantages.

1. Cost savings. It is fairly inexpensive to email survey questionnaires, once you have the email addresses of your target audience.

2. Ability to attach pictures or sound files. You can attach or embed necessary files in the online web survey – you cannot show someone a picture over the phone, or send an audio file easily through direct mail.

3. More honest responses. It’s been shown that respondents are more likely to reveal truthful information online than to an in-person interviewer. Think about how much people reveal through personal blogs and web sites, and this makes sense.

4. Limitless possibilities. With certain kinds of survey software, you can control what types of questions survey respondent can access, show additional questions if they answer a certain question in a particular way, and more. This can be done with paper surveys but it’s a bit more cumbersome and requires written directions: If you answered 'No' to the above question, please explain.

5. Fast results. As I discussed yesterday, the results of online surveys are very rapid, which saves researchers time and money.

Technology has come a long way – ten years ago, the majority of surveys were not online, and that has certainly changed. Now market researchers are using this format more often than not for at least one aspect of gathering feedback. Whether you're looking to conduct a product enhancement survey or an internal business survey of employees, web survey forms have their place in your internet research process.

There are many options available to market researchers when designing a web survey form. I covered this topic a bit last week when I discussed creating online surveys, and included some dos and don’ts.

Conducting a study for the Web offers several opportunities for market researchers that paper questionnaires do not. For example, you can create an instant survey and check on responses frequently for updates. You may even allow the respondents to view the current results when they complete the survey. This works best for one or two-question quick polls rather than longer studies. But knowing they will see the results immediately is frequently a tipping point for respondents who are on the fence about completing your feedback survey form.

This can be helpful in analyzing survey data as well. For example, suppose results for your online survey form vary wildly throughout one week. One day, 10% of respondents use your client’s brand of glass cleaner. The next day, it’s 65%, but then the following day it drops back down to 20%. This could mean something (possibly that you need to check your recipient list) and is good information to track for your client.

The instant results also allow you to add more questions and gain clarification on points you may not have considered prior to launching the survey form. There are dozens of survey web software tools available that can create instant survey results – it’s a method that is worth trying out, but as always, consider your client’s needs before committing to a particular survey method.

Designing survey invitations so that they render correctly in the person inbox is critical. However, with every email client, from Hotmail to Gmail to Lotus Notes to Outlook, have their own rules for rendering HTML email. In the past, I've given you updates on changes Gmail has made that's effected email rendering. Today, I wanted to share some tips to ensure you're creating emails that will look good in Outlook 2007. With Outlook 2003, the general rule of thumb is if it looks good in Internet Explorer, it will look good in Outlook. Outlook 2007 doesn't play by that rule.

Depending on your target market and who you expect your survey respondents to be, you may care more about these email survey design tips. If you are a business-to-business organization, most of your email marketing list is probably going to have business emails on it as opposed to freemail domains. If you're a business-to-consumer organization, you may care more about the rules Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail use to render your emails.

Next time you're sitting down to work on your email survey design, keep these Outlook 2007 tips in mind:

Keep styles in line: This is a general email marketing best practice because a lot of email clients don't support embedded CSS. Outlook 2007 does support embedded CSS, but not all properties work the way they should when their rendered. To avoid running into these problems, just keep your styles in line.

Avoid animated files: Animated .gif files are not going to work in Outlook 2007. Instead of animating, the email will just render with the first image in the animation. As long as you're happy with this first image of the animated .gif file, then it's not going to detract from your email message. Just know that when you go to test your email survey invitation in Outlook 2007, nothing's going to happen.

Specify accurate table widths: This is another email marketing best practice for designing online survey invitations. You should use tables to design HTMl emails. If you have multiple columns and your column widths don't add up to the width you specified for the overall size of the table, you're probably going to run into issues when someone tries to read your email in Outlook 2007. To avoid this, just make sure you're doing your math correctly, or use percentages instead of pixels (just make sure you're adding to 100% not 101%).

Use Alt tag: In Outlook 2007, images are blocked by default. While some users may chose to turn this off and have images automatically show up - you shouldn't count on this. To avoid survey respondents from having no idea what your email says, be sure to include alternative text for all images.

No Forms: If you're trying to embed a survey form in an email message, it's not going to work. Outlook 2007 disables embedded forms. Instead of embedding the form, include a link to your electronic survey hosted either on your website or your survey software company's website.

For the most part, these email survey design tips shouldn't be that hard to follow. In fact, if you're using Cvent Web Surveys software, our email survey tool will keep some of these tips in mind for you - and you don't need to do anything. What do I mean? Our easy-to-use HTML editor automatically codes the email for you, so when you insert a picture, it's going to ask you for alternative text. When you are changing background colors or applying different rules to headings, it will make sure to code the in line style versus embedding CSS. If you're not using an email survey software tool that keeps email marketing design best practices in mind, you're going to need to do the research yourself to find out what different clients allow - or don't allow - in emails.

Web 2.0 is a term that is frequently tossed around, but there are still many who may not be entirely clear on the definition. The simplest way to boil it down is that Web 1.0 offered little or no opportunities for feedback, while Web 2.0 includes countless ways to “talk back” on the Web. It can include blogs, forums, social media sites, and interactive informational sites like Wikipedia. The users can control the content to an extent on these types of sites, a difference from the static web sites of Web 1.0.

What does this mean for a market researcher? I’ve already discussed methods to use social media for gathering data and survey respondents, but you can use other Web 2.0 sites in a similar manner. It’s a huge topic that I am sure will be revisited again and again.

Web 2.0 sites are good for research purposes. People who would likely make the ideal survey respondents are using these sites to talk back about products. For example, if you were doing a baking survey, the blog Bakerella.com has hundreds of posts and thousands of comments about various recipes and their merits. It is a good start for conducting internet research about the habits of the true baking enthusiast, and could help you in your online questionnaire design.

Despite the opportunities for feedback Web 2.0 offers, it is important to remember that it does not and should not replace more traditional marketing research methods, like electronic surveys, paper questionnaires and other methods. Although respondents are very forthcoming on blogs like Bakerella.com, for a quality study respondents must be properly vetted to ensure they are the correct group.

When designing surveys, researchers often want to find out how people act in addition to how they feel.  Questions about actions and behaviors are especially useful in market research, since you can gain a sense of what customers and consumers are actually doing (as opposed to what they say they’ll do).  However, this area of survey research can be difficult – to the point of being unreliable – so I urge you to follow the guidelines below when asking behavioral questions in your online questionnaire design:

Provide a specific time reference within your survey questions.  This allows for an “anchor” to be set, and can give you a clearer idea of what your respondents do during an average time frame (be it a day or a week).

Make the time frame fairly recent.  It is very difficult for respondents to remember what they did three years ago.  At the very most, stick with questions that reference 12 months ago or less (preferably much less, like the past week or even 24 hours).

Ask only about the respondent’s own behavior.  Unless you’re asking about the actions of small children, it’s best to keep survey questions directed at the individual level rather than for family members or friends.  Asking people about others’ behaviors can provide distorted, unreliable data, as most people overestimate or underestimate certain actions of other people.

Personal and sensitive information should be taken with a grain of salt.  Multiple market research studies have shown the more sensitive a question is, the less likely it is that respondents will answer... and the data provided can be inaccurate, so it is important to consider that people might dance around the absolute truth on these kinds of questions.

In the past several years, many market researchers have shifted to using online surveys more frequently. Traditionally, these online surveys were emailed rather than posted online to avoid data skewing.

When creating the online survey design, there are several things to consider. Make sure the electronic survey is simple and easy to use. Too often, online survey forms are cumbersome or technologically dated. Keep it simple, and you won’t run into any problems.

You must also plan carefully to make sure no questions are missed. You can design online surveys so they will not allow survey respondent to move on if mandatory questions are not completed. In addition to requiring survey questions, I would advise setting up the internet survey so respondents cannot complete the questionnaire more than once. Most online survey research software applications have features to create limits on how many times someone can fill out an online survey form. This prevents skewed data – some respondents will try to complete online survey forms multiple times if there is a giveaway or drawing offered as an incentive.

Make sure you read over your electronic survey a few times as well. Proofreading is especially important when designing online surveys. You must have members of your team proofread not only for grammar and clarity, but also functionality. Make sure all the links work, and the survey can be completed with all your caveats and mandatory questions. 

Online surveys have made it possible to gather information much quicker, and when used properly provide an excellent resource for market researchers.

Rarely are we asked the question, What is a survey? Typically questions follow the path of, Why do I need a survey program? What am I going to get out of conducting online web surveys to collect customer feedback? Or How do I get started measuring employee satisfaction with online questionnaire templates?

However, sometimes it's good to define market research and what it means, and answer the rarely asked question, What is a survey?

Market Research Definition (mahr-kit-ree-surch)
The gathering and studying of data relating to consumer preferences, purchasing power, etc., especially prior to introducing a product on the market.

Survey Definition (ser-vey)
Collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research.

Chances are though, you're still wondering about those other questions. These posts may help you answer those ever burning questions about why you should create and design surveys.

Cvent offers a variety of Pre-Designed Survey Templates you can choose from for your first online web survey. These internet survey templates contain default questions, email, welcome and thank you text which you can utilize when designing a questionnaire. You can also choose from over 50 different graphical templates to suit the look and feel of your survey forms. Here’s a list of the different pre-created survey templates that you can use to build the base of your survey:


Besides this vast list of pre-designed questionnaires and graphical survey templates, Cvent also offers you a Question Library, which is filled with Customer Service, Demographics, Event, HR/Training, Marketing/Sales questions that you can utilize in your survey.

So! Go ahead and Sign up for an online web survey free trial account now and enjoy these á-la-carte features absolutely free.

Cvent provides you simple survey tips as best practices that you can follow while working on your electronic survey project to ensure that the project is flawless. Mentioned below are some survey form best practice tips that will help you achieve this.

Anonymous Survey: If you are creating an anonymous survey, please carefully consider the fact that you will not be able to link the responses that you collect to any of the respondents on your targeted list. As soon as a respondent clicks on a link in your online survey email, that person is removed from your targeted list and all of his or her contact information is removed as well. When you run survey reports for an anonymous survey form, the respondents will be identified by unique response numbers that are not linked to any respondent contact information. Respondent contact information is removed from the response for a particular anonymous survey, however it remains in your Cvent address book.

Removing Identity Confirmation Page: You can also create a collect respondent contact information survey and hide the identity confirmation page from your respondents so that the survey appears anonymous to your online survey respondents. However, for this functionality to work in your electronic survey, respondents must access the survey via a link in an email survey invitation. If the respondents are coming through the generic website link, they must go through the identity confirmation page, as there is no way to know who is responding.

Brand your company: As a valued Cvent Customer, we have activated the custom header feature in your account for a custom online survey design. Please take advantage of your ability to customize the headers on your welcome page and survey body pages to include your own images, banners and logos.

Be clear about privacy protections: People are more comfortable sharing information on the internet if they know how it will be used. The welcome page or the first page of the survey is the place to include information about how you will be using people's survey responses. Are they anonymous? Confidential? Shared with others? A university human subjects statement, if needed, would go here.

Use Page Breaks: We recommend putting a maximum of 5-6 questions on each survey page in order to keep the page lengths short. Not only does keeping each page short help reduce the likelihood that a respondent will time out, but adding page breaks helps you to collect partial responses. Anytime a respondent clicks on a "Next" button, the responses entered previous to that button are saved. This ensures that any respondents who exit the online web survey before hitting the "Finish" button will be able to go back in and answer the remainder of the questions to complete the survey.

Progress Indicator Bar: Use a progress indicator bar to allow your respondents to see where they are in the survey and to inform them when they have completed the survey.

Survey Logic: Where possible, drill down for more information. The logic in the Cvent Web Surveys system makes this very easy to do. If someone selects a negative answer choice, add a sub question to probe them for details. Use branch logic to create paths within your survey that are only applicable to one group of respondents. Pipe logic allows you to personalize your survey by pulling an answer from a previous question into the question text of a follow-up question. Lastly, advanced survey question logic can be used to make a question visible to a respondent when specific criteria are met. These criteria can be based on respondent contact information, custom contact fields, or questions in the survey. When you are applying advanced logic, you can also turn on link logic, so that respondents only see certain answer options for one question, depending on how they responded to a previous question in the survey.

Have your respondents market your survey: Activate the survey invitation forwarding feature to allow your online survey respondents send an email invitation to friends or colleagues at the completion of the survey. The contact information collected will be automatically added to your address book for future surveys.

From Name in the emails: Always use a recognizable From Name in your emails as this drives your respondents to open the email. This is very important because without opening the email, your respondents will not be able to take the survey.

Use Multiple Email Campaigns: Send targeted email marketing messages to your audience in order to help increase survey response rates. Within one survey, you can send out different messages to different groups of people by segmenting your invitee list. This functionality allows you to specify the From Name, From Email Address, Subject Line of the email, and body of the email. Take advantage of this functionality and manipulate these variables in order to increase the open rate of your survey emails and your response rates.

We often get asked, "What is a good survey design?" All of these survey best practice tips are components to keep in mind when designing a questionnaire to ensure quality survey data. Watch out for more tips coming soon...

The vast majority of survey research projects are studies at a single point in time of a specified population, such as employees, customers or the general public.  Fewer web survey designs track opinions over time.  This post outlines the different types of surveys carried out by researchers.

Point-in-time surveys are called cross-sectional studies.  They study a single population or sample size during a single specified time-frame, and give us a “snapshot” of opinion data.  Cross-sectional surveys comprise the largest number of projects that are undertaken. 

Longitudinal surveys, on the other hand, are those which study trends over time, and usually consist of cohorts or panel respondents.  These can be further classified into three distinct types of longitudinal designs (trend, cohort and panel).

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

I always recommend probability-based survey sampling techniques wherever possible.  Sometimes, however, companies and organizations want to get an initial feel for how consumers and customers will react to a new product or concept.  In addition, early in the process, you may not have the ability to comprehensively identify a target market or sampling frame, and there is no way to produce a representative sample of your population. 

In these instances, it may be useful to employ a snowball sampling technique as a pilot project, or to gain a rough, early grasp on what customers are feeling.  A snowball sample is one in which you use an initial group of respondents as recruiters for additional market research respondents.  In the survey, you ask your original respondents to list several people  they know that might be interested in completing a survey as well.   This is a case where an incentive might prove particularly useful, since you are asking your market research survey sample to provide contact information of their acquaintances.  Snowball sampling is also especially useful if you do not have a predefined list of people to survey, or if you are trying to identify key information-holders or opinion leaders.

Again, there is a significant caveat of snowball and other nonprobability-based business research methods for sampling techniques: they do not produce representative samples, and therefore cannot be used to generalize findings to the overall population.  But if you are just starting out, and do not mind that your market survey sample cannot produce generalizable findings, then a snowball sampling technique is a convenient survey data collection method to obtain larger amounts of preliminary data.

Market researchers write survey questions for different audiences all the time. Sometimes the groups are broad, like consumers or non-consumers, and sometimes they are far narrower, like employees at a small advertising agency. When writing surveys for any audience, be sure and use the clearest and most sensible language to communicate with that audience.

For instance, if you were hired by the small advertising company to complete a 360 performance survey, you should use the correct title structure for supervisors and employees at the company. You don’t want to refer to managers, if at the agency supervisors are referred to as account executives. It would be confusing and yield improper results for your employee questionnaire.

Similarly, if you were performing a bank customer satisfaction survey, you wouldn’t want to ask survey respondents who only have standard checking accounts about their habits with their savings accounts.

In addition to doing the research necessary to communicate with your audience, you must also use clear language. There’s nothing worse than trying to respond to a survey questionnaire that is poorly written, with confusing grammar or overly long sentences.

Writing as clearly and directly as possibly will give you the answers you need. Have multiple people proofread your survey if possible. Everyone processes information differently and a variety of people may find different errors or points of confusion. Having others read the survey is beneficial, because as the survey creator it is hard not to be biased. You need to make sure it is clear to the respondents and as the survey creator, it is hard not to be biased.

Partial responses are an unavoidable caveat of online surveys.  There are no moderators to ensure the survey respondent completes the web survey in its entirety and there are, generally speaking, no punishments or consequences should a respondent exit the survey early.  Add in the ever decreasing human attention span, and we have quite an obstacle to overcome to ensure your survey gets the most complete and most accurate responses. 

This was exactly the issue facing one of our clients.  Their survey was a decent length, only about 30 single choice questions, and the contacts on the target list were all product users.  So when they called in about the substantial number of partial and visited responses, I will admit I was a bit baffled.  Hey, it happens. 

I asked whether people had sent in messages about possible error messages when they tried to continue on to the next page or submit their responses; nothing. I checked their emails to ascertain whether any information in the messages was discouraging people from finishing the survey or telling them to return at a later date to complete; again, nothing.  It wasn’t until I previewed the survey to test whether there was any bug preventing the collection of responses that I noticed something: a hyperlink.  In the middle of the survey body.  It was so innocuous yet tempting, offering something new and unknown after having monotonously clicked through numerous page breaks and questions. 

I clicked the link and was immediately connected to a new, enchanting website filled with animated images, graphics, and wild colors.  Oh my!  What was this exciting new Wonderland I had discovered?  It was the distant, yet audible cough on the other end of the phone that brought my attention back to the task at hand.  And, I had discovered the cause. 

The hardest part of any online survey is to motivate survey respondents to not only open your email survey invitation, but take time out of their day to complete the survey.  With the proliferation of internet-based communication, people are becoming more desensitized to email marketing.  If you have already overcome the most difficult task of having a respondent start your survey, why lead them astray?

The solution was simple: take the hyperlink out of the survey body.  Put it in an email message or as a link on the separate Thank You page instead.  Keep this survey best practice in mind and you'll keep survey respondents focused on the project at hand.  Once they complete the survey, you can unleash the wonderful and ever intriguing world of the internet upon them.

One of the great things about Cvent Web Surveys software application is that it is constantly getting “better.” I, for one, am not aware of another survey software company that can state with confidence that 80% of all product enhancements come directly from the requests of current clients. Cvent, however, has certain processes in place so that every time a client expresses interest in seeing a new feature added to the online survey application, this request is quickly relayed to our technical team.

For those of you who were clients before our most recent product release in August 2009, you definitely noticed at least one big change in your account the first time you logged in after the release. As soon as you logged into your Cvent Web Surveys account, you saw that your surveys were no longer organized into folders on the Survey Selection page. Instead, they are now displayed in “views.”

Now, you may wonder why I chose to write my blog post this week on the transition from folders to survey views. It may seem like a pretty dry topic. I wanted to write on this particular survey subject because I get so many calls from clients asking how to create a new survey view that pull the appropriate surveys into view. If you have a lot of surveys created in your account, then this is a pretty important thing to know how to do, so that you don’t have to sort through all of your company’s surveys just to find the few that you are personally working on!

When you are ready to create a new survey view and filter the appropriate surveys into this view, you need to remember 3 simple steps:

1) Create a survey custom field. You can create survey custom fields under the Administration tab, on the same page that you create contact custom fields. Survey custom fields are primarily used to classify the surveys in your account and pull them into the appropriate views on the Survey Selection page. So, for example, if your marketing department and human resources department are running surveys, you may want to create 2 separate survey views, one for each department. The first step to do this would be to create a survey custom field for department.

2) Create a new view on the Survey Selection page. You can create a new survey view by choosing “add new view” from the Display drop-down menu. When you add the new view, you will need to name it and also specify certain options (i.e. whether you would like the view to be private or public). Finally, at the bottom of the page, you should apply an advanced filter based on the survey custom field you just created for department. For example, if you are adding the survey view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should choose “department” as the field, “equals” as the operator, and “marketing” as the value.


3) Now that you have created the survey custom field and added the new view, all you need to do is pull the appropriate surveys into the view you just created! When you added the new view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should have gotten a message, “no surveys match your criteria.” This is because you have not yet applied the survey custom field at the survey-level! To do this, simply go into an individual marketing survey, and click on  Settings on the top navigation bar. On the General Information page, you should click on the Custom Survey Fields tab. Here you can apply the “marketing” label to the individual survey, so that it will show up in the “Marketing Surveys” view.


Hopefully this post will be helpful to those of you who are struggling with the transition from folders to survey views. Believe me, survey views are completely customizable and will help you organize online surveys in your Cvent Web Surveys software account.

At minimum, two specific characteristics define a good list of response options for survey questions.  First, the categories (response options) must be mutually exclusive, which means they do not overlap with one another.  Second, survey response options must be collectively exhaustive, meaning they provide all possible options that could comprise a response list.  Let’s take a look at examples of common mistakes for each of these characteristics:


You can see while this response list is exhaustive, it does not provide mutually exclusive categories.  For example, if a survey respondent eats out three times per week, he or she could select either (b) or (c) as an accurate response.


In this survey question example, the response categories do not overlap, but they are not collectively exhaustive.  If a survey respondent make less than $10,000 annually, he or she does not have an option that can accurately capture his or her response.  This could be corrected for option (a) by applying the same response type as shown in (e), such as “$29,999 or less."

Did you know there are 6 steps in the market research process?  While this process speaks directly to marketing research professionals, the process applies to HR, customer or education surveys as well:

1. Identify and define the problem.  Before you start any web survey project, you should identify the key issues you hope to be able to solve.  This step should also include clearly defined objectives.
    
2. Develop the approach. In this step, you need to establish a budget, understand influencing factors such as the environment or economy, decide on sampling and survey methods, and formulating hypotheses.
    
3. Research design. Designing a survey or questionnaire is considered the most important step in any survey process.  Question design takes a lot of thought and time.  We like to say, "If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out."  This means that if the questions are bad, the data will be bad as well.  During the survey research design, keep in mind sampling methods and data analysis factors you intend to use.
    
4. Collect the data. Don't forget to test your survey before to ensure you're fielding the correct data.  Thankfully, with the help of an online survey tool, this step is relatively painless.
    
5. Analyze the Data. The types of analysis you planned to perform on the collected survey data should have been decided in earlier steps, but after collecting the data you have to actually perform the survey analysis.  Analysis can be performed using survey analysis tools like office programs, such as Excel, or more advanced programs such as SPSS - the complexity of the questions will determine this.
    
6. Report, Present, Take Action.  The final step in the market research process is to present your survey research findings and draw conclusions.  While Step 3 is the most important because it defines the outcome of your survey, if you fail to complete this last step and act on the findings in some way, the previous steps don't matter. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this same process can be applied to any type of project: product evaluations, customer satisfaction questionnaires, public relation surveys, etc.  If you give each step the attention it deserves, each of your online surveys should be a success.