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...