You will usually know exactly why you want to create your own survey and what conclusions you hope to draw from it. One thing is highly likely: in 9 out of 10 cases, you need information from your customers or employees. Online surveys have become an established, successful and flexible method of collecting data in market research. Here we explain how you can make effective use of the key benefits of an online survey:
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Benefits of online surveys: save money and time, reduce errors
- Save money: No printing, paper, postage, shipping or return-envelope costs.
- Save time: Less effort to create the survey, immediate reach, shorter response times and real-time results.
- Reduce errors: Analysis is faster and easier because no manual data entry is required. Automated processes avoid errors caused by manual work, as well as interviewer effects and group effects.
- Reach more participants: Customers and employees can be reached quickly without additional mailing costs, regardless of physical distance.
- Receive more responses: Higher response rates through features such as skips, randomisation, filters and continuous rating scales, as well as the high level of anonymity perceived by respondents.
More features and options with online surveys
If you create an online survey with the right survey tool, you benefit from additional features that can increase response rates and participant satisfaction, strengthen engagement with your organisation and even improve your image, for example through an attractive survey design or by combining the survey with a prize draw. These advantages can be used online in modern browsers and are not possible with paper questionnaires.
Online surveys also make it possible to use question types and features that are unavailable or much more labour-intensive in personal interviews or on paper:
- Sliders / rating scales: continuous entry of a response value
- Required questions: responses can be made mandatory
- Ranking: drag and drop to sort items
- Multimedia: include videos, images and audio elements
- Dynamic logic: skips, conditional visibility, redirects, branching paths and required questions
- Randomisation: avoid order effects by rotating items
- Plausibility checks: automatic checks for open-text entries and responses
- Completion-time tracking: together with control questions, this enables the creation of a validity index
- Drop-off analysis: knowing when and why respondents stop enables targeted optimisation of the questionnaire
- Targeted reminders: friendly email reminders to increase response rates
- And much more: with the LamaPoll survey tool.
In detail: paper vs online surveys
The benefits of surveys themselves, such as customer surveys or employee surveys, are covered elsewhere. Here, the focus is specifically on “online”: what advantages does an online survey offer compared with a traditional offline survey or paper questionnaire?
- You save direct costs: online surveys avoid many small individual expenses that can add up quickly with paper questionnaires. These include postage for all participants, including return postage, as well as paper and printing costs for thousands of questionnaires.
- You save indirect costs: when you create an online survey, all results are available immediately in real time and presented graphically. An offline survey, by contrast, can require many hours of manual work to enter, compile, process and analyse the results.
- You save time: with the right survey tool, you can create and test your survey within a day. An online survey can reach thousands of participants within minutes and provide results in real time. For example, you create and test the survey on Wednesday, invite your employees on Thursday morning and can prepare the presentation for the board that same evening.
- You reduce errors: manual steps are eliminated. There is no need to type in thousands of questionnaires or manually analyse and prepare the results. A suitable survey tool automates these processes.
- You improve quality: you avoid group effects, minimise interviewer influence and respondents perceive a higher level of anonymity, which increases the likelihood of truthful responses.
- You increase response rates and therefore the number, significance and validity of the results. Online surveys generally achieve higher response rates than paper questionnaires.
- You benefit from broad reach: regardless of where your customers or employees are located, they can be reached by email.
Choosing a suitable tool is important for your survey project. Define your requirements in advance. Only when you know exactly which features the software needs to provide can you avoid mistakes when choosing a solution.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is an online survey tool for creating employee surveys and measuring employee satisfaction. With us, you can create, conduct, and analyse all types of employee surveys.
Set up your employee survey in just a few steps, customise it with your company's corporate design, and invite your employees conveniently by email or via your intranet. You'll gather insights to boost employee satisfaction in no time. Sign up for free with our online survey tool. You can then run surveys for up to 50 employees immediately and with no obligation. If you need more responses for your online employee survey, simply use our monthly plans. You can also make use of our templates and examples for employee survey questionnaires.
