Who Else Wants to Get Some Survey Question Ideas?

You’re a question away from your customers. In a way, this is the truth. You want to know how do they feel about your amazing products and awesome services?

Even if you think your company is doing everything right for your customers, have you ever considered what might the customers feel?

They feel SHIT!!!

Well, you can argue but you’re not sure. You’re seeing a straight line on the sales graph; it’s not spiking although you’re dying for it. After giving more than your full effort, you can’t hold on the line.

The sale is dropping and you’re feeling void because you’ve done everything possible. All of the above are the common scenarios you face with your eCommerce sites and you don’t know how to measure the severity.

That’s where comes the survey – a messiah that can help you where’s the tumor. You’re the surgeon so you know how to remove a lump right after you have explored it.

Beyond survey question ideas, in this post, I have gone further with other relevant things so that you pull together your lost confidence. What are you waiting for? Let’s get started right here, right now.

What is Survey?
What is Questionnnaire?
Survey vs. Questionnaire
How to Define a Good Survey Question?
Why is it Necessary to Design a Good Survey Questionnaire?
What is Not a Good Survey Question?
Types of Survey Questions
How to Write Survey Questions That Work
Survey Question Examples
Survey Questions Best Practices
In Case of Sensitive Questions

What is survey?

A survey is a method of collecting data from a select group of a particular industry. The information is then used in research and market analysis based on the user’s response. A survey is a powerful tool, and it can be implemented in any field to gather the information you want. To make things easier, you can use WordPress plugins for creating surveys.

Some survey question examples:

Should we arrange webinars every week?
Do you love extra free french fries with your meal?
What do you think about the build quality of our product?

What is questionnaire?

A questionnaire is a set of questions that are connected in a defined pattern. These can be in any structure: open-ended, close-ended, or combined.

Survey vs. questionnaire

A questionnaire is, as mentioned earlier, a series of questions used in research to gather data from a targeted group of people. A questionnaire is a part of a survey that can be applied as a tool to collect information.

How to define a good survey question?

Simply put, a good survey question comes handy when you want to know more about your customers. Also, you’ll get business-related information that can be analyzed for future decision making. An effective survey question helps you understand the following matrics:

• Your target audience: who are they? what do they want?
• Price reaction: how do your customers take the current pricing?
• Bounce rate: the reason behind your customers leaving your website

Moreover, it depends solely on the quality of your survey questions, whether to get valuable answers or not. If you want to get a critical understanding of your business then you need to organize the questionnaire in a sophisticated way. For further analysis, get help from tools that can provide a clear insight into customer behavior.

Why is it necessary to design a good survey questionnaire?

You’re only as good as your data… and good data starts with good survey questions. A good survey question is asked in a precise way at the right stage in the buyer’s journey to give you solid data about your customers’ needs and drives.

Without data, you can’t know what’s good for your business. To get the right data, you need to run a survey with the appropriate questions. A good survey question helps customers to participate in the research.

With this information, you can then tailor your website, products, landing pages, and messaging to improve the user experience and (ultimately) maximize conversions.

What is not a good survey question

What happens if you don’t ask the right questions, or you word them wrongly and/or ask them at the wrong time? You could waste countless hours trying to fix minimal problems while ignoring the real ones.

A survey question is not for knowing all the small details of a person. Personal information is sensitive things and you can follow other techniques to get them if you think that is necessary.

A survey question is not a once-in-a-year event that you can’t make whenever you want. On some websites, you’ll see the survey is happening on a daily basis. Either there’s going a poll on the sidebar or asking about your opinion beneath an article.

A good survey question doesn’t bore the users out. Well, well; filling out forms – be it clicking on radio boxes – is a nettlesome task. Present it in a way that respondents feel it will also help them in some way.

An excellent survey question never takes the whole day to complete. It requires a few munites with a shorter length.

A good survey question is not full of words difficult to pronounce and hard to understand. If people don’t get what you’re describing at their first look, the survey questionnaire will simply be worthless.

Types of survey questions

You will see various types of survey questions in many books and websites. I’m going to mention only the ones that are most popular and used in online market research. Get to know the types and what they are used for.

Open-ended questions

You can treat open-ended questions as an ice-breaker. Unlike other question types, where users choose from selected parameters, open-ended questions allow them to express their opinion in words.

Where close-ended questions offer pre-determined options, open-ended questions allow users to tell what they want to say. You’ll provide them with a text box to write. The examples of open-ended questions could be:

What features you want to see in our next update?
Are you facing any trouble currently using our product?
What’s the best option you find in our product?

When to use open-ended questions

• To learn the unknown needs of your customers, nothing works best than open-ended questions. Just let the people express their opinions and be sure, you will get some astonishing replies you didn’t know of their existence.
• However, open-ended questions are highly effective when you want to know what customers think about your products/services. And, it might happen at the beginning to know what users expect and in the middle to know why users are getting frustrated.

Closed-ended questions

Unlike the previous type, closed-ended questions limit users to answer within the defined options. Either respondent will choose an answer from the list, or they will go for a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

You will use closed-ended questions when you want to keep your questionnaire clutter-free and keep your users focused on the topic. Besides that, it’s easier for busy people to respond quickly.

Let’s see some examples:

Have you watched the movie?
Did you visit the trade fair last week?
Do you want to get a free addon?

Rating questions

In this question type, you’re letting your users review your service and rate it with a number or percentage. Usually, you will see this type of question with stars, scaling bars, or even emojis.

Rating questions are very useful because, with these, you can understand your users like your products how much. Based on the popularity or unliking, you can make the next decisions more accurately.

Rating questions examples:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much would you give us?
If you love our service, please let us know with stars.
How did we perform? Let us know from the bar below.

Likert scale questions

Likert scale questionnaire helps you find out what people think about particular things you want to know. These questions come handy if you’re going to compare your products with others or want to see how people love your competitors.

You have probably seen these types of questions already. Likert scale usually comes with a five-point scale, which sometimes can be seven or nine-point range. It’s a fantastic way to determine how much users agree or disagree with a specific thing.

The scale can be used to measure the level of agreement, frequency, likelihood, importance, and quality.

An example of agreement words:

Strongly Agree
Agree
Undecided
Disagree
Strongly Disagree

If you want to measure the quality:

Excellent
Good
Fair
Poor
Very Poor

When to use Likert scale questions

Likert scale questions are useful when you can guess what your customers might think. Let’s say you have received a report on the length of help videos. Now you tend to make the next videos with a shorter length and want to know the ideal time. Run a survey with Likert scale questions that suggest a bar

Multiple choice questions

This type of question simply cuts down a lot of pressure from the user’s neck. They’re more likely to answer them because it requires no brain work and can be done at a fast pace.

Another benefit of multiple-choice questions is you can hide them under dropdown, which makes your form cleaner. If you can’t fix a date or choose the best option, go with multiple questions.

Let’s check out some examples.

Which browser is the fastest: Chrome | Safari | Firefox | Opera
Years of experience in digital marketing: 1+ | 5+ | 10+ | 15+
The convenient date for you to participate in our program: Jan 12 | Jan 18 | Feb 6 | Feb 12

Picture choice questions

A picture can tell more than words. Besides, people can easily relate to an image, so try to include a pictorial section. Well, although this is not a popular type of question primarily because of the hassle, one may feel during the survey creation.

If your survey tool supports picture questions, then you should try it to bring some variations with your forms. The conversion will be increased with this technique applied as it helps to stand your form aside.

Demographic questions

When you’re creating a survey, the demographic questions will help you know about your customer’s background. If you know where they are coming from or in what age group they belong to, then you can design a better strategy.

How can the demography of a customer help your business? In many ways. Let’s say, most of your customers are females, and you know there’s a big difference in personality between men and women. Also, if you find out that a lot of people live far away from the city, then you might plan to add shipping fees.

Demographic questions examples

Which gender do you belong to?
What’s your profession?
Your years of experience?

When to Use Demographic Questions

• If you know your customers well, especially their background, then you can make your services more user-friendly.
• Use these questions when it’s essential to know a person’s background then you can meet their choice more appropriately.
• Customize your services based on the data you have acquired. Keep the offers personalized for different age groups.
• If you want to know the professional group of your audience, then run a survey with this survey type. For busy people, you might plan an easy to grab deal whereas the married persons can have another treatment.

‘Yes’ or ‘no’ questions

These are close-ended questions as you’re limiting your users only in ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The items are plain, and you only want to know whether the users are positive or not with your opinion.

Although it seems very simple Yes/No questions can help you big time in many ways. Let me give you an example. If you want to know only about Instagram experience, you may ask a question like ‘do you have an Instagram account?’ If the answer is negative, then there’s no need to proceed with the survey.

Some examples with yes or no questions:

Did you find what you’re looking for? (Yes/No)
Is this information correct? (Yes/No)
Is it personal or business? (Yes/No)

When to use Yes/No survey questions

• These survey questions are crucial when you need to segment your questionnaire. If you want to approve only a particular group, then you can exclude all the others at first question with a painless ‘no.’
• These questions help a lot when you want to encourage users to respond and get them involved further. Choosing only yes or no requires a little effort, so users don’t find it hard to answer.

How to write survey questions that work

Everyone struggles with writing the best survey questions. Depending on the question structures and information type you’re collecting, the performance of a survey varies. To increase the survey response rates, you should improve the quality of survey questions.

Be fair, first of all, with all of your questions. You want to know what users think about your product or service, not you are to manipulate them even before they answer.

State the fact with as simple language as possible. Avoid adjectives that show exaggeration, and don’t let the customers think you’re too obsessed with your company.

Let’s put an example for you. If you ask, “How do you like our outstanding support?”, isn’t it weird? Whereas the question should be “How do you like our support?” or “Is our support helpful enough?”.

Want to hear a secret? People are more likely to respond to simple survey questions. Therefore, keep the survey questions uncomplicated and easy to answer. It will boost the conversion.

The users depreciate questions that require too much effort. If a question needs a lot of time to complete, then it’s not the right question. Let’s encourage users to answer with short words instead of long paragraph-like text.

Don’t stray from the main topic in order to collect redundant information. The temptation to get more data can be daunting for respondents, and it will create damage for you. You should stop asking too many questions while you can ask all in a single survey.

Go for the sophisticated questions that are related to user’s lives. If they have to answer based on assumption, it may harm your survey goal. Save yourself from asking questions that users may or may not relate to.

Remember, users will answer what you will ask. That’s why it’s crucial to arrange the questions smartly. The more detail you can explore, the better your survey can perform.

If you ask “Did you find the documentation helpful?” then the answer will be “yes” or “no.” Think now, what can bring a question like “How helpful was our documentation?”. It will end up pulling an answer from “extremely helpful,” “moderately helpful,” and “it sucks.” You see? Based on this data, you can make even more effective decisions.

Another golden rule of a survey is not asking more than one question at once. Your job to motivate people to participate in your survey, not to intimidate or confuse them. Asking multiple things in one question will overwhelm your customers no matter how connected they are.

If you want to know multiple correlated things in one question, then keep them in a cluster but with individual items. This way, you can be able to get more appropriate answers and brilliant insights.

Survey question examples

To give you some idea of how easily you can run surveys in the digital age, I have created some demo templates. Moreover, to feed your curiosity, all these templates were created with WP Fluent Forms.

As I have promised to deliver some survey questionnaire ideas, I believe, the following examples can show you the path to move forward. On a side note, it’s not worth spending on a separate survey tool if you don’t have to run surveys regularly.

A smart form builder like Fluent Forms can help you collect leads, create surveys and quizzes, and not to mention connect more people with powerful contact forms. Why don’t you try it free?

Survey questions best practices

Follow the rules described below to make your survey work for the best. These are the industry-popular practices and you can implement them in your data collection process only to make it prone to be filled out by the participants.

Use simple language

In your business, the respondents are general people, so keep the questions easy to understand. You may want to use more formal and sophisticated language in academic research.

If you don’t want to increase the dropout rate of your survey, avoid complicated questions that make your users confused. Use everyday language in your forms to make the users understand that both are communicating on the same page.

Be specific

Language is a tricky thing, you know. It’s the best practice to be specific with all your questions. When you want to know the value, don’t ask, “Do you use shampoo every day?” Ask, “How often do you use shampoo?” instead.

In order to get objective and precise answers, you need to ask direct questions. Want to know the frequency of going to play of a person in a week? Avoid asking, “Do you go to play every day?” Ask a more specific question like “How many days per week do you play football?”

Break down big ideas

For big research, you may want to know a lot of things from a single subject. That’s not an offense, but you should not get your users overwhelmed. That’s why split the broad ideas into multiple steps.

A vast question holding multiple angles can be challenging to answer. You can quickly solve this problem by putting all the sub-topics in separate questions. And keeping easy options like checkboxes and rating scales make the whole process more user-friendly.

One thing per question

Yes, I have discussed this topic in the previous section. But the idea explained there was related to breaking down a big idea into multiple parts. In general, try to cover only one thing at a single question.

Never combine two questions into one. It only makes people confused. For example, if you ask, “How are our products and service?” people might not get it correctly. Maybe your product is good, but your support is not.

More interval questions

Do you know how to achieve more output from your survey? Yes, applying interval questions. Instead of asking questions that require only yes or no, choose questions that need answers in different scales.

A question may be, “Are you satisfied with our service today?” which demands nothing more than yes/no. On a different aspect, a question like “How satisfied are you today?” leads users to choose an answer from 1-10 or 1-7.

Thus, you will get a more clear scenario that describes the opinion of your users: agree, strongly agree, disagree, strongly disagree, and more. Now you can easily analyze the answers and take the next step efficiently.

In case of sensitive questions

Keep the following things in mind while creating an efficient survey questionnaire:

• Religion and political ideologies are a very personal matter. If you have to ask questions on these things, apply them wisely. Place all these questions on a relatively close block.
• A no-brainer tip is keeping the first questions comfortable and exciting. This way, you can make the form conducive to fill up and evoke the user’s best interest.
• Make it clear before your participants what you’re going to do with all the data collected. Are you doing this for commercial use? Does it have an academic purpose?
• It may seem silly, but I have to tell you that grammatical errors jeopardize the success of your survey. Double-check the question so that they are free from spelling mistakes and okay with the standard language.
• Take care of the presentations of your survey form and make it comprehensive for all-level users. If you have a select user group, then there’s no offense to use jargon; otherwise, refrain yourself from being unknown.

Bottom line

Whatever your industry is, remember, simple and direct questions can get more benefits from the survey. The first key to a good survey question is easy to understand. Then go with all the other tips mentioned above.