Information Gathering Methods: Online Surveys
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by: cheesynic
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Word Count: 497
Internet surveys provide a natural convenience to people that most other surveys can’t match, which increases the odds of people being willing to participate. Many who wouldn’t bother with other surveys will be fine with an internet one.
The first step though is getting people to realize you have an internet survey to begin with. You can try to do a mass mailing to people letting them know about it, but if you want to have your survey be ongoing, you’ll need to find more permanent approaches. You can easily get some label printing done and place a label on every advertisement or piece of material you send out mentioning the internet survey, and encouraging people to give it a try.
This way you don’t have to spend more money designing completely new marketing material, and the cost of label printing is low enough that you aren’t breaking your marketing budget.
But what exactly does an internet survey provide you with? You can ask more questions, though these question will likely need to be multiple choice. This is due to the number of responses you’re likely to get, and the need to organize that much information. A written response is going to be harder to organize and require more people to sort through. Also, many customers will be unlikely to bother giving you a good written answer, but they will be willing to answer several multiple choice questions.
The drawback of this approach is that you aren’t going to get very clear or defined answers. If you’re using multiple choice a customer might pick an answer that’s only half true, but was the only answer that worked for them. This leads to answers that don’t give you the whole picture, and requires that you interpret the data that you pull in.
Because of this I wouldn’t use this form of survey if you need a lot of detailed information. Only use internet surveys if you want a nice wide pool of people to respond and you only need a few simple answers.
As with most survey approaches, internet surveys work best when used with other formats as well. Given the number of options you have and the unique traits of each, you should take advantage of all of them to get the most well rounded information possible.
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