How to Survey Your Blog Readers and Actually Get Answers

Have you successfully used surveys on your blog? Today, international bestselling author Michael Simpson (@Traitwise) tells us why surveys are an important tool for bloggers.

Surveys are a powerful tool. Surveys may be used for gauging your audience’s satisfaction or to create user profiles so you can personalize products or services to an individual. Used well, they become an engine of discovery and innovation. Used poorly, they are mind numbing and turn people off from your brand. At Traitwise Surveys, we provide a technology that maximizes the benefits and minimize the negatives.

Through years of research, we recommend many “best practices”.

1. The first is to think about user feedback as a continuous process. Building user feedback into everyday business processes helps you stay up to date with what is happening in your organization in real time. Embedding questions into your web and mobile applications provides the most engagement. We have found that people are more than twice as likely to answer questions on your site rather than click a link to a third party survey. In addition, by asking users questions immediately, answer accuracy is significantly improved.
2. The second tip is to make questions short and easy to answer. Ideally, questions should be able to be read, understood, and answered in six to eight seconds. It is better to ask 25 short engaging questions than 5 obtuse ones. Many people think they have to keep the number of questions to a minimum, and wind up creating difficult or multi-part questions that are hard to understand.We have found that asking simple questions provides a better experience for the survey taker. Traitwise has taken the user experience a step further, and our technology provides instant feedback on many question types, so that the communication is two-directional. The user gets to see how they relate to others as they take the survey. We find that people will answer four to five times more questions when the get to see the instant results.
   
3. The third recommendation is to ask questions in the first person. People like to talk about themselves more than being interrogated.
   For example, “I eat apples…
   • 1) never
   • 2) sometimes
   • 3) always

   is more engaging than “How often do you eat apples?

   • 1) never
   • 2) sometimes
   • 3) always

Due to these techniques, Traitwise Survey users routinely call our technology: “fun, addictive, the best survey I have ever taken”. Try it yourself now at Traitwise. Compared to other survey technologies, Traitwise is consistently ranked much better (actual results).

Please feel free to reach out to us at michael@traitwise.com with questions or a copy of our white paper.

About the Author

Michael Simpson, President and CEO of Traitwise has 20 years experience in executive management, consulting, and product management. His management experience spans from large-scale data aggregation to web services. Michael received a BS from Cornell University and an MBA in finance from the University of Texas at Austin.

Photo courtesy of: Peter Kaminski via photopin cc