Read our simple step-by-step practical guide to creating your survey in SurveyMonkey
So you’ve read the ten steps you need to consider when using SurveyMonkey for your research and are ready to dive in. Here’s your practical step-by-step guide on how to create a survey using SurveyMonkey.
Use this section alongside your Survey Monkey screen to help guide you through each of the steps you need to undertake a good quality Survey using SurveyMonkey.
SurveyMonkey really have thought of everyone. From the experienced researcher who can write from scratch, import their pre-prepared questionnaire or copy a previous one, through to the complete novice wondering ‘how to create a free survey in SurveyMonkey?’, with options to ‘build it for me’ or start from a template.
Templates provide a rich resource for non-experts building a survey as they give access to questionnaire designs created by experts in the field. Experts not only in writing surveys in general but of specific subject matter, be it Customer Satisfaction or product testing. This mitigates the potential risks when fielding a survey as a non-expert and ensures that the data you collect is robust in support of your business objectives. This is important as the questions you ask and the way you ask them have a big impact on how useful and reliable the resulting data is.
You can also start from scratch, writing each question yourself, or use one of the time-saving tools available below. Once you have a bank of surveys, you can also re-use those to create new ones.
SurveyMonkey makes it very easy for you to build a survey – often within a few clicks. However, there are some things you must review in order to ensure you get good quality data and provide a good respondent experience.
There are many question types available in SurveyMonkey. You can browse through the options to choose the one that best suits your needs. Once you’ve drafted your set of questions, use this handy list to check you’ve set everything up correctly:
The way your survey looks and flows is both important for the respondent experience and for your professional reputation – so definitely check your logic, layout and survey view before you launch.
Once you have created your survey with some questions using one of the methods above, and borne in mind the considerations too, you’ll want to review it in terms of visual appeal, and to ensure it makes sense.
This does not just referr to visual appeal, but whether questions are too long to read on one screen or whether code lists cannot all be seen together (meaning those on the second page will be much less likely to be used). You can also add your logo and corporate colours with the paid plan - a professional image will help with the response rate. Check the experience on different devices – will the question be understood and read as easily across mobile, tablet and laptop?
Does the logic of your survey make sense?Are you providing all the answer options that people may have? Review the survey to make sure it reads well and doesn’t use complex language that may be misunderstood or not understood at all.
SurveyMonkey provides a great ‘genius’ tool that uses AI and a bank of existing surveys to check the quality of your survey, including estimated response rate and length of interview. You should keep the length as short as possible to ensure the highest response rate. If the estimated time is longer than ten minutes, review your questions and consider removing some that aren’t directly answering your business objectives.
You may have your own lists of respondents, or social platforms where you will share the survey link. With SurveyMonkey, you can even embed the survey into a mobile app or into Messenger.
Alternatively, you can use SurveyMonkey’s panel of respondents. By selecting the sample size, demographic profile and market, the tool will give you a price for fielding your survey for you.
SurveyMonkey allows you to set up what they call ‘collectors’ which are different ways of sharing the link to your survey to your own respondent sources, or those offered by SurveyMonkey themselves. With the free plan you can have up to three ‘collectors’. The options are shown below.
Once you have your collectors in place, you can send them out via email, post the link to your social channels, add them to your website, or launch your paid-respondent survey. But before you do, check this final list of items to ensure your survey gives the best experience and generates the highest quality data (but note, not all will be available in the free plan):
Congratulations – you have now successfully launched and collected responses to your survey! Now comes the next challenge: how to process the answers into a format for analysis and interpret and present the results.
Your data will appear in three types:
Our article How to analyse data from SurveyMonkey provides all the detail on the analysis phase of your SurveyMonkey project, including the options for using coding within the tool, or when to use a dedicated tool such as codeit for more flexibility.
Overall, SurveyMonkey is extremely easy to use and is an ideal option for those businesses who want to understand their customers but don’t (yet) have budget for using a market research agency. Its intuitive nature and huge library built by experts mean that you don’t have to sacrifice data quality.
codeit works perfectly with SurveyMonkey to ensure your coding can be done fast and at the depth required. If you’d like to give codeit a go, you can take up our 30 day free trial to help you start coding and analysing your open-ended question data today.
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