One mistake I see MANY marketers–even TOP “gurus”–making is that they rely almost exclusively on open-ended questions in their surveys.

I’m going to show you why this is a mistake and how to avoid it.

In business surveys, I recommend that about 85-90% of your questions be closed-ended (meaning you write choices to give the respondent), rather than open-ended.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. From your point of view, open-ended questions just give you too much information.  Imagine getting thousands of responses with long, open-ended answers.  Wading through it all and trying to come up with a real analysis of what’s there requires not just a lot of time but also a lot of skill.
2. In most cases, your customers HATE open-ended questions.  They take far more time and thought to answer than closed-ended questions do.  That means you’re less likely to hear from a broad base of your customers AND you’re more likely to irritate them–something you NEVER want to do with a survey.

But open-ended questions DO have their place.

You can include them in a survey after open-ended questions, to ask things such as “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about ______?

• That way, you can pick up information and ideas you might not have thought to ask.
• You’ll also start to pick up some of the language of your customers, language you can use in your marketing.

Open-ended questions are also really useful to get information you feed INTO closed-ended questions in surveys.

• So, if you ask questions such as, “What’s your most important question about _____?” or “What problem or issue about ______ keeps you awake at night?” can give you impressions that you can then test, in a survey, with closed-endd questions.

Follow these suggestions and you’ll see your response rates–and your profits–grow.

To learn a quick, easy, foolproof system for writing closed-ended questions, check out our survey system.