How long can a survey be?  How long SHOULD it be?

Usually we gauge this by how long the survey takes.

Most of the research shows that the absolute MAXIMUM you can push people is 15 minutes.

But that’s actually a pretty long survey.    It can be done, but you’d better offer a KILLER incentive.

• I recently did a survey for a client that averaged about 20 minutes.
• We got 800 responses (from a big list), which was good.
• Here’s how we got such a good response:  She offered a $40 coupon for a product or service from her cart AND a chance to win a Kindle.

In general, shorter is better.

But the critical issue in getting people to do ANY survey is to show them “what’s in it for them.”

I’ve refused to answer 5-question surveys because it was “all about the marketer:”

• the survey didn’t offer any incentive for me to take it,
• it wasn’t conversational,
• the questions were clearly designed to get information the marketer could use to make money.

It’s OK to ask questions that will help you make money. After all, that’s the reason for doing the survey.

But if you do that in a way that shows the customer how you will use the results to provide VALUE to him or her, and if you make sure there are LOTS of questions about the CUSTOMER and what he or she wants (always lead with those), you’ll get a much better response.

So length is definitely one of the things that can make people angry, but so can bad questions, poor design, and lots of other things.

Here’s the bottom line:  If you do good surveys and keep the length reasonable (within 15 minutes), you should be able to get good results.

To make sure you can do good surveys, go here to get our survey system.

Several of you asked,

How can I get people to respond  to my survey?

That’s a REALLY important question, because it’s ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to get as many responses as possible to a  survey.

Why?  Because it increases the chances that your sample–the group of people who respond–will be representative.

In other words, you want the people who respond to look as much as possible like your customer base as a whole.  The more responses you get, the better the chance that you represent your customer base well.

So how do you do that?

Some of the videos we’ve put up will give you some useful information about this, but here are some of the key things.

To get response:

1. First and foremost, you get response by showing your customers “what’s in it for them” in taking your survey. It needs to be ALL about them, so that they see why they should spend time and effort to give you information.
2. You do that in many ways, but 2 of the key ways are to (a) offer incentives for taking the survey (such as, everyone who takes it gets a free report AND a chance to win something cool, like an iPod) and (b) designing the survey so that it reads as if it’s about THEM, not about YOU and how YOU can make more money. If you do that, you WILL make more money, because you’ll get the information you need.
3. Write a good survey! If you learn how to write clear, effective questions, to make your survey a conversation, and to report results to your customers and show them how you’re using the data, they’ll learn over time that your surveys are worthwhile. That takes some skill, but you’ll be surprised how fast you can learn to do good surveys, particularly with the simple recipe we’ve put together.
4. Send multiple invitations to do the survey.
5. Show your customers how you put the information they give to work to give THEM more value.

There are just some of the techniques we’re teaching.  To get the whole system, go here.

It will give you a great overview of the awesome system that will let you put surveys to work making money for your business, with a minimal investment of time and money.  To get the system, go here.