You’ve given us some AWESOME questions in response to our video offer and contest. (And if you haven’t put a question up yet, go here: http://www.siteproweb.com/survey-question to put a question up, get 20 free videos, AND a chance to win a cool prize!)

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.

One of our clients, who was using Survey Monkey to adminsiter his survey, asked whether he should use the setting that allows respondents to “back up” in the survey, to review or change the answers to prior questions.

That’s a great question, because it CAN affect the pattern of responses.

When we construct surveys, it’s critical to ensure that any question that might affect another is placed AFTER that other question, not before.  So, if you were asking a client about (a) his or her post-coaching outcomes and (b) the situation pre-coaching, you DON’T want to ask about the outcomes before you ask about the pre-coaching situation.  Doing so could “contaminate” the response to the pre-coaching questions.

I you have a situation like that in a survey and you’ve carefully ordered the questions to avoid contamination effects, you might decide that your settings should not allow a respondent to “back up” in the survey.  However, if no such situation exists, I see no problem with allowing a respondent to review or change his or her responses.