Online Surveys: An Effective Tool Which Is more beneficial in Marketing Business

 Online surveys are also a useful tool to obtain feedback from your employees, for example after a conference they attended or after a training session. Finally, web surveys can be used to ask prospective clients a series of questions before you provide them with services.  With an online survey you eliminate the delays for printing, mailing and data keying. Results are received in hours not days, and they are ready in a database for analysis.

A type of survey known as an intercept survey is more and more prevalent. An intercept is a mechanism by which certain web site visitors are invited to participate in an online survey. By combining an online survey with an intercept, it is easy to find a target audience that should be invited to participate in the online survey.

The interception of website visitors can occur only on certain specified pages of the web site, so that only visitors who have viewed particular pages are invited to participate. Furthermore, other parameters, such as, the amount of time spent on the web site and the number of pages viewed on the web site can be used to invite only the participants that are more likely to participate in the web survey.

Benefits of Online Surveys:

Conducting phone or in-person interviews is costly since you need to pay wages to those you hire. Direct mail and paper questionnaires are also costly; besides printing costs, you'll need to pay for postage.

Online questionnaires can be designed with advanced features that streamline and personalize the survey experience for your respondents. For example, branch logic allows you to send the respondent down specific "branches" of questions based on his or her answers to previous items. This all but removes questions that are irrelevant to the respondent.

Cost-efficient, quick fieldwork possible, easy handling even for larger sample sizes, longer questionnaires (up to the length of CATI-questionnaires) possible, international projects can be co-ordinate centrally, certain special target groups can be found more easily, multimedia-based contents can be shown.

Online Surveys V/s Traditional Methods:

Traditionally, surveys were conducted face-to-face by individuals. Today, many surveys are conducted over the telephone. Response rates and accuracy for one-on-one surveys are very high relative to other approaches. However the major downside to conducting personal surveys the expense.

Direct mail has also been used to gather survey information. Respondents are mailed a survey form and encouraged, often through some form of reward, to complete the survey and drop it in the mail. The benefit of direct mail surveys is the wide audience of respondents they can reach.

The disadvantages include very low typical response rates and the inability to provide ancillary information if a respondent is unclear about exactly what is meant by a particular question. Also, the responses must be converted from paper to a database for analysis, which can be expensive and error-prone.

The Web provides a new medium for surveys that can be extremely effective, and offers advantages beyond personal interviews and tele-surveys. Online survey technology can provide most of the benefits of one-on-one surveys while leveraging the Internet to dramatically reduce costs. Online surveys can even mimic the conditional branching capabilities of one-on-one surveys but without the complexity, providing focused, targeted questions to different classes of respondents in a way that is completely transparent to them.