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Hurray, work is over, the holidays are here! It is also the season of holiday shopping, cooking, and traveling, which sometimes induces stress. However, one question remains unanswered. Are the holidays a good time to conduct a customer survey using online survey software?
Yes, you should. You have a lot to gain from eliciting responses over the holidays. In many cases, people are off of work and have time to complete a short survey, especially if deployed via a mobile platform.
Here are three things to consider as you design your holiday surveys.
1. Think about question difficulty
The difficulty of the questions you want to ask may influence your decision to conduct a survey during the Christmas season. Are you primarily interested in the responses of respondents? If the majority of the questions you're asking are simple for respondents to answer, then you can send your survey through the survey tool to your respondents.
If, on the other hand, the data you're gathering is susceptible to data quality or requires respondents to be really attentive, you might wish to postpone your survey until after the holidays.
Consider the questions where we discovered the greatest variation in responses before and during Thanksgiving: having heard of and using bogus companies. To correctly answer these questions, respondents must carefully consider each company name and overcome any faint emotions of familiarity to state that they have never heard of that company honestly. Contrast that with asking respondents their age, gender, or how much they favor a particular product idea. Even if responders are preoccupied, those questions are intuitive and much easier to answer accurately.
2. Know what you need
Consider the data you want to collect as well as its purpose. Does your market research project require exact figures, such as the proportion of respondents who have used a specific service or purchased a particular product? If that's the case, it's generally best to postpone until after the holidays. Are you asking many questions about respondents' familiarity with various brands or products? It's probably also preferable to wait.
3. Always design for mobile devices.
Regardless of when you survey, many of your respondents will answer through survey tools on mobile devices. Keep your survey brief, eliminate matrix questions, and contain no more than two open-ended questions. Furthermore, make sure to thoroughly test your survey on mobile to ensure that all images and videos appear and play. Because videos can be difficult to load, you may want to postpone concept testing surveys with several videos to make your survey even more mobile-friendly.
Takeaway
Sending a survey through survey software during the holidays is a decision that should be made based on the results you want. If you're primarily interested in responder sentiment, it can be beneficial to launch your survey during the holidays. However, if you believe your target group won't be as responsive to receiving and completing a survey, perhaps delay your research survey until the new year. Either way, using survey software is the most efficient way of conducting research surveys.
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