Survey Success: How to Ask the Right Questions for Actionable Insights

Commissioning an online survey is a great choice when you are looking for quantitative data to support or adjust hypotheses for communications, product development, customer service and much more. They are an excellent way to boost confidence in commercial decisions and present ideas to senior management in a persuasive way.

Once you have defined your research goals (what you want to find out) and chosen a research partner who will conduct the research for you, the questionnaire that will be used becomes the next milestone towards completing your survey. Questionnaires consist of questions – and the format and phrasing of these is essential to the success of your data collection. Bear in mind: online surveys are completed without the help of someone explaining or asking additional questions to clarify.

There are a number of things to consider:

Who are you talking to? The language of your questions has to be aligned with the experience and expertise of your audience. Generally speaking, questions that are very easy to read (not too long) and understand (using plain language where possible) will produce better data – respondents know exactly what you are asking and can answer quickly and easily.

What is their perspective on your areas of interest? Are you asking them to talk about someone else (like their employees, members of their family or a specific group like fans of a football club), their own experience or general events (what is happening in society / the world)? Are you asking about something that has already happened or that may happen in the future? Are you interested in emotional or factual aspects? The language of the questions needs to be very clear which of these applies.

What languages do they speak? It makes a big difference whether your questionnaire will need to be translated or not. The more disparate the languages of your audiences, the more attention needs to be paid to the clarity and universal comprehension of your question text, especially when it comes to specialist or technical topics.

How much do they know about your topics of choice? If your audience is made up of experts in your chosen topic, they will be able to answer a wide range of specific questions. If they are not, they can’t. Simple enough, but very important to consider: can the participant genuinely answer a given question? If they cannot, they may still click a random answer to continue with the survey – clearly not a desirable scenario.

How much information do you already have about the types of answers your audience may give? If you can describe the majority of potential answers, based on your hypotheses, great. Brainstorming with colleagues and your agencies, background research and even GenAI can all help define potential lists of answers.

So what about open-ended questions? We are often asked to add one or two open-ended questions to online surveys – and have done so many times. Unfortunately, this very rarely produces more than entries of seemingly random or cryptic words which may make perfect sense to the respondent at the time of typing them in, but without clarification remain meaningless to anyone else.

As online surveys have a fairly limited feasible length, we recommend using every question to produce data that will inform and support your objectives. Adding “Other” to a list of answers helps to capture additional information, and a well-designed and written questionnaire can be a treasure trove for insights and tailored content. Talk to a professional market research agency and give them as much information as possible, considering our list above, and you should be all set for getting a very effective set of questions into the field.