When creating custom surveys, you need to think about more than questions and answers if you want to maximize the number of responses you receive. It’s incredibly important to nail the design and personalization elements as well.
When it comes to choosing survey software, you need to take an inventory of the kind of customization features being offered. Ideally, you want to choose a survey maker that offers everything on this list.
What is a custom survey?
Custom surveys are those with customized designs, personalized paths, or that are branded to align with company guidelines.
They can help you achieve multiple things, ranging from identifying that the survey represents a brand or business to directing respondents to different sets of questions based on their answers.
5 Ways you can personalize custom surveys
As we’ve alluded to above, there are more than a few ways you can make surveys your own. You may not need to use every method on this list, but we’ll begin with the most basic and work our way down to the more specific suggestions.
1. Customize the design of your survey
You can start by selecting a theme, for which you’ll be able to customize the design and create beautiful surveys. Customize colors for different aspects of the survey, including text, backgrounds, and question highlights. You’ll also be able to assign background images and select from a list of fonts for your written content.
This design-level customization allows you to make a survey your own. There’s no denying that a more visually appealing survey will improve your response rates.
No one wants to scroll through a boring survey with no personality.
2. Brand your survey
If you’re collecting customer feedback, you’ll likely want to add branding to your survey.
You can start by using the design tools mentioned above to ensure theme colors and fonts match those in your brand guidelines.
Then add your logo, which will be displayed in pride of place at the top of your survey.
To go further in creating a branded experience, white-label your survey which removes all our branding. This applies to any email campaign you create for a white-labelled survey, there will be no mention of us at all.
Finally, customize your survey link and host it on your own website domain. So, instead of a default link like shout.com/s/5uRV3yC0d3 you could use yourwebsite.com/would-you-recommend-us.
3. Create custom paths for respondents
Survey personalization goes beyond design, it also applies to functionality. You might have a lot of questions but find they don’t all apply to every respondent.
In this case, you can use Question Logic to send respondents to different pages based on their answer choices.
An easy example of this would be for customer satisfaction surveys, where you’d only really want to send customers who gave you positive feedback to a review page.
You could then send those who gave negative feedback to an exit page or somewhere to make suggestions.
4. Personalize survey content
There are several methods for personalizing survey content.
Firstly, you can refer to respondents by their name or include other information you hold on them with merge tags. This adds a personal touch as they will feel the questions have been tailored for them.
To add merge tags to your survey, you’d need to use our Text Piping feature.
This will only work if respondents have accessed your survey through a tracked link. Otherwise, their survey responses will be completely anonymous.
You can also use Text Piping to pass respondent answers into future survey questions. This presents an extra layer of personalization that engages respondents, as each question feels as though it’s specifically aimed at them.
5. Mix up your question types
When creating online surveys, you’ll have over 20 industry-standard question types to choose from. This includes basic questions like Multiple-Choice and Opinion Scales, but also more specialized types like Net Promoter Score.
Why do question types matter?
It would be easy to make a survey with 20 questions that are all Multiple-Choice. You would still collect the data you need to make informed decisions. The problem with this is that you can impact respondent engagement, as there’s nothing stimulating when answering the same question type over and over again.
If your respondents lose engagement, they’re more likely to drop out of your survey, meaning you lose out on results. It can also mean that your respondents don’t come back to your future surveys for this same reason.
Changing up your survey question types can help keep respondents engaged, as each one offers a different way to interact with your questions.
Of course, you could choose to start with a survey template. These will provide you with a set of industry-standard question types for your survey, whether it’s an employee satisfaction survey or a market research survey.
Why custom surveys are important?
There are lots of ways you can benefit from custom surveys, let’s go over them below.
Stand out from the crowd
This is the most obvious benefit of creating a custom survey, which is to say that yours will look a hell of a lot better than others being sent to customers.
Increase brand awareness
If you have detailed data on your respondents, e.g. demographic and psychographic data, you customize your survey according to what your audience likes.
This will help keep them engaged and make it more likely that they’ll be happy to respond again in the future.
Build trust with respondents
Branding your surveys also can make your surveys appear more trustworthy to respondents, which can lead to more genuine responses and even encourage people to share personal data.
Wrapping up
Let’s go over again the top 5 ways you can personalize custom surveys:
- Customize the design of your survey
- Brand your survey
- Create custom paths for respondents
- Personalize survey content
- Mix up your questions types
Abiding by these methods will help you boost response rates and build trust with your respondents. If you’re struggling to collect the data you need, take a look at our tips for finding more survey respondents.
