How to conduct an online survey

Last week, I told you the secret to getting free information by conducting a survey. Today, I’ll tell you how I did it.

Mailing list
I already have a small list of about 150 people that organically signed up. This should give me pretty good results since it highly targeted. they opted in and gave me their email address because they want something from me.

FREE prize
As incentive for people to take the survey, I offered 2 prizes.

1) A never before released ebook of the 1st book on the Philippines with exclusive new content. This is worth at least $20.
2) 3 early entries to my program for the ones that provide the best feedback

I could’ve just offered the ebook or the entries but I’m a firm believer of over delivering to make an impact. I felt that if I just offered the FREE ebook, I wouldn’t get good quality answers because they may just run through the survey to get the prize. The early entry prize incentive would give me better answers. The great thing about the 2 prizes was that the didn’t really cost me much. The ebook was created in about 1 hour and the early entries are actually beta testers.

I blasted my network via my mailing list that consisted of:

Existing mailing list – 150
Facebook Baybayin page – 4.5K members
Facebook PinoyTattoos – 9.8K members
Personal Facebook – 1.2K friends

I wrote a posts about the survey along with the mechanics and prize info on 2 websites that also automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter.

Services used

Web form (survey) – FREE
Google docs is the best free service for surveys. When you create a survey form, it also inputs all the data in Excel so that you can easily manipulate and report. Don’t forget to uncheck “display” survey results on the confirmation page. If you leave it checked, it will display your survey data. Don’t check this if your collecting name, email addresses and other sensetive information.

Email list – FREE
I used Mailchimp because it’s FREE for up to 2k emails and you can plan everything ahead of time and schedule the emails. That means timed auto responders and follow-ups. Please note that I’ve since switched to Aweber. I’ll go over why in a future post. Feel free to reach out to me if your thinking of getting a mailing list service.

These two are optional

URL shortner – FREE
This is a URL shortening service from Goo.gl. It provides basic analytics about who clicked on the link. however, when I used it in Mailchimp, the URL was busted. I shouldn’t have used it in Mailchimp because they already provide their own tracking. It did come in handy to keep track of how many people downloaded the free prize.

Amazon AWS
Amazon AWS allows you to host your content on their servers for a small fee. Many companies use Amazon for their cheap data rates. You probably will not need to use this. If you already have a website, upload it there unless your exping a lot (thousands) to download your file. Otherwise you can just use Mediafire for FREE.

Here’s the communication flow I used:

Email sent > User clicks on the survey link > Survey is filled out > User submits > User is redirected to a “Thank you” page with the download link for the free prize. The end!