Hi - for all who want to do customer/house opt in list surveys (and I recommend you all do this, it's a best practice for successful businesses...

I recommend http://www.surveygizmo.com

I'd thought about using surveymonkey.com for the last couple years, but held off...

Then I saw that marketingsherpa.com used surveygizmo in their latest blog survey, and so since I respect sherpa, I checked out surveygizmo and ran a survey last week using it..

so far I got a *very* highly respectable 5.2% response rate on the survey.. I kept it short and easy to answer, 6 questions, and didn't even have to bribe em with a free audio etc for participating..

using surveygizmo.com is free up to 500 responses a month, which most people will never get too, so that's a great service.. and hopefully I'll boost higher response rates and justify needing the premium version.

anyways, it's a free resource for up-to-500 response surveys, highly recommended, folks. (I have no connection w/it)

ken calhoun

As far as construction, in the most basic sense of that term, it seems like a good resource.

However, the tricky part isn't constructing forms, it's asking the right questions in the right way. Surveys are perhaps the easiest way to go wrong there is.

"Self-reported data is extremely weak and three levels removed from the truth". Why is this? People lie on surveys and focus groups, often unwittingly.

A little story. A handbag designer produced a focus group and survey for deciding which bags they should offer for the upcoming season. They had the participants go through the process. As a casual aside, they allowed each participant to take one handbag as they left -- as an expression of the company's appreciation.

They then threw out the survey and counted which bags had been taken.

The web is great for automating with great efficiency the stuff you should not have been doing at all.

I agree with Ken about doing surveys of your customers. I haven't tried SurveyGizmo, but used SurveyMonkey and it worked great for me. The point of my survey was to find out how I could improve my newsletter.

I also agree--somewhat--with John. Focus groups are, in my opinion, pretty useless. I haven't done one for my own Internet Business, but I've done them at work. As John points out, you can't trust the results of "What do you think about...?" type questions.

And with surveys, even anonymous ones, people often answer in the way they think they SHOULD answer. So with a question like, "Do you recycle used motor oil?" they'll answer YES because they feel it's the right thing to do... even if they do NOT do it.

So you have to be careful about the questions you ask. And you need to start designing your questions with the end result in mind. Ask yourself, "What will I do with the results of this question?"

Where I work, for instance, an employee survey that asks "What kind of articles would you like to see in the employee newsletter?" seems reasonable at first. But when you think about the answers you're likely to get--Movie reviews, recipes, comics, classified ads, etc.--and you know those will NOT be included in the newsletter no matter how many employees want them, then asking that particular question is pointless.

So it takes a bit of thought to do an effective survey, but I feel the results are worth it. When I did a survey of my website newsletter subscribers, I got some very interesting and surprising results. This helped me to improve the newsletter, make more money, and also gave me ideas for future products. And it was all free.