Get your survey responses rolling in.
We’ll show how to get your survey in front of your respondents.
Your questions are written, your answer selections are formulated, and you’re ready to start receiving survey responses. What’s the best invitation tool to send out your survey? Is it better to send in an email, embed it in a website, or link through your Facebook, Twitter or other social media page? We’ll walk you through it.
Using a survey collector
A “collector” is just our shorthand way of describing the way to collect survey responses. A collector can be a survey deployment mechanism, a response gatherer, a survey submission accumulator, or any method to get responses. At SurveyMonkey, we provide a variety of collectors, including posting on a Facebook wall, using our Email Invitation Collector, or even embedding it on your company website.
How to collect responses
We’ve got lots of ways to send surveys. Here are a few:
- Web link. Create a custom URL for your survey, then get responses by emailing the link through your own email client, or by posting the link on your website. You can also pop up a survey invitation to segments of visitors on your website.
- Email. Once you upload your contacts into SurveyMonkey Contacts, you can create your own email lists and custom email invitations, then send your surveys with email. You’ll be able to track if respondents have taken the survey, and send reminders to those who haven’t responded.
- Website. Embed a survey on your website, or display it in a popup window when visitors arrive at your site.
- Social media. If you have a Twitter account, you can publicly tweet a link to your survey. On Facebook, you can post a survey on your wall and on your friends’ walls.
- Buy a Targeted Audience. With SurveyMonkey Audience, you can purchase access to an audience who meets specific demographic criteria for your survey. It’s a great way to get targeted responses from a specific group.
5 tips for collecting responses
- Create an automatic web link. Once you design your survey, you can quickly get a link right from the Edit Survey page to email or post on your website.
- Track responses. Only our Email Invitation Collector has automatic tracking, which you can use to message people who haven’t responded to your survey. To track who your respondents are, check out our help article on how to see who’s taking your survey.
- Use response validation. Make sure respondents submit their answers in the right format. Require responses or make questions optional, and automatically check that responses to open-ended questions are in the right format.
- Segment your respondents. Write a single survey that works for different groups of people, then use unique survey links to send it to different demographics or channels (like Facebook and email). Once you get enough responses from one group, you can deactivate the link without turning off the entire survey.
- Set limits. Get only the responses you want. Limit your survey to a maximum number of responses, set a cut-off date, or lock it with a password.