Full press release can be found here.

Forbes covered the story and they found out interesting details about the deal and about Qualtrics. Here are some of them:

• Qualtrics turned down a $500 million offer.
• Current deal valued the business at less than the rejected buyout offer, but they managed to keep their independence.
• Qualtrics in on track to generate $50 million in revenue in 2012.

More about Qualtrics

Qualtrics makes sophisticated research simple. The company is a worldwide leader in enterprise data collection and analysis with software that is easy enough for an intern, but sophisticated enough for a Ph.D. Global organizations and research firms of all types and sizes use Qualtrics software to make better decisions based on strategic research intelligence. Founded in 2002, Qualtrics has more than 4,000 enterprise customers including 600 universities worldwide, all of the top business schools, and half the Fortune 100. For more information and a free trial, visit www.qualtrics.com.

Qualtrics’ appeal is its blend of easy-to-use question-generating tools, nifty data visualizations and low cost. Users can pick from 87 question types, including sliding scales that correlate to happy to sad faces or grades from A to F, and heat maps that allow people to click on a picture of a room or stadium to indicate what they like or where they want to sit. Results display in 35 different graphs and can be shared via e-mail or viewed in real time as responses pour in online.

For more details about Qualtrics and survey software reviews, visit www.survey-reviews.net.

We will review now the main features of the survey software tool that CheckMarket offers.

Signing up for a free trial of CheckMarket surveys is very easy and only takes a minute.

A confirmation email is received shortly and we are ready to create our first survey. Actually the single survey, as the free trial version of CheckMarket only offers the possibility to create a survey, send e-mail invitations, collect responses and analyze the results. Trial surveys are limited to 10 respondents. However I think it should be enough to demonstrate the capabilities of the software.

When you want to create a survey, you have the possibility to create a survey from scratch or choose from one of the existing templates. The survey templates are quite complex. Some of them have over 40 questions.

We will start to create a new blank survey. Clicking on “Next” brings us to the next step where we can choose the languages that the survey will be created in. There are over 30 languages available.

We will only select English for now and on the next page the survey title is required and we are ready to design the survey questions.

The survey editor looks nice and simple. The thing that I like the most is that it fits the entire page width and I can take advantage of the large computer screen that I have.

The survey is already prefilled with 3 pages: a start page with a welcome message, an internal page where we can start adding our questions and a thank-you page with a message. The messages from the start and final page can be customized. The start page can be removed completely.

We will now start adding questions to our survey. CheckMarket offers a lot of questions types.

You can choose from:

• Multiple choice questions (radio button, checkbox, drop down list, listbox)
• Open text fields (textbox, list of textboxes, multiline textbox)
• Rating and ranking (rating scale, constant sum, rank order scale, net promoter score)
• Tables (matrix with radio buttons, checkboxes, textboxes or endpoint labels)
• Special types (text/instructions, date picker, maxdiff, upload)

You also have the possibility to copy a question from one of your existing surveys.

More details about CheckMarket question type can be found here:
http://www.checkmarket.com/survey-tool/create/question-types

The questions editor follows:

Here you can change the question type, edit the question text and answer options and set a lot of other additional options, like these:

• Add on “other” option
• Add a “none of the above” option
• Choose the number of columns
• Order response options (default, random or alphabetically)
• Make the question mandatory
• Hide question

A nice thing, next to the question type, there is a short example link where you can see what this question type looks like and it also contains an explanation to know when you should use this type of question.

After the first question is added, we return to the survey editor to see what the question looks like and we notice a few more nice features:

• You have the possibility to edit the question text and options inline, without having to open the whole question editor
• You can also make the question mandatory or not with a single click without having to leave the page.
• The next are quite common features that most survey providers offer: edit, delete, copy, move question.

Other features that can be accessed from the survey editor:

• Edit, copy, move, merge, preview page
• Add page branching logic
• Export the whole survey to PDF, Excel, Word, CSV or translation file
• Find and replace texts in the whole survey

18 questions later we are ready to preview the survey.

We are now ready to launch the survey. CheckMarket offers a lot of deployment options. It’s possible to combine the choices and modify them at a later date. You can collect responses:

• Via email
• Via web
• Via paper
• Via telephone
• Via Kiosk
• Via SMS
• Buy a targeted panel

We will just use the “via web” option for now, where we can further select link, embedded or popup survey.

Here is what our survey looks like:
http://s.checkmarket.com/?e=20882&h=5325305E86D26A8&l=en

(NOTE: this survey will be opened for 2 months – CheckMarket trial version limitation)

The default template of the survey looks very nice. Here is a screenshot of the live survey page:

Further customizations can be done to the survey:

• Appearance (change logo, colors, fonts; use an existing template or create your own)
• Alerts (receive automatic notifications based on answers to the questions or respondent fields)
• Languages (modify the survey languages)
• Permissions (manage the users that have access to the survey)
• Set response options, limits and others.

One of the nicest features that we found here is the possibility to set automated alerts. This enterprise-feedback feature allows users to be notified if respondents answer a certain way. It can send an e-mail, text message, direct tweet, or call another API. For example, you can have alerts that create a help desk ticket for unsatisfied respondents. The alert can even include another survey link for the person doing the follow-up to fill-in about how the alert was handled.

We have created an alert because we wanted to receive an email if our respondents answer that they were not satisfied with our site in our question 3.

After adding several responses to the survey, it’s time to take a look at the reporting section. Here is how the default summary report looks like:

The summary report allows easy filtering. You can just click on a row to include in the report just the respondents that selected that answer. You can also filter by date or completion type.

The reporting section contains a lot of other sections with a lot more features:

• Download results (Generate PowerPoint, Word, PDF or HTML reports, download raw data to Excel, SPSS or CSV)
• Distribution summary (View distribution statistics and response timeline)
• Share results
• Printable question layout
• Automatic email reporting

And we cannot finish our review without mentioning a very important feature for enterprise level survey tools and that is the presence of a strong API. You can find details about CheckMarket’s API here:
http://www.checkmarket.com/survey-tool/survey-api

Things we liked about CheckMarket

• Powerful and easy to use surveys and questions editor
• Multilanguage capabilities
• Automated alerts
• Powerful report filtering

Things we did not like about CheckMarket

• Very limited trial version (1 survey / 10 responses / 2 months)
• Could not find an easy way to browser individual responses online, but maybe I am just missing the link to that section

Overall, CheckMarket looks like a very powerful online survey software that falls into the enterprise survey software category. Definitely it’s not for students and small companies looking for free survey software.

CheckMarket offers flexible pricing options. You can pay per project, per month or per year. You can find all their prices here:
http://www.checkmarket.com/pricing

Prices to their additional services are listed here:
http://www.checkmarket.com/pricing/professional-services

One thing that should be appreciated about CheckMarket is their transparency. You can get price lists with all their services unlike many other enterprise survey software tools that encourage you to contact them to find out how much they are charging.

For more details about online survey software and survey software reviews, visit www.survey-reviews.net.

Very often, companies do not have a long enough customer list to be able to question and find detailed answers about their business. Many of these companies are willing to pay a small fee for each answer they would get to their surveys. Because of that, a lot of the survey companies from the market started to build online panels that allow companies to purchase respondents to their surveys.

I don’t know if this is a surprise or not, but Google recently announced the launch of Google Consumer Surveys.

How it works

1. You create online surveys to gain consumer insight.

Write your own survey questions or customize existing templates. Target the entire US Internet population or specify a custom audience you’re after, whether it’s 25-34 year olds, coffee drinkers, or pet owners. Pick how many responses you want and your survey is ready to go.

2. People complete questions in order to access premium content.

People browsing the web come across your questions when they try to access premium content like news articles or videos. Opinions are valuable, so answering the question gives them near instant access to the page they want for free. They don’t have to pull out a wallet or sign in and you gain insight into what people think.

3. Publishers get paid as their visitors answer.

Questions run across sites in our diverse publisher network in order to get the necessary respondents. Publishers – online news sites, video creators, and app developers – make money as site visitors provide answers. Everyone wins.

4. You get nicely aggregated and analyzed data.

Google automatically aggregates and analyzes responses, providing the data back to you through a simple online interface. Results appear as they come in, not days or weeks later.

Here is the presentation video for Google Consumer Surveys product:

For more details about online surveys or survey software tools, visit www.survey-reviews.net.

The version that we will review from Smart-Survey is the Professional version that costs £29.99 GBP/month (around $48 USD/month today). Smart-Survey also offers a Free account (limited at 100 responses per month) and a Basic account (limited at 350 responses per month).

Signing-up for a 7 days free trial of the Professional version of Smart-Survey is very easy and take less than a minute. You just need to enter your Name, Email and Password and you are good to go. Even easier, you can just use your Facebook account to sign-up.

A confirmation email is received shortly and we can start working right away. The first page that we see while logged in is the account dashboard. Looks nice, but I do not like the fact that is 2012 is still optimized for 800px width browsers. I use a large screen resolution (1920×1200) and the content of the page appears in a small box in the center of my screen.

We will start creating a survey now. I am planning to create a customer satisfaction survey for our site www.survey-reviews.net. Let’s see how easy it is. Upon clicking on “Create survey” link, we are presented with the following options:

• Create new survey
• Use a survey template (10 templates to choose from)

We will create a new survey; name it “Customer satisfaction survey for survey-reviews.net website”. We will use the default language and the default folder. Unlike other survey software tools, clicking on “Proceed” sends us to the survey settings section and not survey design. This is not a bad thing; I think I even like it.

In the settings section we can find a lot of customization options:

• Theme settings (possibility to choose from 17 pre-made themes)
• Page and question number settings
• Button texts and other messages
• Progress bar settings
• Logo (nice thing: you can specify an url where the respondents are redirected if the click on it)
• Survey ending options
• Security settings (password protection and SSL)
• Response limitation settings

I chose a theme, set the logo, clicked on “Save” and got redirected to the survey design section. We will start adding questions to our survey.

The questions editor looks like this:

There are 17 question types to choose from:

• Choice – Single Answer Horizontal
• Choice – Single Answer Vertical
• Choice – Single Answer Menu
• Choice – Multiple Answer Horizontal
• Choice – Multiple Answer Vertical
• Choice – Multiple Answer Menu
• Ranking
• Open Ended Text – Single Line Input
• Open Ended Text – Multiple Line Text
• Open Ended Text – Essay
• Open Ended Text – Combination
• Matrix Table – Radio Buttons
• Matrix Table – Checkboxes
• Matrix Table – Spreadsheet
• Matrix Table – Drop Down Boxes
• Presentation Text
• Contact Details Question

In this first page of the questions editor, you only need to select the question type and enter the question text. Clicking on “Save” will take us to a second page with more options.

The screenshot above is for a Single Choice Vertical question. You get to set your answer choices and also a few of other options:

• If the question is mandatory
• If you need to add an “Other” field
• If you need to add a “Comments” box
• If you want the answer options to be randomized

After adding a couple of questions to our survey, the survey editor page looks like this:

We will continue to add the rest of the questions for our customer satisfaction survey… After adding a total of 20 questions, I can say that Smart-Survey survey editor is very easy to use. One thing I did not like is that I could not change the type of a question once I created it. It could be a nice addition to this application.

Here is the look of the survey preview page:

A nice feature in the survey editor page, you can export your full questionnaire to Word for offline printing. Here is the link to the questionnaire I have designed:
http://www.survey-reviews.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/MSWord_Report.zip

Another nice feature of the survey editor is the organize section, where you can easily move, edit, copy or delete pages.

It’s time to launch our survey now, so we click on “Launch” link from the header. The page looks like this:

After this intermediary page, we are being sent to the real launch page where we can see all the deployment options and urls.

The deployment options are:

• Web link
• Email
• Website embedded
• Facebook post

Here is the master link to the survey we’ve just created:
http://www.smart-survey.co.uk/v.asp?i=49756kmdcp

Let’s start adding a few responses now to see how it works and also to be able to test the reporting section…
After adding a few responses, it’s now time to view the results section. Here is the first look at it:

There are options to:

• Download results as Word document
• Export results to CSV
• View individual responses
• View printer friendly version of the summary report
• Search text data
• Share results
• Filter reports
• Create cross tab reports

Here is how the individual response report looks like:

Report sharing offers several customization options. You can:

• Set a password for the shared report
• Set permissions to view individual responses, export to CSV, search text data or manage filters

Here is how our shared report looks like:
http://results.smartsurvey.co.uk/?i=49756&uc=kmdcp

If you have more than 1 survey, there is also a “my surveys” section that looks very nice and offers access to all sections of a survey.

From here, you can also access the other sections of your account:

• Survey folders
• Mail lists
• Themes
• File cabinet
• Downloads

Things we liked about Smart-Survey.co.uk

• Easy to use survey/questions editor
• A lot of data export options
• Simple and well designed reports
• Possibility to create a questions library for future surveys

Things we did not like about Smart-Survey.co.uk

• Rather old looking site design (800px width application pages)
• Could not change question type after the question was created
• Only 1000 responses included per month for the Professional version

Overall, Smart-Survey is a powerful survey software tool and we recommend you to use it.

For more details about online survey tools and survey software providers, visit www.survey-reviews.net.

To know which of the many online survey tools is the most beneficial for your business could be a hard thing. For example, in our survey software directory there are listed around 100 survey software companies and each and every one of them try to convince you that they are the best in their field.

We have reviewed in the past a number of online survey tools and to help you better decide which is the best online survey software, we have compiled another list of 10 online survey tools that we did not cover yet, but look very promising to us.

1. SnapSurveys – www.snapsurveys.com

Snap Survey Software gives you full online survey capability – it’s easy to create, manage and analyze web and email surveys. Customers choose SnapSurveys because:

• Designing professional looking questionnaires is easy. Routing, piping, randomization, text substitution, pre-seeding from a database, save and resume all help to deliver a better respondent experience.
• Snap supports any language you need to run surveys in. Questionnaires and reports can also be formatted to be read from right to left.
• It is simple to include multimedia and visual questions (controls) such as sliders, image maps, star ratings and calendars to engage respondents more effectively.
• Snap offers an array of powerful analytical tools and real-time reporting.
• Our survey software has the flexibility to handle multi-mode surveys, create and analyze questionnaires for online, paper, PDA, Kiosk and phone.
• Custom branded URL and survey design templates available.

2. KwikSurveys – www.kwiksurveys.com

Free online survey tool with unlimited questions and results. Create forms and polls for free! According to them, KwikSurveys is the MOST POPULAR FREE and easy to use service.

• No hidden charges, it’s free !
• Unlimited number of questions, answers and surveys
• Premium and free support options available
• Secure and Reliable service
• The most popular free survey software
• Downloadable results ( MS Word, Excel, Open office)
• Brandable Surveys, Logo’s and custom themes
• Embedded surveys directly into HTML webpages, forums etc..
• Survey panel to gather participant responses.

3. FluidSurveys – www.fluidsurveys.com

Save Hours of Time
With an easy to use drag & drop editor, you can build unlimited surveys, forms, polls & quizzes in minutes. Powerful enough for a PHD, but simple enough for an intern!

Build & Send Unlimited Surveys
Build powerful surveys with logic, multimedia & tons of question types at a fraction of the cost. Send out via web link, personalized emails, facebook, twitter, mobile and more!

Access Unmatched Analytics
View data in real-time and impress clients with beautiful graphs, charts, tables and cross-tabs. Drill down into the data with powerful filters, share reports online or export to Word, PDF, Excel, PPT and SPSS!

4. AskYourTargetMarket – www.aytm.com

AYTM makes it easy to create sophisticated surveys. You can drag questions to change the order that they will appear, use skip logic, and even clone surveys. Add images and videos to engage your audience and capture their attention. You don’t need to be a research expert because we guide you every step of the way. If you don’t have your own list, AYTM’s panel of consumers are waiting to answer your questions.

5. SurveyBuilder – www.surveybuilder.com

Whether you’re a first-time surveyor or an industry pro, anyone can use SurveyBuilder to create online surveys. Gain quick responses to questions from customers, employees or your potential audience with SurveyBuilder’s free online survey tool. This FREE online survey tool is easy and intuitive. You can quickly create online surveys, add images and videos to engage your audience and publish your survey to online communities, your website, or email it to your customers. Then sit back and watch the responses roll in! You don’t need to be a research expert to Build, Promote, and Analyze your surveys. Sign up today with SurveyBuilder, a simple yet powerful online survey site. It’s always free to create an online survey and share it.

6. SurveyTool – www.surveytool.com

Why SurveyTool?

• Over 35 prewritten professional templates to get you up and running quickly
• Add rewards automatically to incentivize respondents
• Intuitive new survey design tools
• Attractive Price Point – SurveyTool offers the best value for the price
• Automatically distribute surveys on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

7. Smart-Survey – www.smart-survey.co.uk

Smart-Survey is an Online Survey Software designed to help users create and publish custom surveys within minutes, then view results graphically in realtime. Using just your web browser, create your survey with our intuitive survey editor. Select from over a dozen question types (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, and more…). Send your survey by email or use our built-in mailing list system to make bulk email distributions. To do this is very easy; simply copy the survey link provided and send! View results as they come in ‘live’. View overall results in clear colourful charts, drill down and view individual responses. You can even export your results into a spreadsheet (CSV) or Word document and share your results with others.

8. NoviSurvey – www.novisystems.com

Novi Survey is an enterprise web Survey Software consisting of a set of Survey Tools that allow for the creation of sophisticated online surveys and data collection forms. Responses to surveys can be collected by posting them on a web site, by sending email invitations, or by manual data entry. The Online Survey Software application can be installed in-house or used on our hosted system to create online surveys that gather feedback from your employees, customers, subscribers, etc. The online surveys can be taken in any language and can include more than 100 question variations. The survey software designer comes with sample templates and allows for extensive conditional logic, a customizable look and feel, robust user security management, advanced survey reporting, an easy to use respondent survey portal, and a many more survey features.

9. dotSurvey – www.dotsurvey.com

Why dotSurvey?

• You can fully brand or ‘white label’ your surveys in seconds, with the unique CopyKat tool
• Save money – it’s FREE and there’s no need for web designers or IT bods – you can do it all yourself
• The drag & drop survey editor is so flexible, you can create and change any survey layout you want…
• …Even multi-column surveys. Yes! Just drag and drop any column, where you want it.
• Includes free integration with dotMailer email marketing

10. MoboSurvey – www.mobosurvey.com

MoboSurvey claims to be A Truly Mobile Survey Application. With MoboSurvey you can quickly create online surveys that are accessible from any internet capable devices. Your users can access the same survey from their smart phones, tablets, laptops, or desktops at anytime. Build once, distribute once, and see your results in real-time.

For more details about online survey tools and survey software, visit www.survey-reviews.net.

The online world may have brought down barriers to trade but they have also taken away the personal aspect of business. Where salesmen could read a raised brow or a frown, the online marketer can only guess what is going on in the buyer’s mind. Therefore, surveys play an important part in getting to know what the customer is thinking at crucial points of time.

Feedback is too late in the chain of events to keep a smile on the customer’s face. This is a reactive phase while surveys are proactive by asking a customer what he or she wants instead of waiting for an answer that could swing either way.

Another important role that connects its use to the offline world is the product itself. Online surveys have the power to rapidly get customer needs insights and translate that much faster into product improvements.

Free online surveys reduce the cost of business. We know that surveys are a non-revenue generating exercise and therefore, the advent of the free survey software takes away some of the marketing costs.

Flexibility of use allows survey software to send email surveys to customers, thereby not intruding on the experience of surfing and allowing the customer time to phrase out suggestions.

All these benefits can only work if there is a concerted effort put into designing the content of the survey itself. Questions are a tricky part of the survey equation and one vague question that goes out to a million people will just make reported data inaccurate and useless. There is also the danger of not designing the exact points of where the survey will pop up in the surfing exercise when using a web based survey. This should be done with tact and with some technical expertise and logic. It must be fundamentally remembered that all surveys are an imposition on the customer’s time and patience so gathering data must be done quickly and smoothly.

Online surveys have indeed done a lot to make businesses more profitable online and this has only been increased by the efforts of service providers giving free online survey software. Web based surveys and email surveys are some of the important tools in the goal of promoting brand loyalty.

For more details about online survey software and free online survey tools, read www.survey-reviews.net.

Survey Monkey is one of the best online survey software providers and one of the companies that inspired many with their innovative approach to online surveys. They provided a simple, easy to use survey platform that is now used by millions of users. The company grew very fast in the last few years and for sure it will grow even more in the near future.

Founder Ryan Finley started SurveyMonkey in 1999. With his brother Chris, Finley grew the company to a rumored $30 million in sales– without raising any outside funding. In 2009, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital bought out the Finleys, installing Goldberg, a former Yahoo exec, as the chief executive.

Since then, SurveyMonkey has been on a bit of a buying spree. In June 2010 it acquired phone polling startup Precision Polling. After closing a $100 million round of senior debt financing that November, it bought WuFoo, which makes online forms. Last year it bought a stake in survey provider Clicktools.

In December SurveyMonkey teamed up with TPG Capital to buy part of MarketTools, a rival firm, which operated Zoomerang. At the time, TPG’s single-digit stake in SurveyMonkey valued the firm at $1 billion, according to the New York Times.

In an interview with Forbes, Survey Monkey CEO Dave Goldberg speaks about Tech Valuations, Growth and a possible IPO. We also covered in the past some of the news related to SurveyMonkey.

The success of SurveyMonkey inspired many other companies to create similar software products. Some of the Survey Monkey alternatives are successful, others are not. So, if you are looking for a SurveyMonkey alternative, you can take a look at our list of online survey tools reviewed on our site. For an even larger list, check out our survey software directory where you will find around 100 survey software companies listed.

SurveyMonkey alternatives

eSurveysPro
Online tool that allows users to create and deploy free surveys, polls and questionnaires.
http://www.esurveyspro.com


QuestionPro
Online service provider offering online surveys, survey panel management, idea panel management and micro polls. Case studies, demo and pricing available.
http://www.questionpro.com


Zoomerang
Quickly and easily create free online surveys to get the insights you need. With Zoomerang’s online survey software, you can build a survey in minutes with free access to over 100 professionally-designed online survey templates.
http://www.zoomerang.com


SurveyGizmo
A powerful Online Survey Software tool that offers enterprise features at a lower price. Create Online Surveys in minutes and start collecting the data you to make informed decisions! Sign up for a Trial today!
http://www.surveygizmo.com


FreeOnlineSurveys
Offers limited basic survey services with fee required on exceed. Tour, Demo Survey and FAQ available.
http://www.freeonlinesurveys.com

For more details about online surveys and free survey software, please take a look at http://www.survey-reviews.net/.

Writing great questions for your survey is like an art that requires a lot of practice. It’s never easy to have people answering your survey and for sure you would like to have as many responses as you need and you would like those responses to be accurate. To be able to do that, you will need to pay a great deal of attention to your questionnaire.

But what if you can get some free help when creating your online survey? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Online survey software platforms available on the internet today try to get more customers not by just providing a survey software application, but also by providing a whole set of additional resources that might help the users with their needs for online surveys. On almost any professional survey site, you will be able to find articles, tips and tricks about online surveys and most of all, you will be able to find online survey examples or questionnaire templates, as some people might call them.

Survey Monkey, one of the top survey software providers, provides a resources section on their site where you can find free questionnaire templates about the following types of surveys:

• Customer Feedback Surveys
• Product Feedback Surveys
• Market Research Surveys
• Employee Satisfaction Surveys
• Performance Review Surveys
• Events Surveys
• Non-profit Surveys
• Education Surveys

Zoomerang, recently acquired by Survey Monkey, has one of the nicest sections about professional survey templates. As they say, Zoomerang’s online survey tool comes equipped with professional survey templates to create many types of surveys. You will be able to find questionnaire templates for:

• Customer Satisfaction Survey
• HR Survey & Training Survey
• Marketing Survey
• Student Survey, Teacher Survey, School Survey
• Meeting Survey & Event Planning Survey
• Facebook Survey
• Employee Satisfaction Survey
• Business Survey
• Market Research Survey
• Non-Profit Survey
• Twitter Survey
• Mobile SMS Survey

eSurveysPro online survey software provides a section on their site where you can find survey templates, articles, best practices, tips and tricks. eSurveysPro has the following subsections:

• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Human resources surveys
• Marketing research surveys
• Services evaluation surveys
• Academic questionnaire templates

Another cool page where you can find a lot of survey examples is provided by SurveyGizmo. They provide examples about:

• Consumer Surveys
• Education Surveys
• Employee Surveys
• Event Surveys
• Health Assessments
• IT Surveys
• Quiz Surveys
• Research Surveys
• Satisfaction Surveys
• Web Form Surveys

QuestionPro also provides a nice section for free questionnaire templates. Their survey template library provides questionnaires for the following types of online surveys:

• Customer Satisfaction (Voice of the Customer, Product Surveys, Service Evaluation)
• Human Resources (Employee Evaluation, Job Satisfaction, Training Evaluation)
• Marketing (New Product/Concept Testing, Focus Group Recruitment, Website, Conference Feedback, Hardware/Software)
• Services (Hotels/Restaurant, Retail, Health Care, B2B, Travel)
• Community (Social, Personal, Demo/Psychographics)
• Academic Evaluation (Course Evaluation, Training)

So, it’s not very hard to find free questionnaire templates. Study the resources we’ve pointed out in this post, take a look at a lot of survey examples and decide on your own which are the best survey questions that you should use when you create your online survey.

For more details about online survey sites and free questionnaire templates, visit http://www.survey-reviews.net.

An alternative to the paper based survey is the use of an online survey. The online survey has the advantage of reaching a much wider cohort of people and as a result obtaining a significantly higher numbers of responses.

Similar to online surveys is the online poll. Rather than replicate a paper based survey in an online environment, a poll presents individual questions to users giving them the flexibility to respond to as many or as few questions as they choose. In comparison to online surveys, by their nature online polls have the ability to survey much larger numbers of respondents but have the disadvantage of being unable to correlate responses.

When a business considers releasing a new product or service, they have to think about how customers will respond. Creating an online poll on the front page of your site will be a great place to gather data.

Giving a customer something to vote on is a good way to gather an estimate of how many people would buy the product or invest their money in a specific service. You can then use this feedback to help decide whether it is a good financial decision to move forward.

Customers enjoy knowing that a business they invest their money in truly cares about them. They like to have a voice when it comes to the decisions that are made about the business and they like to know that they are being heard.

To conclude, online polls can be an excellent way to learn more about your customers and site visitors. People love to give their opinions and enjoy feeling like their feedback matters. Polls and surveys can also be a form of entertainment to your visitors. Most importantly, using the data gathered from informal polls and surveys on your website, you can determine what visitors want and make adjustments to your site to change your site visitors into customers.

There are a variety of online poll tools from which to choose. For a comprehensive list of online survey and poll tools, you can check our survey software directory.

Here is a list of 7 poll software tools we found online.

1. PollDaddy – www.polldaddy.com

Polldaddy is brought to you by the same company behind WordPress.com. Every day PollDaddy is trusted by many Fortune 500 companies to conduct their surveys, polls, and quizzes. With full support for WordPress and other publishing platforms it couldn’t be easier.

Polls are a perfect way to interact with site visitors. Your audience can give you instant feedback on the topics you choose, with a single click. Polldaddy makes it easy to get feedback.

2. eSurveysPro Polls – www.esurveyspro.com

eSurveysPro.com polls are completely free (including the most complex reports). eSurveysPro.com poll software comes with a variaty of powerful features:

• Unlimited polls
• Unlimited responses
• No programming required. Just copy/paste a line of code into your site, blog or facebook profile
• Block repeater voters by cookie or IP; or don’t block them at all
• Single choice questions or multiple choice questions
• Answers order randomized
• Automatically close poll at a certain date
• Choose from existing poll themes or create your own
• Add images or Youtube videos in your polls
• Poll reports. View poll results online or export them into xml or csv files
• Track the IP addresses of your voters
• Prevent fraud by checking the IP addresses from where more votes came in
• See the country of each individual voter and a summary with all the countries in a map view report
• Customize poll language (change all default poll texts)

3. Vizu – www.vizu.com

With Vizu you can create a free web poll and put it on your blog, Facebook or other social page. Also you can try Vizu Answers for opinion polls and affordable market research.

4. MisterPoll – www.misterpoll.com

With MisterPoll you can create your own polls on any subject with an unlimited number of questions. Share them with friends, submit them to our public directory, and more. Plus, every poll gets its own message forum!

5. 99 Polls – www.99polls.com

With your free account from 99polls you can now create customized surveys and polls for your website, blog and social network profiles.
Using 99polls is a powerful and effective way to get instant feedback and increase your site’s popularity among Internet users.

6. SnapApp – www.snapapp.com

SnapApp gives us five reasons to use Surveys & Polls:

1. Give your customers a voice. Surveys are a simple but effective way for your customers to tell you what they think. Voters share surveys with friends.

2. It’s easy for users to share and compare survey answers with friends. Get insightful customer feedback.

3. Get exactly the information you are looking for. Surveys are designed to allow you to ask follow-up questions.

4. Control how the results are presented. You can collect data privately for your own personal assesment, or opt for a more conversational approach and allow your customers to view the results.

5. Free market research. Write an entertaining survey mixed with your market research questions. If users are having fun, they are more willing to share their information with you.

7. PollCode – www.pollcode.com

PollCode works very simple. To get started, simply type in a poll question and up to 30 possible answers. You can then customize your poll with your own colors, font, and settings. When you’re finished we’ll provide you an HTML code to paste into your website, or you can “quick post” your poll to MySpace, Facebook, WordPress and many more.

For more details about online survey tools and free survey sites visit www.survey-reviews.net.

It’s very easy to create an account on eSurveysPro.com. You just need to click the “Subscribe” button from the home page of the site and you are redirected to a very simple signup page where you just need to fill in a few fields, the most important being your email address and password.

After the registration, an email is sent to you with your login details. You are redirected to a page that displays a thank you message and links that could guide you through the content of the site.

We will follow the “Create new survey” link to get started with the survey creation process.

The options we have are:

• Create a new survey from scratch
• Copy an existing survey. This is not possible for us, since this is our first survey.
• Copy a survey from eSurveysPro.com templates library. Unfortunately this feature is available only for paid accounts, so we will not be able to use this feature either.

The survey editor page that follows looks very clean and intuitive.

We will start adding a few questions to our first survey. Clicking on “Insert question” button, we will arrive to the questions editor page. There are 18 question types, 14 available for free and 4 question types available only for Corporate and Enterprise accounts.

The question types are well exemplified here:
http://www.esurveyspro.com/SampleQuestions.aspx

The 14 question types available for all accounts are:

• Single choice vertical
• Single choice horizontal
• Single choice menu
• Multiple choice vertical
• Multiple choice horizontal
• Matrix single choice
• Matrix multiple choice
• Free form response one line
• Free form response multiple rows
• Free from response textbox
• Open ended constant sum
• Display text only
• Display image only
• Display space only

The 4 question types available for Corporate and Enterprise accounts are:

• Hidden field (more details about this here)
• Matrix with free text (spreadsheet)
• Matrix with drop-down menus
• Side by side matrix

The question builder uses a rich text editor for the question text. Premium accounts and above can also take advantage of the integrated spelling checker that can work with several languages.

There are several options that can be set for a question:

• Make the question mandatory
• Display question answer options in more than 1 column
• Randomize answer selections
• Allow respondents to create their own “other” answer.

Depending on the question type, other options are displayed. For example for the multiple choice questions, you can specify the minimum and the maximum number of answer options that the respondent can select. Choice questions can use predefined scales from the scale library. Most interesting are the countries of the world or the states in US. It can save you a lot of trouble when you need something like this.

Corporate and Enterprise accounts of eSurveysPro.com can also use a more advanced feature called “question visibility”. Using this feature you can choose to display your question only if certain conditions are met.

More details about this advanced feature can be found in this eSurveysPro blog post:
http://esurveyspro.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/new-feature-possibility-to-control-questions-visibility/

Here is how the survey editor looks after adding several questions to our survey.

There is no limit of the number of questions that we can add to the survey. Also, there is no limit to the number of surveys that can be created on eSurveysPro, even by free account members. These are the features that make eSurveysPro one of the best providers of free survey software.

It’s very easy to edit, delete, insert and move questions. eSurveysPro.com also provides for all accounts, including free, advanced page logic functionality.

Survey page logic is used to control how a respondent moves through the pages of a survey. By default, when a user clicks on the “Next” button, the user is taken to the next page of the survey. However, sometimes you might want the user to skip some pages with questions that are not relevant to the user based on the answers given on previous questions, so it is useful to override this default behavior.

When page logic is added to a page, the logic conditions are evaluated when a respondent exits that page. The logic conditions then control if the user is directed to the next page or some other page.
Page logic can be added to a page while editing the survey by clicking on the “Page Logic” button in the title bar for the page.

Follow this link for a complete tutorial of eSurveysPro.com page skip logic functionality:
http://esurveyspro.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/survey-software-tutorial-page-skip-logic/

Before trying to deploy our survey in order to be able to receive some responses, let’s take a look at survey options section to see what more we can customize for our survey. There are 4 tabs in survey options section:

• General settings
• Response options
• Appearance
• Other

Free accounts have the possibility to:

• Set a survey title
• Upload a survey logo
• Change page and question numbering options
• Change the texts of all buttons and messages the survey can display
• Select the number a responses that an unique user can give
• Set a survey end date
• Set the maximum number of responses that the survey can accept
• Select one of the predefined survey styles (or themes as some other providers may call)
• Password protect the survey
• Make the survey completely anonymous

Premium accounts or above can use some more features:

• Display a progress bar in survey page
• Create a custom theme for the survey
• Send email notifications when a response is received.

For now, we will just set the survey title and move to the deployment section of the survey. There are several options that can be used to collect responses to the survey:

• Send survey url via your own email client
• Place survey url or your website or blog
• Embed the full survey into a webpage
• Create a recipients list and email them using eSurveysPro.com (this feature is only available for the paid accounts, but can be tested for free with lists less than 50 recipients)

Premium accounts or above can also create a shorter survey url with a custom text in it.

Here is the link to our survey. In order to be able to receive responses to the survey, you need to open it first in “Manage surveys” section.
http://www.esurveyspro.com/Survey.aspx?id=9f195b4f-58a0-4474-8376-c8aad31ba68d

Here is how it looks in the browser:

The main problem with the live survey page is that eSurveysPro.com displays ads for free account users. The advantage of still using eSurveysPro despite of that is that you can receive an unlimited number of responses to your survey, even if you use a free account.

After a response is added to the survey, for free accounts, the user is redirected to a standard thank you page. Paid accounts can customize or remove this page.

We will start adding some response to our survey so that we can test the reports. The number of collected responses can be easily tracked on the surveys dashboard. Here you can also remove all the responses received to the survey, delete the entire survey if you like or have access to the survey sections we previously covered (edit survey, survey options, collect responses, reporting).

The reporting section of eSurveysPro.com looks very clean and neat. You have the following sections:

• Results overview
• Summary report
• Respondent details reports
• IP analysis report

The results overview displays a chart with the number of responses received in the last week, top IP addresses with most responses, survey completion report, links to the last 5 responses received.

Besides the reporting overview page, free account users also have access to the summary report and to the details reports. They both look very nice and are very simple to use.

More advanced reporting features are available for paid subscribers:

• Summary report filtering
• Respondent details dashboard
• IP Analysis report
• Custom charts for the questions in survey
• Custom cross tab reports
• Export survey data

Besides surveys, eSurveysPro.com also has a very advanced polling tool, but we might review that at a later date.

Things I liked about eSurveysPro.com:

• Unlimited number of responses
• Unlimited number of surveys
• Unlimited number of questions per survey
• Easy to use survey builder
• Advanced options like page skip logic for free
• Clean and simple reports

Things I did not like about eSurveysPro.com:

• Ads displayed on live survey page
• Templates library available only for paid accounts
• Data export available only for paid accounts

Overall, eSurveysPro.com is a site that we liked and found very useful.

For more details about online survey software tools and survey reviews visit http://www.survey-reviews.net.