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 provider, 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 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.

Prior to EFM, survey software was typically deployed in departments and lacked user roles, permissions and workflow. EFM enables deployment across the enterprise, providing decision makers with important data for increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value. Enterprise Feedback Management enables companies to better respond to customer needs.

Unlike low-end survey tools, EFM applications provide a workflow process with user roles and permissions, so that users may be able to author a survey but require another user to approve it before it is published. Such workflow ensures consistent survey quality and enforces respondent privacy and IT security policies. Applications of EFM vary widely from HR, IT, Marketing, Sales and continues to expand on its corporate implementation and scope. Departments within an organization can collaborate on feedback initiatives, sharing results and gaining insights that enable the organization to listen, learn and react to the needs of their key stakeholders. A key part of the value of an EFM deployment is the development of the business rules (i.e. who needs to see what feedback info) and which parts of the customer / employee / partner facing process needs to be measured.

Choosing an Enterprise Feedback Management System could be very hard. Searching in Google for an enterprise feedback management, some 196 millions results are returned.

What to consider in your search for an Enterprise Feedback Management solution:

1. Hosted or installed – decide if you want to manage the system on your own or choose one of the online EFM providers.
2. Features – think about the features that you really need.
3. Results – see what results the system can give you. In the end, it’s all about results.
4. Panel management – make sure that the technology you select has a panel management system to prevent it from being overwhelmed by your consumers/clients.
5. Try before you buy – ask for a demonstration of the tool to be able to assess better the power and user-friendliness of the system.

We will conclude this post with a list of Top Enterprise Feedback Management Providers.

1. Qualtrics – www.qualtrics.com

Enterprise Feedback Management allows companies to systematically collect and manage feedback and integrate their results with various information systems. This allows companies to have an actionable, comprehensive and accurate enterprise-wide outlook. Using Enterprise Feedback Management will increase efficiency and reduce costs because it eradicates the use of several other redundant and inconsistent survey tools.

One of the most outstanding differences that separates the Qualtrics Research Suite from other online market research tools is its ability to be used by entire organizations. Everyone within your organization – Marketing, HR, R&D, Client Relations, Upper Management – can benefit from Qualtrics. With Qualtrics Enterprise features, managing accounts and collaborating within your organization have never been easier.

2. Confirmit – www.confirmit.com

With Confirmit survey software, you can create your own surveys, tailored to your company branding, and send them to your customers or employees. When responses come in, the advanced reporting allows you to filter information, create tables and charts, and share reports, so you can pinpoint opportunities to improve business processes.

3. Vovici – www.vovici.com

Whether you need to …

• Capture customer feedback to build deep, lasting customer relationships
• Measure employee feedback to improve satisfaction and retain top talent
• Conduct better market research
• Measure support, training and compliance programs
• Use panels to collect feedback in smarter ways
• Launch an online community

… Vovici’s intelligent solutions help you turn information and feedback into action and proactive decisions.

4. KeySurvey – www.keysurvey.com

Since launching its Enterprise Feedback Management solution in 2007, WorldAPP has quickly become the provider of choice for businesses worldwide. Its robust features and user-friendly interface help companies more easily create, manage, deploy and assess employee and customer needs.

KeySurvey’s EFM solution delivers enhanced clarity around organizational performance, with a convenient historical archive for enhanced statistics over time. As a result, clients are able to accelerate approval, expedite innovations, boost employee and customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue.

5. Inquisite – www.inquisite.com

Inquisite Feedback Solutions give you the power to quickly and accurately understand what matters to the people that make or break your organization – your customers and employees.

Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software from Inquisite gives companies the power to automate and optimize the collection and management of customer and employee feedback across the organization to drive operational performance.

For more details about Enterprise Feedback Management platforms and survey software reviews visit http://www.survey-reviews.net.

SurveyMonkey is without any doubt the biggest online survey software platform. It is used by millions of individuals and companies. Until 2009, SurveyMonkey was operated by a handful of people. We have covered the acquisition of SurveyMonkey by an investor group led by Spectrum Equity Investors. Since then, SurveyMonkey acquired a number of smaller businesses. Now the saga continues, but with the acquisition of a big player this time: Zoomerang.

The news of the acquisition was released last month on SurveyMonkey’s blog. According to the press release, SurveyMonkey customers will experience no changes to their services. For Zoomerang customers, all their existing surveys will remain fully functional, including those embedded in websites or housed on third-party platforms such as Facebook. Their survey respondents will not see changes to the user experience, and there will be no need to redeploy existing surveys.

Financial details of the transaction were covered by Techcrunch and New York Times. To be able to acquire MarketTools, the owner of Zoomerang and few other products, SurveyMonkey partnered with TPG Capital. According to the New York Times, TPG will transfer some MarketTools assets to SurveyMonkey and take a minority stake in the service. TPG’s investment — which represents less than 10 percent of SurveyMonkey’s total shares — values the company at roughly $1 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal terms were private.

This move is definitely good for SurveyMonkey that consolidates the top position of the online survey software market. Their market share is huge now, as Zoomerang was their biggest competitor. We are far from a monopoly here as the online surveys area has dozens of other offers from a lot of survey software companies. But no one else is currently able to compete with them if we compare the number of user accounts for example. Online survey business Zoomerang has over 1.7 million users that will be added to the 9 million already utilizing SurveyMonkey’s core product. We will see how that will work our for these 10-11 million users, in the near future.

For more details about online surveys and survey software reviews visit http://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.

The survey platform of QuestionPro remained the same, so you can read our previous review here.
For more details about survey sites and survey software reviews, visit http://www.survey-reviews.net.

Dear SurveyPirate User,

As of February 1, 2012, SurveyPirate will be taken out of service.

SurveyPirate was the first free online survey tool giving anyone access to consumers from all over the world. Cint, the owner of SurveyPirate, has now partnered with many survey software providers to offer instant access to respondents. Through our partners, you will find improved survey functionality paired with our global reach in over 40 countries.

Before February 1, 2012, please:

• Download any data/reports from SurveyPirate that you wish to access after February 1st. You can download data/reports in .pdf and .csv formats. Please see instructions here: http://blog.surveypirate.com/downloading-reports-in-surveypirate/#content
• Migrate any surveys to a new survey tool. Visit http://cint.com/cds/#tabs-16 to find a list of providers offering access to more than 6 million consumers.

Would you like more information about accessing people to gather opinions? Please go to http://cint.com/cds/ for a short 2 minute video.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time with us. We’ve enjoyed having you and look forward to helping you again via our trusted partners!

Best regards,
The SurveyPirate Team

Taking a quick look at the rest of the site, it does not seem that the rest of the online survey platform changed. Same old design for the survey application. But the home page looks good. Congratulations for FreeOnlineSurveys.com and we look forward to see the rest of the site redesigned.

Comparing the main features of these popular survey tools we would recommend SurveyGizmo or eSurveysPro for users that want to create and analyze surveys for free. For more details about survey software reviews and comparison of survey tools, please take a look at http://www.survey-reviews.net.