How to effectively shorten surveys

Ask important questions

Before sending out your survey, ensure all your questions are relevant. If multiple questions serve the same purpose, only one of them needs to be retained, while the others can be removed.

All of the above questions will elicit similar responses, so only one should be kept. Alternatively, you can set one of the questions as mandatory and the others as optional.

Also, if the answer to a particular question will be the same from everyone, avoid asking that question as it might.

Shorten your questions

First, reduce the length of your introduction and conclusion messages. Next, do some proofreading to ensure your questions are concise. Remember, each word adds length to your survey.

It’s helpful to eliminate starters, like “It would be great to know…” or “We’d like to know how you feel about…” as these phrases will lengthen your questions. You can also eliminate unrelated answer options to make your survey crisp at a basic level.

Use survey logic

Use survey logic to make sure you’re only displaying relevant questions to your respondents. Question and answer display logic can help you with this.

If the customer selects Adidas and Nike from the list of brands, the questions that follow should only be related to Adidas and Nike. This logical survey construction saves a lot of time for respondents and decreases the risk of survey abandonment.

Prefill answers

Fill in as many survey questions as possible using data available to your organization. This form of automation reduces the time it takes to answer your survey.

For example, your organization’s CRM system stores data about your customers, like their name, age, gender, and address. Fill in the survey with this available information so the respondent can focus on the remaining questions.

Avoid asking technical questions

Certain product or service terms may be common within your organization, but they may not be as familiar to customers. Avoid posing jargon-heavy questions, and opt for layman’s terms to encourage understanding. Consider posing more technical types of questions to your online community or during in-person interactions, so you have the opportunity to explain the required nuances in detail.

Conduct surveys frequently

Don’t flood your respondents with too many questions at once. Asking too many questions makes your surveys longer and reduces the response rate. Instead, classify questions by topic, product, or service, and break them into multiple surveys to send out at frequent intervals. Using this technique, you can roll out follow-up surveys as well.

Present longer surveys as modules

When sending out longer surveys (which we recommend you do sparingly), break the surveys into modules and ask if the respondent is willing to continue at the end of each module. This increases the respondent’s trust in your brand and also makes the survey feel more manageable.