7 Different Types of Surveys (Explained!)

Surveys are not only ideal means of making extra cash, but it’s also a crucial tool in a company’s growth. Different types of surveys are used to collect information from the public and customers.

Surveys are instruments used to collect information about a particular subject. People looking for side hustles participate in surveys as a great source of additional income.

But on the flip side, we have groups that rely on different types of surveys to gather insights into certain pertinent matters affecting their business.

For example, marketers rely on surveys to find information on customer satisfaction, and employers use surveys to collect data from employees, and the list goes on and on.

Whether it’s an audit survey, market research surveys, job satisfaction surveys, or customer feedback surveys, businesses use these surveys to determine their path.

Before we dig deeper into some of the different types of surveys that can help grow your business, let’s explore the two different types of survey instruments.

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Two Different Types of Surveys Instruments

For all the different types of surveys, there are two methods or techniques that businesses can use. They include:

1. Questionnaires

This is a conventional survey approach that involves giving respondents a list of questions they can answer individually. Most of these survey questions are closed-ended but may also be open-ended questions.

The three most-applied methods that use questionnaires include:

Self-administered
Group-administered
Household drop-off

Most researchers use the self-administered approach.

2. Interviews

This technique involves more probing and is more personal. The researcher asks follow-up questions to gain deeper insights into a matter. This approach has one major setback, which is it’s quite time-consuming.

The three most-applied approaches for personal interview include:

Face-to-face interview
Phone Interview
Online Interview

The three most applied methods for the personal interview are the phone interview and the face-to-face.

So, without further ado, here is the list of types of surveys that could help you improve your business.

Main Types of Surveys

1. Market Research Survey

This is one of the conventional surveys for research and is used by business owners, marketers, and executives to discover insights into their customers’ behaviors. It is one of the most common types of surveys.

Market research surveys offer insights on how, where, and who purchases your products, your competitive position in the industry, and even your customers’ needs. Its fundamental purpose is to understand the company, customer, and competition.

Market research is categorized into two. It can either be primary market research or secondary market research. Primary market research helps collect new data that has not been gathered before, and secondary market research involves collecting information that has already been produced.

Types of Market Research Surveys

There are several types of surveys in this section. They include:

Market Investigation Surveys – This helps measure your size and the market share. Also, it helps find crucial information about market growth and your position against the competition.
Brand Awareness Surveys – These types of surveys help companies and business owners determine how much customers know about the company. While you may know everything about your brand, it’s not always the case for the customer. It’s crucial to determine if people understand what your brand stands for or the real meaning of your company name and logo. It helps communicate different marketing messages about your products, services, and overall brand.
New Product Concept Analysis Surveys – This survey helps collect opinions and attitudes towards new product concepts. With it, you can discover potential customer preferences, dislikes, and chances of purchasing if the new idea takes form.
New Product Demand Surveys – This helps compute the total demand for new products and services.
Market & Customer Profiling Surveys – This survey helps discover who your customers are and who are not your customers and why they are not.
Customer Expectations (& Attitudes) Surveys – This helps understand whether your products and services meet your customers’ expectations. Also, it gauges your customers’ attitude towards your products and services to improve your advertising strategy, purchases, and customer loyalty.
Customer Motivation Surveys – What makes the customer move from hearing to being interested and ultimately purchasing your products and services? Customer motivation is crucial to understanding consumer purchases and loyalty.
Customer Satisfaction Survey – This the most widely used type of survey. This type of survey helps companies and small business owners gauge how satisfied their customers are after purchasing a product or service.
Customer Retention Surveys – This helps discover the extent of your customers’ attitude towards your company, products, and services. This is more predominantly used for high-priced consumer goods or those requiring a lengthy decision and purchasing process.
Purchasing Tracking Surveys – This market research survey allows you to find more information about your customers at different purchasing process stages, their experiences, and opinions so far. This information can help you understand if and when the customers will repurchase your products and services.
Habits and Uses Surveys – This is a survey that helps you understand usage situations, including how, where, when, and why the product is used.
Product Fulfillment Surveys – It is a market research survey that helps understand the expectations produced by packaging, product appearance, and advertising fulfill.

Most market research companies recruit members globally to fill out surveys for money. They rely on people’s opinions and offer rewards and cash in return for their opinions.

People join these online survey sites to get paid to take surveys. Be sure the site you join is legit, as there are many scammers out there.

Some of the most reliable types of surveys that people join, to get paid to answer questions include:

Survey Junkie – Over 3 million panelists
InboxDollars – Over $59 million paid to its panelists
LifePoints – Approximately 5 million users
Swagbucks – Paid over $449,514,669 to its users

Market research data helps to:

Reach and analyze a target market
Reach a specific audience.
Gain insights on your present and future products.
Measure brand awareness.
Test the branding, naming, and positioning of the company.
Research and analyze a target market.
Dig deeper into customer demographics.
Understand your position compared to your competitors.
Efficiently conduct market segmentation.
Understand consumer sentiments in the market.
Decide strategies or creative assets to use in your subsequent campaign.

How to Do a Market Research Survey

Here are the six steps to follow when creating a market research survey:

First, define your problem
Establish your research objectives
Target the right audience
Decide your margin of error
Set your timelines
Identify the right resources and tools to use to collect and analyze data.

2. Employee Satisfaction Survey

The employee satisfaction survey approach helps measure whether your employees are content with their work situation. During the survey, employees voice their concerns and frustrations about the nature of their work and the company.

This type of survey helps get feedback about what the employees feel about their workplace. Positive results show employees are satisfied with their nature of work, team, or company. Negative results show there is room for improvement.

Some common employee satisfaction survey questions include:

Do you find your work enjoyable to do and meaningful?
Do you feel valued, or does your work input matter?
How would you rate your work-life balance on a scale of 1 to 10?
Would you recommend the company as an ideal place to work?

This type of survey should preserve the respondents’ anonymity to increase their honesty threshold. The survey should occur less often, for example, annually.

Employee satisfaction survey helps the employer:

Get deeper insights into how the employees feel about their work and where to improve. Employees also feel included in making company changes, which will help boost their morale.

3. Job Satisfaction Survey

The job satisfaction survey is very different from an employee satisfaction survey but has several similarities. A job satisfaction survey helps gauge the overall job satisfaction.

While all employees take an employee satisfaction survey, a job satisfaction survey asks for a particular employee’s personal views to understand if they are satisfied with their tasks.

Companies that measure job satisfaction outperform those that don’t. This is why- Job satisfaction measures help boost employees’ morale.

Some of the job satisfaction survey questions include:

Do you take pride in working for the company?
How likely are you to seek another job outside this company?

When carrying out this survey, emphasize the confidentiality aspect. The survey helps point out what keeps the employee happy and what needs improvement.

A job satisfaction survey helps:

Understand what an employee feels working within a team
Visualize areas where guidance or extra training is necessary
Build measurable and actionable employees targets based on their input to improve their teamwork, communication skills, and ambition for the company and themselves

4. Exit Interview Survey

Several reasons can make an employee quit or leave their once-loved job from personal conflicts with management or employees, financial or extra benefits, lack of opportunity advancement to other job or work environment unrelated reasons. An exit interview survey helps understand why employees have chosen to leave the company.

Employers can ask exit interview survey questions like:

Why are you leaving the company?
On a scale of very bad to excellent, how would you say were your job financial benefits or opportunities for growth?

This type of survey can help employers:

Find out why employees quit and discover the improvements to make within the other employees’ job description and satisfaction.
The survey can help reduce employee turnover rate as the company can work on what frustrates the employees, thus increase engagement and productivity.
Lower the cost of employee turnover by correctly anticipating the employees’ happiness on the job.

5. Training Evaluation Survey

If you want to remain on top of the latest trends and stimulate growth in your employees and company, carrying out training is vital. A training evaluation survey helps offer pieces of training. The techniques help your employees voice their opinion regarding the relevance of training and the quality of training.

The survey helps determine if critical subjects were well understood and tackle any rising issues as soon as they arise. The instructor can actually use some of the suggestions given instantly and even address certain specific points in class.

A training evaluation survey should have questions such as:

What topics do you find useful and which ones aren’t?
Is the quality of the training, instructor, or classroom good? Rate it on a scale of 1 to 10

The survey helps employers:

Improve training and align it accordingly
Increase the attendees’ productivity and satisfaction
Ensure the training is quality and examine the instructors and the trainees?

6. Lead Generation Survey

This type of survey helps companies gather the target audience’s contact information and preferences. With the data collected, you can create a list of potential customers who may be genuinely interested in your services or products.

An example of lead generation survey questions is:

What is an email address, and would you like to receive our newsletter?

Creating playful and interactive puzzles and quizzes can help increase the level of engagement here. Also, providing or promising to offer the respondents with something they value increases participation.

A good lead generation survey will get you:

Prospective leads interested in your products and services as well as their contact information
Leads qualification which you can deduce when you ask questions about the preferences, what they’re looking for, and how likely they’re to purchase your products and services
Permission to contact them because they voluntarily opted in on your survey.

Be cautious when giving out personal information. Make sure the company is legit, and they’re likely to be confidential with your information.

7. Event Evaluation Survey

When a company or an organization organizes an event, they often feel the need to know if it was a success. Having a hunch or thinking that it was successful is not enough to determine that it really was successful.

There is a need to do an event evaluation survey after the event to determine what attendees thought about it. The results can help tell if the event met its objectives and, if not, what to improve on.

An event evaluation survey should be short and to the point while still giving the respondents the possibility to provide their opinions about every aspect of the event.

Use event evaluation survey questions such as:

What was your favorite part of the event?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the program, venue, or catering?
Would you recommend a follow-up edition to your family, colleagues, or friends?

An event evaluation survey helps.

Give your audience an avenue to interact with the company or organization
Capture attendees honest opinions and perceptions

If you keep the survey short and straightforward, you’ll receive more honest opinions, which will help you prepare for the next event.