Online surveys are a great way of getting feedback from your customer base to help keep your business moving forward.

Below is a quick overview of ten major benefits of creating and using free online surveys for your company.

1. With the right online survey tool, free online surveys are easy to set up and utilise on either your existing company website or blog. Most free online surveys provide a free template which can be customised with your own questions. Your survey can be hosted and liked to, and even if you have little or no IT skill you will be able to distribute an online survey to your customers through emails to get your required feedback.

2. Why are you going to the hassle of creating and distributing free online surveys? It’s because you want answers to important questions that you can use to ensure your company is taking the right steps. Online surveys provide you with a greater and more detailed source of feedback from your customers. No longer do you have to rely on word of mouth and anecdotal feedback. Free online surveys, customised can provide a lot more.

3. An online survey needs to be kept short in order to ensure that it retains the interest of the participant and gets completed. This doesn’t have to be a drawback however; it means that you have to make sure every question is focussed on a particular area of your business. What do you want to find out? What are the areas of your business that you most need to improve? By creating a short and efficient survey with no open ended questions you’re more likely to get useful data that you can use to help your business improve.

4. Many companies benefit from free online surveys nowadays as they have become increasingly simple to use. A well structured survey can help highlight the negative areas of your business. Don’t be offended or ignore the information if the answers you receive are negative towards your service. The whole point of the survey is to utilise the information you have obtained, whether it’s negative or positive, to improve your business.

5. An online survey can show your existing customers that you care. By asking questions and looking for feedback on your company and your service, customers can see this as a clear indication that you are concerned about what you do, the products you sell and the service you provide.

6. If you are looking to increase the profit margins of your company why not think of some questions to use in your survey to help give you some great business ideas? An online survey with well structured questions can provide you with great ideas that you would never have thought about on your own, this can lead to new and completely original methods to take your business forward.

7. An online survey is also a great way of finding new customers. If your survey is hosted on a survey provider’s site, or even generating new hits and new traffic on your own business website, you can attract more visitors and potentially more new customers.

8. Similarly, an online survey generally results in a higher response rate than other feedback methods. Mail shots and flyers can be time consuming and costly. Surveys normally will provide your business with far more responses and far more information that can be acted on, simply because they are so much easier to use.

9. Free online surveys will also benefit your business because compared to mail shots, flyers, feedback forms etc they are far cheaper to distribute! The information you are gathering from an online survey is a far more cost effective approach to ensuring that you are keeping your company up to date with your customer’s current opinions on your business.

10. Finally, effective use of free online surveys will provide your business with easy access, to analyse and report on the data you collect. There is no need for data input and time wasted filling hard copies. Your feedback results will be able to be collated quickly so that you can spot the trends from the data quickly and easily and waste no time in starting your resulting business action plan.