A questionnaire is a necessary tool for every survey. Though it is rather a list of questions with possible answers, without it the whole survey would be ill-performed and chaotic.

A questionnaire (as well as the whole survey) is tailored to specific purposes and tasks, so you can choose from different types of questionnaires. The most common types include customer satisfaction, product perception, brand recognition, marketing productivity, and company communications questionnaires.

First Things First: Why Are You Doing a Questionnaire?

If you want to make things right, firstly, you should think about key arrangements related to a questionnaire creation and then bring them to life. At the very beginning, identify what themes and topics you want to cover in the questionnaire, and it will be good if you can connect it with the survey tasks.

Try to be concise and use only formal language. State your thoughts clearly, because your respondents need to have a precise conception of what you are asking them.

Do not put too much information in one question. If things you want to ask are too big – split them into several questions. One question should contain one thought.

Try to provide the most suitable options for the questions, so the respondents can understand the range of possible answers and choose from them.

Consider the type of data you want to obtain. It can be mostly quantitative or qualitative. Different types of questions are strongly connected with the types of survey data. Closed-ended questions are related to quantitative data, while open-ended questions gather opinions and produce qualitative data. 

After you’re done with all the preliminary preparations, it’s time to define your target audience. A wrong audience means wrong data and wrong results. Try to think about how your respondents related to your business – that is the key.

The final step before the immediate survey conduction is finding the right channels to spread your questionnaires. The most popular ones are email letters, social media, or in-house surveys.

Get to Know Your Questions Before You Start

Now that you know about the basics of survey preparation, it’s time to consider which types of questions you will include in the questionnaire. Please take into account the following types, as they are the most popular and productive. For example, if you need to gather personal opinions, thoughts, and considerations of your customer, you may choose open-ended questions.

Dichotomous questions are another popular type, which offers two simple answer options that are usually opposite. For example, you may ask if a respondent uses your product and the answer options will be yes/no.

Multiple-choice questions provide respondents with multiple options (usually 4-6 short answers). For example, if you want to gather data about your competitors what brands or products they are used to buying.

Pictorial questions became very popular as the development of digital software took place. They are very handy when it comes to product or brand recognition. Pictorial questions are also used when the pre-advertising campaigns are taking place.

Scaling questions are included in most questionnaires as they allow to rate happiness, satisfaction, or utility and produce informative quantitative data. For example, you may ask about the quality of your product, with possible answers from 1 to 10, where 1 is very poor quality and 10 is very high quality. Additionally, you may want to include other types of questions in your questionnaire, so you may search for them on the internet.