Online polls and surveys 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 survey tools from which to choose. The one I prefer is Survey Monkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com). This site is great because you can quickly create a poll or survey without any special software or development skills. By using an online service, you can provide a link to your survey in an email or on your website, and respondents can submit their answers anonymously. It'll also save you time tallying the responses since it calculates everything for you in real-time (as the responses are received) and provides a printable report for you.
Additional advantages to using Survey Monkey include:
1. No limits - You can create surveys with an unlimited number of questions.
2. Skip / conditional logic - You can set the survey up to automatically skip questions that aren't applicable to the respondent based on their answers to other questions (ie: if the respondent doesn't own a car, the survey will skip the question about the color of their vehicle).
3. Randomize answer choices - The ordering of choices within a question can introduce an unintended bias. This service enables you to randomize answer choices to eliminate order bias.
4. Filter results - Helps you find patterns in your results.
5. Share results - You can let others view the results without giving them access to your Survey Monkey account. You can also control which results are visible (depending on what's relevant to the audience receiving them).
6. Download results - All of the data can be downloaded to your computer for further analysis. The results can be exported into Excel, which you can use to create graphs.
7. Guaranteed privacy - All of your questions and answers will remain private (not accessible to outsiders).
8. User-friendly surveys - The user experience is enhanced through interactivity.
The Survey Monkey service is currently only $19.95/month and is extremely easy to use. You can try it out free for 30 days with no obligation to continue your membership.