How to conduct a survey in 7 Steps

Conducting a survey seems easy, but if not done correctly, it may drastically alter the response rates and results you get. According to the latest research, only 2% of customers complete a questionnaire. 

Getting a goose egg in your survey campaign is not what you want. So, how do you conduct a survey that will get you the desired results? In this article, I will explain how to conduct survey research in seven easy-to-follow steps and further guide you to design, conduct, and organise an efficacious survey in no time. 

7 steps to conduct a survey

Step 1: Be clear on survey objectives and goals

It is imperative to know the purpose of the survey as this will help with the subsequent steps, like identifying the right audience for the survey, creating the list of questions etc. You need to ask yourself and your team about what you want to achieve by conducting a survey. 

For instance, is it because you want to improve the product activation rate and want your customer’s feedback on the onboarding experience? 

Or you want to launch a new product in the market, but before that, you want to validate if there is a demand in the market.

Setting goals and objectives can be confusing. You can gain clarity on goals by asking these questions:

a) What do you want to learn from your audience

b) What kind of result do you expect from the survey

c) How would you use the data you collect

Once you are clear on your goals, you can easily achieve the following:

  • Your desired results
  • Chances of missing important questions in your survey reduced
  • Every question asked will lead you to your goal

Step 2: Identify your target audience

When conducting survey research, the next crucial step is determining the right participants for the survey. There are two main concerns when it comes to surveying the participants:

a) Who should I survey?

The “who” here is the target population or specific group, which can be broad or relatively narrow. Ex:

Population of Ireland

US College students

Customers of the age group 18-24

Indian Entrepreneurs aged less than 40


Your survey should aim to produce results that can be generalised to the whole population—ignoring which can lead to severe repercussions. For example, sample and selection bias can arise if your survey is not generalisable.

b) Who is my target market?

It’s practically impossible to survey the entire population —  it would be difficult to get a response from every college student in the US or every person in Ireland. Therefore, you will need to survey a sample from the population. 

In general, the sample should aim to be representative of the population as a whole. The larger or more representative is your sample size, the more accurate and deep your survey insights will be. Read more on sample size and how to calculate your survey sample size from our blog.

Step 3: Create a list of questions and design your questionnaire

Now that you have the survey goal and target audience in mind, next you can hop on to the next step, which is also considered the heart of any survey. Yes, you guessed it right – It is the list of questions you put on your survey. It would be best if you wrote down your most pressing questions to move ahead with this. I suggest keeping your questionnaire short (not more than 20 questions).

When deciding what questions to ask and how you can ask them, consider the following factors to ensure your research is fruitful:

  1. You can choose from types of questions, including open-ended, closed-ended, matrix table questions, and single or multiple-response questions. Also, online surveys do not require users to fill in irrelevant questions. The subsequent questions can be skipped based on the previous answers using logic and piping, improving response rates. Grab tips on how to write NPS questions on different scenarios with examples.
  2. The content of the questions should be crafted in a manner so that the survey research results are reliable. The questions should be directly relevant to the purpose of the survey and narrowly focused with enough context for the respondent to answer accurately.
  3. Phrasing survey questions should be simple and to the point. Also, make sure to avoid ambiguity and double negation.
  4. The order of the questions includes organising the questions in your surveys. It should be logical. For instance, put the simple and closed-ended questions at the beginning as this will encourage users to continue, while complex and open-ended questions should be added at the end. 

Step 4: Decide on the right time to conduct a survey

Time plays a vital role in conducting a survey, and it can impact not only your response rate but also how users respond to your survey, which means the timing can also affect the answers they provide. There are two main factors based on which you can decide the best time to send surveys:

a) What is your survey about

Let’s say you want to send surveys to collect your customer’s feedback on a recent event. You don’t want to wait a week to send the survey, right? In fact, you need to send the survey as soon as possible to ensure that the interaction stays fresh in their minds.

b) Active hours of the audience

The second factor to focus on is your audience’s active hours when they are available and willing to respond to your survey. For that, you need to run some text surveys and analyse when your audience would be least busy or interested in answering your questionnaire.

Step 5: Distribute your survey and gather responses

In this step of conducting survey research, you need to ensure that you reach out to your target audience through their preferred channel or medium. You can use different channels to distribute surveys, E.g., Email, social media, Web-app embed, etc. After survey distribution comes the process of collecting and monitoring the response rate, as your final sample size will depend on how many users complete your survey. You want more people to complete or answer your survey. To increase the response rate, you can offer a gift, discount coupon, redeemable points etc. 

Step 6: Analyze the survey result

Now that you have collected the feedback, you need to sift through the responses and extract the key insights that would help you achieve your goal. There are ample ways you could go about digging into your data – 

  1. Use charts and graphs to visualise the data better
  2. Word cloud could make your task easy by highlighting commonly used responses in the open-ended question
  3. You can even use spreadsheets to inspect the trends

In addition to this, starting your analysis with quantitative data helps you better understand your qualitative data. Also, ensure you analyse the responses of different sub-groups in your surveys to extract accurate insights. 

Step 7: Create a clear report on your insights and findings

The last step is creating a status report. This survey report summarises the key findings from your analysis and indicates whether you met the goal you’d set for the survey. The number of responses, completion rate, date of last response etc, are some of the metrics you should consider in your report. A successful survey effectively measures customer satisfaction and gets your desired results.

Now that you have gone through the seven steps in conducting survey research and understand how to conduct one, it’s time to create your own survey using Freshsurvey. This survey software provides you with all tools and features needed to help you design your survey FREE of cost.