Making market research meaningful and efficient – the three best online survey tools

If you want to successfully sell products or services, you have to have a good knowledge of your customers’ needs and expectations. This sounds self-evident in theory, but in practice getting reliable information about customers’ motivations is rarely so simple.

They provide a cost-effective way to better understand their customers’ preferences and desires, identify customer groups with similar needs, and evaluate their marketing efforts and advertising campaigns.

Nowadays, the effort required to create, conduct and analyse surveys has become manageable thanks to professional online tools. Here, we took a closer look at the three best free survey tools online.
 

The cloud-based survey software, Qualtrics CoreXM, offers companies the opportunity to listen to customers and employees, ask them about their experiences and implement improvement measures in real time. The surveys form a basis for managing the experiences of both customers and employees. The survey tool is drag-and-drop, with over 100 question categories and ready-made templates to create customised surveys.

XM Solutions’ automated methods and workflows can be adapted to individual needs and requirements – mobile-optimised surveys, custom survey URLs and powerful analytics make this survey tool an all-round solution.

The free version includes an active survey, 100 responses, 7 different question types, summary reports and filters, and survey logic tools.
 

The web-based SurveyMonkey software is intuitive to use and does not require any prior knowledge to create and analyse surveys. The tool is designed for professional use but, unfortunately, the extensive functions such as branching logic, live result tracking and branding are only available in the paid version. The free version is good for getting to know the tool or for very simple surveys. If your needs change, you can upgrade at any time.

SurveyMonkey is wonderful for small businesses that still want to grow and for whom the features of the basic version are sufficient. 

The free version offers an unlimited number of surveys with 10 questions and 40 answers each.

With the open source software LimeSurvey you can create, conduct and evaluate online surveys quickly and easily without any programming knowledge. The software does require a certain amount of training to be able to use its full potential, however.

With panel integration, question editor, skip logic and branching, survey administration, user-defined URLs as well as data export to common spreadsheets and word processing programmes, LimeSurvey offers a comprehensive and versatile online tool that is suitable for both beginners and professionals. Thanks to the open source system, surveys can be created in over 80 languages.

The free version allows 25 survey responses per month and 30 question types.
 

These survey tools can support you in your quantitative market research. Our tip for your qualitative research: GoSpeech, the AI-based speech recognition software for automatic transcription of audio and video formats. The full GoSpeech package is available to you for free. 

Try GoSpeech now for free