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Everybody knows long surveys don’t work very well.
So, why do they stagger on like zombies?
For over a decade, market researchers have recognized that long surveys just don’t make sense. At industry conferences we hear again and again that audiences are simply too busy to invest their time in a 50-question survey.
Even when compensated, respondents often value their time more than the rewards market researchers offer—especially for younger respondents, busy professionals, and those with higher levels of income. This is especially true when it comes to B2B studies.
Survey fatigue is also a huge problem. Though 1000 people may choose to take your behemoth survey, many will lose interest over time and fail to devote any thought to later responses. As a result, researchers are often forced to discount the responses towards the end of the survey.
So why do long zombie surveys continue to wander the earth?
The argument for longer surveys is that it’s necessary to ask audiences 50 questions to get a full picture of a particular topic.
But are 50 questions really necessary?
The discipline and rigor to reduce the total number of questions can benefit the survey designer as well as the respondent. It can focus the mind on the hypotheses that really need to be tested, rather than on every possible question they can think up on a topic.
And there’s another option: Here at Glimpse, our clients often strategically carve longer surveys up into 15-question sections and then send those out to lookalike audiences. This approach can reduce bias for survey respondents, permitting, for example, one set of respondents to react to broader questions about industries or categories while a matched audience answers questions about a new product feature or marketing concept. The reactions to the new feature or concept won’t be biased by earlier questions.
At the end of the day, if a survey fails to engage respondents from beginning to end, you won’t receive high-quality responses. The respondent experience question is really a data quality question.
At Glimpse, we’ve designed our platform to make surveys easy, accessible, and engaging for today’s audiences.
With a well-designed survey effortlessly available on mobile, asking people to respond isn’t a huge request. And when you create studies using Glimpse, you gather answers provided in the flow of people’s daily lives, resulting in much more natural, human responses.
Our NLP-powered human response platform is perfect for analyzing these natural responses— capturing the nuance and depth decision makers are looking for.
Get in touch with us at glimpsehere.com if you’re interested in creating a survey that engages audiences and retains their attention from start to finish.
No more zombies! 🧟♂️
Instead try accessing the humanity of your customers with deeper, more differentiated, and more actionable insights than ever before!
The story of how Glimpse was tricked by Generative AI in response to a survey about Generative AI–while working for one of the world’s leading Generative AI companies. Read more to find what happened and learn some concrete tips to defend your own research against similar threats . . .
For over a decade, market researchers have recognized that long surveys just don’t make sense. At industry conferences we hear again and again that audiences are simply too busy to invest their time in a 50-question survey. So why do zombie surveys continue to wander the earth?
Traditionally, market research was primarily a support function. Even today, a lot of quantitative market research is designed to either validate or invalidate existing hypotheses. It focuses on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ far more than on the ‘why’.
