With so much to learn about my target market for Flam Swiss, I’ve been making use of surveys to find out who my site visitors are.
Wufoo is great, but I only had 1 response when visitors were asked to visit a link in order to fill out my Wufoo survey form. When I decided to embed the Wufoo form directly in my webpage I got** 12 responses**. So much better! However, Wufoo wasn’t built to be used for surveys, and I found it difficult/impossible to match the embedded wufoo form to my site’s design.
There are many questions I want to ask my website visitors, and I’ll be adding more constantly, so I needed something different than a traditional form, where I can roll out questions as I think of them. Also:
- It needs to allow visitors to answer one question at a time (no need to answer all questions and then submit)
- Some questions should only show when a previous question is answered in a certain way
Being a programmer is both a blessing and a curse because I feel compelled to do everything myself. I wanted a simpler survey system, so rather than look for an existing solution and instead of trying to bend Wufoo to meet my needs, I created one myself in an evening: last night. You can see it here, on the right side of the site.
Conclusion
Even one click away is asking too much of your visitors. You shouldn’t ask people you have no prior relationship with to go out of their way in order to fill out a survey.
Worth noting: I haven’t been 100% methodical with my surveys. It looks like I took down the link to the wufoo form on September 6th, and I can only assume I put it up some time in the Spring of 2009. If it was up for 3-6 months, and I only got 1 response, that’s not good. Granted, I was only averaging about 4 visit per week for that period, and now I’m getting somewhere around 10.