Online surveys are a great method of interacting with your users to find out what their perception of your product or service is. There is a distinct difference between feedback and surveys. Feedback is a reactive impulse and that does not necessarily have to be a good thing; however, surveys are completely different in that if they are used effectively, they prevent bad news in feedback coming in. This makes them the proactive component of marketing.

Surveys are a non-billable exercise, which means that there is no revenue coming in from them and the link between survey and sale does not exist, despite it being a step forward in the right direction. Therefore, it was a natural progression for surveys to become a free online survey product proposition, as most popular tools on the internet become. These free of cost tools are basically set up of a survey made from a web tool where you fill in your questions and patch the survey to your site. An alternative to this is to use the email survey functionality that most of these free of cost value propositions espouse.

Online surveys are a crucial method of getting data about your users. Fundamentally, surveys are the one tool that you can use to become your customer’s partner. You can find out details about spending habits, shopping preferences, vacation preferences, likes, dislikes, and basically any question that is not infringing too much on their privacy – and sometimes even this is tolerated by users.

When you ask a set of questions to a large group of people, assuming they all respond, you end up with a huge amount of date that you need to put somewhere. Free online surveys store this data on database servers and show you the reports or send it to you for further manipulation.

Email surveys also have the same functionality and can even form a  part of a bigger client profile. When all this data is collected, you will have to look at trends. So questions like, “What do teenagers want from a social networking website today? Is it more applications, better friend finder logic, or more gaming? This very question if asked to the pertinent audience will immediately reveal a trend, which will tell you what product features or even what product you should be launching.

Online surveys combined with the free online survey offerings are not completely free of problems. Bland visual designs, inconvenient placement, and repeated requests to the same user to take a survey are distracting to users. Email surveys can overcome this problem but they end up becoming fair game for spam filters. This could end up ruining a survey and one must consider the crucial element, sample size, before coming to an absolute conclusions.