14 Types of Surveys to Grow Your Business (+Examples)

You want to know what your customers really think, why good employees leave, or whether anyone recognizes your brand yet.

A survey is the quickest way to get those answers, but “survey” covers a lot of ground. The type you choose shapes the responses you get back, so it pays to match it to what you’re trying to learn.

Below are 14 types of surveys you can run on your WordPress site. For each one, I’ll cover what it’s good for and when it’s worth reaching for, so you can pick the right fit instead of guessing.

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How to Choose the Right Type of Survey

Before you build anything, it helps to get clear on what you actually want out of the responses. That one decision points you toward the right type of survey faster than anything else.

If you want to improve something you already offer, a satisfaction or feedback survey works best. If you want to understand a market or an audience before you commit, market research and brand awareness surveys are the better fit.

And if the survey itself is meant to bring in business, a lead generation or poll style survey keeps things short enough that people actually finish.

How the survey reaches people changes the results too, since a quick on-page poll, an emailed questionnaire, and an anonymous form each pull different response rates and different levels of honesty.

Types of Surveys to Grow Your Business

There are more types of surveys than most people expect, and each one is suited to a particular job. Skim the full list below, or use the table of contents to jump to the one you need.

1. Job Satisfaction Survey

A job satisfaction survey shows you whether your team is genuinely happy at work, not just whether they say so in the hallway.

You can let your team know in a meeting you’re sending these out, and hopefully get lots of people completing them (especially if you let people know they are anonymous).

Once you have an idea of how happy people are with their jobs, you can use their feedback to improve the atmosphere. Take a look at what scored low on the employee satisfaction survey and work on improving those things first.

2. Brand Awareness Survey

Does it feel like you’re spending a ton of time and money on your marketing efforts but you can’t really tell if they’re working? A great survey type to try on your website is a brand awareness survey.

By conducting a brand awareness survey, you can find unknown associations people have with your brand. This can sometimes lead to new business opportunities for you!

It’s also a natural place to ask what people think of your logo, your site design, and the rest of your branding.

3. Matrix Question Survey

A matrix question survey is a type of survey that can help gather information with closed-ended questions. It uses columns and rows like this:

Also, you can ask your visitors to rate different aspects of the customer service you provide on a scale from ‘Very Satisfied’ to ‘Very Dissatisfied’. Check out these examples of great customer surveys to get some inspiration.

4. Poll Style Survey

Poll style surveys with closed-ended questions have great response rates. That’s because they are quick to fill out and don’t require much time commitment.

You can even conduct a poll survey without asking for an email address, so users can complete the survey in just a click.

5. Questionnaire Survey

A questionnaire survey works best when it’s clear, short, and specific. Give people simple instructions and keep each question focused, and the answers come back a lot cleaner.

An administered questionnaire can be done with a survey plugin like WPForms to gather a variety of different feedback from your customers and website visitors.

6. Customer Satisfaction Survey

One of the most popular online surveys you’ll come across when looking at survey types is the customer satisfaction survey.

That’s because customers are crazy important to the success of any business. Check out the survey example below made using conversational forms.

A customer satisfaction survey helps you understand your customer’s needs and wants so that you can provide them with those things. This zero-party information can be critical for the growth of any business.

7. Exit Interview Survey

You may sometimes lose employees, it’s just a part of being a business owner. But many times, you can use the experience as a learning opportunity by conducting an exit interview survey.

Turnover can cost you quite a bit of money in your small business. So an exit interview survey can help you get ideas for improvements to keep employees around.

And you might be surprised what you learn about what’s going on inside your business by asking people who are leaving. Check out these examples of exit survey questions to get some inspiration.

8. Lead Generation Survey

A lead generation survey is one of the more powerful types you can run for growth, and it does two useful jobs at once.

It gathers the contact details you need for your email list, and it feeds straight into your lead generation efforts while telling you something about each person who fills it out.

Because you’re asking a few questions anyway, you can qualify and segment leads at the same time.

Ask which service someone’s interested in, then route them onto a different email list based on their answer. By the time a lead lands in your inbox, you already know what they came looking for.

9. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey

NPS surveys are a very useful type of survey you should definitely be using for your business. Using a score of 0 to 10, you can measure the willingness of customers to recommend your products or services to other people.

And, we suggest you set them up with conditional logic. So a paragraph text box will show up  asking for more details or for a testimonial based on the rating they give.

10. Market Research Survey

If you really want to dig into what consumers think about your products and services, a market research survey is a great choice.

You can get an idea about if your products and services are reasonably priced. Or, see how aware people actually are about your brand.

Overall, you’ll discover strength and weaknesses on your products, so that way you can develop a course of action to make things better,

11. Likert Scale Survey

A really fantastic version of the matrix type of survey is a Likert scale survey.

A Likert scale is a rating scale used to measure people’s experiences or opinions. It gives users a balanced scale of choices on either side of a neutral option.

That way, you can find out the degree of someone’s opinion on a specific question. This is helpful with data visualization, too.

12. Open-Ended Survey

Why not add paragraph text to your survey to keep things open-ended? Just remember, open-ended questions can be time consuming to read through and collect data on.

However, these types of surveys can still be a great way to gather specific details on your product or service from your audience.

13. Cancellation Survey

Keeping customers is just as important as finding new ones, so it’s a smart business practice to create a customer cancellation survey in WordPress.

This is the type of survey that’s like an exit interview, but instead of employees you’re asking customers why they’re cancelling a service with you.

The answers often point to a fixable problem, and now and then the survey itself gives you one last chance to win the person back.

14. Anonymous Survey

If you’re looking for public opinion on your survey questions, sometimes it’s best to keep it anonymous!

It’s the anonymity factor that really helps boost people’s interest in taking these kinds of surveys. This increases engagement from people because they can contribute to the survey without having to give anything up except for their time.

It’s super important to create this type of survey so that you can try and gather and look into reasons why your services or products aren’t working out for people.

Bonus: Publishing Surveys in WordPress

You can use the gathered data from your survey questions to get a great idea of what your target audience likes and dislikes about your business so you can make changes.

The easiest way to do this on WordPress is with the WPForms Pro plugin. And WPForms Pro has tons of features you can use to create professional surveys for your website, including the Survey and Polls addon.

The survey reporting feature is stunning and makes it simple to see your data on an easy-to-use reporting dashboard. The addon lets you create engaging surveys that your website visitors and customers will love to fill out.

Features:

• Easy to use: WPForms is one of the simplest survey builders out there, with a drag-and-drop editor that makes any type of survey quick to put together.
• Survey templates: start from ready-made survey templates, with or without conditional logic, for both simple and advanced forms.
• Customizable fields: add the fields your survey needs, from text boxes and dropdowns to checkboxes, radio buttons, and star ratings.
• Email notifications: send a confirmation to the person who filled out the survey, or alert yourself and your team, with email notifications.
• Beautiful reports: view results as line charts, pie charts, and bar graphs right inside your WordPress dashboard.
• Conditional logic: show or hide questions based on earlier answers, so the survey stays short and relevant for each person.

That’s it! Hopefully, this list helped show you the different types of surveys you can use to grow your business.

FAQs About Types of Surveys

Types of surveys is a broad topic, so here are quick answers to a few questions that come up a lot when people are deciding which survey to run.

What are the 3 main types of survey research?

In research terms, surveys usually fall into three groups, exploratory, descriptive, and causal. Exploratory surveys open up a topic you don’t understand well yet, descriptive surveys measure what’s true for a defined group, and causal surveys test whether one thing actually influences another.

What is the most common type of survey?

The customer satisfaction survey is the one most businesses reach for. It’s quick to run, easy for customers to answer, and it maps directly to decisions about your product, service, and support.

What is the difference between a survey and a questionnaire?

A questionnaire is the set of questions you ask. A survey is the whole process, including the questionnaire, the people you send it to, and the analysis you do once the answers come back. Every survey uses a questionnaire, but the survey is the bigger picture.

Next, Plan to Launch Your Survey

Before you send your survey out, a little planning goes a long way, and once responses start coming in, this guide on how to write up your survey results helps you turn raw data into something you can act on.

And if you’re still deciding what to ask, these examples of demographic questions are a useful starting point.

Create Your WordPress Survey Now

Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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