Free Survey Tool for Basic Market Research from Google Docs

If you’re looking to survey prospects, subscribers, or customers you might be interested in the enhancement that Google made to Google Spreadsheets that turns it into a free survey tool.

There are existing services, such as Survey Monkey, that already offer a free alternative but I noticed two things the Google Docs enhancement offers that you don’t get with the basic Survey Monkey version.

Offering Incentives
Whether you’re sending current subscribers or prospects generated by paid traffic to the survey, you can always increase the survey response rate if you offer something free in return for taking it.  I wanted to send people from my last Survey Monkey questionnaire to a free report if they took the time to fill it out but Survey Monkey wanted me to upgrade to a paid version to offer this feature.

In Google Docs, after you create your survey you can select the “Custom confirmation message” checkbox in the Preferences section to turn on a thank you message.  You can enter the message you want people to see once they’ve completed the survey and point them to whatever free item you promised.

Data Download
In SurveyMonkey, you can look at each individual survey response or you can look at a summary of total answers but you can’t download all the responses into a spreadsheet for further analysis unless you upgrade to a paid package.  With Google Spreadsheet all the responses are easily available for analysis or download.

Basic Service
You do get what you pay for. The survey form interface is very plain for Google Spreadsheet so you can’t customize it with any of your own graphics or different color schemes.  In addition the survey functionality is not as sophisticated as what Survey Monkey can offer with some of their packages.

However, if you’re just looking for a basic, quick & easy tool that’s free, Google Spreadsheet should do the trick! Thanks to Aweber for alerting me to this market research tip.  Check out their video demo.