By Chris Lee

Since its launch in 1999, online research tool SurveyMonkey has grown to the point where today it boasts more than five million users globally. Since April this year it has been gaining 80,000 new users each week. SurveyMonkey has customers in over 200 countries worldwide and is used by a variety of customers including banks, charities, schools, universities and charitable organisations as well as consumers looking for quick and informed responses to their questions.

To coincide with a site re-launch and European expansion, NMK’s Chris Lee spoke to SurveyMonkey’s chief executive officer, Dave Goldberg, about the value of online research for businesses, as well as general survey generation best practice.

Briefly describe SurveyMonkey for us and how it works

SurveyMonkey offers users a simple, quick and cost-effective way to gather and analyse information to help them make more informed decisions. In terms of pricing, there is a free ‘Basic’ account which allows users to ask ten questions to a maximum of 100 people. The ‘Pro’ account is £19.95 per month, and offers an unlimited amount of questions to 1,000 respondents per month. Lastly, we have an ‘Unlimited’ account which is perfect for regular users as it only costs £16.67 per month but is billed annually.

What was the inspiration for SurveyMonkey?

SurveyMonkey was founded by Ryan Finley in 1999 when things were nearing the height of the dotcom craziness. The aim was to create a simple and intuitive survey tool, as while he was working in his then current job for a music community site he was unable to find a good tool to survey its customers.

How did you grow and spread awareness?

To date, SurveyMonkey has relied on growing virally through word of mouth, recommendations and usage. The name has significantly helped aid in this growth because it is instantly recognisable – Ryan wanted a name that would stick in people’s minds and he’s described it as the best asset he came up with. Gorilla marketing was also a key tactic in the early days. By 2002, Ryan was able to quit his day job and work on SurveyMonkey full time and as a result subscriber numbers snowballed with a 500 per cent growth by the end of 2002. This rapid growth continues today, with the registered user base growing from 2.5 million to 5 million in the last year and 80,000 users signing up per week.

How many countries/languages are you active in?

Until now SurveyMonkey has only been available via the US site, yet we have customers in almost 200 countries. We are now focusing on international growth, and supporting customers with local-language sites and regional customer support. We have just opened an office in Madeira, and have sites and customer support in Spanish, Italian, French, German and Portuguese. More languages will be following shortly.

Give us a couple of examples of high profile research carried out over SurveyMonkey

We have a number of high profile customers, for example Facebook uses SurveyMonkey for extensive global market and customer research. Additionally Xerox uses SurveyMonkey to measure customer satisfaction as well as for internal employee feedback and insights gathering.

Are there any cultural differences in how SurveyMonkey is used across the world?

The desire for a self-serve, robust, easy-to-use survey solution is common across cultures and has spurred SurveyMonkey’s international growth. However, different cultures certainly have different communication styles and interpretations of things such as answer scales. In addition, direct translation of questions can cause errors and inconsistencies in responses. That is one of the main reasons we have established a customer operations centre in Madeira which is staffed with native language speakers who can assist our customers with successful survey creation and deployment.

What are your top five tips for a company looking to run a survey on SurveyMonkey?

Here are the top five tips we give to our customers when they are setting up surveys:

1. Clearly outline your survey goals and objectives

2. Think specifically about how you are going to analyse and use results – this helps ensure you ask the right questions to gather the data you need to make decisions

3. Understand the best ways to reach your respondents – will it be via email, your website, social media? This helps ensure you deploy the survey correctly to your audience. SurveyMonkey provides a range of response collection options from email and web links to social media widgets

4. Craft your questions so they are clear, specific, and mean the same thing to all of your respondents. We have more information and guidance on our site to help customers and our support staff is trained to provide additional help if customers need it

5. Remember the vast majority of people welcome the opportunity to provide feedback, give opinions, and share their insights. If you follow 1 – 4, you will have a survey that your respondents will be happy to complete