Polls, surveys and questionnaires are great tools used by businesses for various purposes. For example, businesses use them to learn about customer experience, competitors, product opinions and more – often in real time. The results of this form of company research can often bring interesting and sometimes even surprising results – but there’s a catch. In order to get the most valuable details out of your survey respondents, you need to make sure you ask them the right poll questions – and these will significantly vary depending on your poll type.
How can you do it? Today, we’re giving you tips on how to ask the best poll questions, as well as inspiring you with our list of +100 effective questions to ask.
How to ask the best poll questions? Good practices
You may think that designing an effective list of poll questions is a piece of cake. If you think so, you couldn’t be further from the truth.
The reality is that it takes time, effort, and skills. Ideally, you want a good poll topic, a good survey response rate and as many potential respondents as possible.
We know the good practices that can help you with all of the above.
#1 The poll question should be clear and concise
First things first, you want to make sure that your poll questions are easily understandable and not too complicated for your respondents. The minute you start creating questions that are long and difficult to read, you’re exposing the results of your poll to many risks, such as:
- false or wrong responses
- missed responses
- incomplete polls
For this reason, whoever is the poll maker, should ensure that whether you’re asking a multiple-choice poll question or an open-ended poll question – it should first and foremost be easy to understand and, as a result, answer. The same goes for your answer choices, actually. If you make answer choices difficult to understand, you may risk getting false responses.
#2 The poll question shouldn’t be biased or leading.
Speaking of creating your questions, be sure to leave your personal opinions at home. The last thing that you want to do is ask a question that already imposes an answer and offend your respondents with it.
Being objective with your questions is an important skill to learn. Without it, your survey could bring poor and untrue results. Thus, stay away from questions like this.
#3 Poll questions need to include at least one or two ‘neutral’ answers, such as “I don’t know” or “no opinion”
Another important thing to remember is to ensure that your respondents have the maximum chance of fully expressing themselves, kind of like with an open-ended question. For example, when you ask a question like “Do you like our current Zoom Meetings frequency?”, you shouldn’t just allow for yes or no answers.
Here, a great option would be to add additional answers, such as “I don’t know” or “I don’t have an opinion”. This will allow people who have a neutral attitude towards the Zoom Meetings to fully express their opinion.
#4 Ask one question at a time – don’t ask two or more in one poll (then it’s not a poll, rather a survey)
Just like you should make your questions easily understandable, not biased and with various answer options to choose from, it’s also vital to remember not to ask more than one question at a time.
So-called double-barreled questions are questions in which you ask about two things, for example: “What do you think about our new Harry Potter product and new Hobbit product?”.
When asking questions like this, you’re risking only getting an answer to one of them. For instance, here, a survey respondent could only answer the first part of the survey asking about the Harry Potter product. To avoid this, simply focus on properly structuring your poll questions, together with the right answer options.
#5 Limit voting on polls to only registered users of your site – this will ensure that all participants are qualified and legitimate voters
Finally, you may want to consider adjusting your poll settings so that only genuine people, for example those registered on your website, take part in it.
It’s a great strategy if you don’t want to keep your responses anonymous.
Yes, you can share your poll everywhere – but why? When you post your poll everywhere, you will attract plenty of poll respondents that will bring nothing informative to your results.
Also, what valuable information can you get from people who know nothing about your products or company at all? None.
For this reason, you should be selective about who your respondents are, as usually they will be able to provide you with more valuable poll responses. And valuable poll responses will give you a better poll overview – win-win, right?
100+ Best poll questions to ask
Once you fully understand how to best structure and ask your poll questions, it’s time to conduct your poll!
We’ve prepared a list of over 100 examples of questions for you to use. These questions touch upon topics like products and services, brand, survey itself, marketing, business questions and more.
Enjoy!
Product/service questions:
Understanding what people think about your products and/or services is important from the profit point of view. Once you get a chance to better analyze why and when people buy your products, what they like about them, as well as how they use them, you can continue to perfect them and, as a result, make more profits.
Below are examples of questions you can ask your respondents about a service or product that your company offers.
Examples:
- What are the most important features of your product/service to you personally?
- How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?
- On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied were you with our call center/customer service?
- How often do you use this product/service on average per day?
- What do you like best about our company and products?
- How often do you use our services?
- What do you like best about our company and products
- Which of the following best describes how satisfied you are with our customer service A) Very Satisfied B) Somewhat Satisfied C) Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied D) Somewhat Dissatisfied E) Very Dissatisfied
- What is your favorite product at our store and why do you like it the most?
- How often do you shop with us?
- Why did you choose to buy this product today?
- Do you have any suggestions for ways we can improve our store or products?
- Would you recommend this product to a friend or family member who might be looking for something similar in another store
- How likely are you to purchase this product or service in the future (scale of 1-10)?
- Have you ever been dissatisfied with one of our products or services and what did we do to make it right for you?
Customer service questions:
Outstanding, top quality service is very important today. If you fail to succeed at it, some other business won’t and your customers will simply switch. Thus, understanding how people feel about it at your company can allow you to make much needed changes.
Take a look at what you may want to ask people:
Examples:
- Do you have any other comments about our customer service that we should know about before moving forward with the survey process?
- If there was one thing that could be improved upon in regards to our customer service, what would it be and why?
- How would you feel about our company analyzing calls with our customers during team meetings?
- Is our customer service staff helpful?
- Is there anything else we can be doing to better serve your needs or improve our customer service?
- How would you rate your company’s customer service today on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best?
- What do you think about our customer service staff?
- Do you consider our customer service staff well qualified?
- What does good customer service mean to you?
- What do you like about our customer service communication channels?
- Do you prefer contacting our customer service through social media or telephone?
- Would you like us to implement customer service over email?
- Could you rate your satisfaction with our customer service from 0, being the lowest, to 10, being the highest?
Brand/company questions
Let’s not forget about the significance of knowing people’s sentiment towards your brand. Do they like your company? Do they identify with your brand? This is just some of the things you may want to consider asking. You can ask them your customers, employees, partners and more – it’s up to you. Here are some more questions you may want to ask your poll participants:
Examples:
- Did anything about today’s experience make it more likely that you will come back again soon, less likely, or not affect your decision at all?
- What are some of the most important things that you consider in terms of your event types when deciding which company to purchase from?
- What is the last thing that made you angry about our company?
- Why did you choose us over the competition?
- What do you like about our brand?
- Do you think our current team meetings are well conducted?
- Could you please list 5 things that come to your mind when you think about our company?
- Do you identify with our company’s values?
- What is the last thing that made you happy about our brand?
- What makes our company different from the competitors?
- Do you know our company’s tagline and slogan?
- How can our company improve?
- Would you like to participate in our team meetings on a regular basis?
- What improvements would you propose for our current team meetings?
Survey feedback questions
In the case of bigger, more complex surveys and polls, it’s always worth asking your poll participants how they found them. You may know everything about how to make your polls perfect, including great designs, logos, pictures, and all that – but that’s theory.
In practice, remember that every audience is different and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be the correct answer to making your polls great. For this reason, you can ask your poll participants about how they like your survey itself so that you can improve in the future.
Examples:
- On a scale of 1-10, what is your level of satisfaction with this survey so far (1 being not at all satisfied, 10 being very satisfied)?
- Do you have any other comments or feedback for us today that would help us provide an even better experience for you in the future?
- Would you recommend this survey to a friend or a family member?
- Could you provide us with some authentic feedback for this survey?
- Would you like to see a visual representation of possible survey answers?
- Would you like to receive a poll notification with the overall results?
- Have you taken part in similar surveys before?
- Did you find the survey design interesting?
- Did you find the survey easy or difficult to navigate?
- Would you like to make any suggestions regarding future polls?
- Were you satisfied with the length of this survey?
- Do you feel like something was missing in the survey?
- Would you like to answer image poll type of questions in the future?
- What do you think about our current polling question technique?
- Would you be willing to take part in similar surveys in the future?
- Do you feel like we could have provided you with some additional answer options for this survey?
- How would you rate the design of this survey on a scale of 1-10 (1 being poor, 10 being fantastic)?
Marketing poll questions
Can you imagine building your business without marketing it properly? If you’re putting a lot of effort into your marketing strategies, well done!
But how do you know if your marketing campaigns are well received by your audience? Apart from measuring KPIs, there’s one more important thing you can do – and that’s asking your audience! Or, at least part of it.
Examples:
- What is your current marketing budget for the next 12 months?
- What are your top 3 goals for this year in marketing?
- How many customers do you need to break even on your advertising investment?
- Do you currently have a marketing plan in place?
- What does your current marketing plan entail?
- How would you describe your basic knowledge when it comes to trending marketing strategies?
- Which type of content do you prefer – text, audio, video, images, or all three?
- What are your thoughts on the marketing campaign for this product or service so far (scale of 1-10)?
- On a scale of one to five, how much do you like our marketing campaign for this product or service so far (one being not at all and five being very much)?
- What is your favorite part about our marketing campaign for this product or service so far (or what’s been most effective)?
- How many times have you seen our marketing campaign for this product or service so far before today, including other channels such as TV, radio, print ads, billboards etc.?
- What sort of event types would you like to promote in the near future?
- Are you planning on promoting your online events anytime soon?
- Which channel has been most effective in reaching you with our message about this new product/service launch – social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; traditional advertising mediums such as TV commercials and magazines; word-of-mouth from friends, family members etc.; Google search engine results pages; email campaigns that we sent out…?
Business poll questions
Customers aren’t the only people that you may want to survey. Sometimes, it’s great to survey other people, for example your business partners. Doing this can reveal interesting facts, opinions and areas for improvement.
Examples:
- What is your company’s mission?
- What is your company’s vision statement?
- Would you like our business to provide your clients with some additional training?
- How would you characterize the culture of your organization?
- What are the most important qualities for success in this role?
- Who do you report your progress to?
- Would you like us to provide you with more appointment template type of materials?
- What does this person (a job position) do on a day-to-day basis?
- If I were to be successful in this position, how would my work impact our customers/marketing/company goals
- Tell me about an accomplishment or skill that makes you proud of yourself as it relates to this job
- On a scale of 1-5, how likely are you to refer us to someone else as their go-to business
- Do we have anything in common (e.g., hobbies, interests)?
- Is there a particular goal in mind that you’re working towards right now, whether personal or professional related?
Customer questions
Customer demographics are possibly one of the most valuable data you can obtain out there. Knowing who your customers are, what they do for a living and more is very beneficial when you’re designing a marketing campaign for example. Here are some useful questions to ask your customers:
Examples:
- How old are you?
- Would you be willing to tell me more about yourself so I can better understand who my customers are and what they want from me/my company?
- What are your interests?
- How much do you spend on our products monthly?
- How much do you earn per hour? (use a salary to hourly calculator if necessary)
- What percentage of your income goes into products like ours?
- Where are you from?
- What do you do for a living?
- What made you become our customer?
Ecommerce poll questions
Are you running an ecommerce business? Would you like to know what people think about your website? Asking some e-commerce related questions is your perfect chance to find out details like this, and more. Take a look at some of these great questions that you may want to ask:
Examples:
- What is the purpose of your purchase today?
- How did you hear about us?
- Why do you want to buy this product?
- What other products are you considering buying from us?
- Who else will be using this product and why?
- Will this product be used at home or elsewhere?
- What are your thoughts on the quality of our products?
- How would you rate the customer service that we offer?
- Would you recommend us to a friend or family member?
- What is your opinion about our prices?
- Do you feel like there are enough product reviews on the site?
- Did you find what you were looking for when browsing through our website?
- How would you rate our website functionality?
- What is the main reason you would like to purchase this product/service from us today (choose one)?
- Do you have any questions about our products or services before we proceed with your order?
- How do you feel about our shipping times?
- Were you able to agree your preferred delivery time slot booking with the courier?
- Would you be interested in a bundle package of _____and _____?
- What are some of the most important features that are important to you when purchasing an item like this one online?
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our customer service thus far today?
- What are some of the things that you’ve been wanting to do or buy lately but haven’t had time for yet
- Have you considered any of our other teen investing products recently?
- What are your thoughts on _____ (product)?
- Do you have any questions about _____ (product)?
- Would you like help with anything else today, or is there anything else I can do for you before we wrap up this call/meeting/chat session?
Over to you
Quite a contentful list of options, isn’t it? We hope you enjoyed this article. There of course are multiple additional polls that you can run, and these are just some examples to inspire you. Replacing random poll questions with those well-thought-out can bring amazing results!
We hope our extensive list of over 100 questions will be of use in the near future.
In the meantime, if you’re still searching for a reliable solution to help you with designing your polls, surveys, various questionnaires and more, you should have a look at youengage.me.
It’s the ultimate, top-quality tool for online surveys that are fully customizable. Why not take advantage of tools that will make your next survey perfect?
Good luck!
