Online surveys are part of a large family of self-administered surveys (Internet, mailing, multimedia terminals, etc.). In contrast with administered surveys (face to face, telephone), the person responsible for the survey is not physically present to question the respondent.

Without this direct contact, in theory nothing drives the respondent to take part in the survey. To ensure a satisfactory rate of return on surveys, it is thus necessary, in order to motivate respondents and to minimise personal “investment” (time, intelligence, etc.), to do everything to ensure

• that the questionnaire is clear, concise and understandable to any respondent;
• that the respondent understands the question at first glance;
• that it speaks the respondent's language in the real as well as the figurative sense.

It is also important to think out a questionnaire in terms of the time the respondent will devote to it. The respondent's attention and motivation (and hence the reliability of the replies) have a tendency to drop as the questionnaire progresses. It is therefore essential to place the most important questions at the beginning.

On the other hand, one of the principal specificities of online surveys is the speed of replies. A peak is noted 48 hours after the first request, then a gradual drop, up to the first reminder. An online survey therefore makes it possible to receive a very rapid response to the questions one wishes to put to one's contacts.

Lastly, a major advantage of online surveys is the very low distribution cost. In fact, thanks to the Internet, the cost of a survey on an international scale is the same as that of a questionnaire sent out to the national market.

On a Thursday and preferably in the morning.

In fact, we have found statistically that a survey will have a better rate of return, if the request e- mail is sent on Thursday morning. This phenomenon can be explained quite easily, using the following process of elimination :

• On Mondays, the respondent is starting the week, e-mails may have accumulated over the weekend and he probably has little time to spare for an online survey.
• Tuesdays are generally similar to Mondays and the respondent's workload does not always allow him to take out time for replying to a questionnaire. An additional phenomenon is that of part-timers.
• Wednesdays are generally days of rest for part-timers and Tuesday's work must therefore anticipate the absence on Wednesday.
  Wednesdays and Fridays are traditionally RTT(working time reduction) days or rest days
• On the other hand, by Thursday the respondents will have broken the back of the week's work and will be more wiling to take time out (on that day or on the following day)

Lastly, it is always advisable to avoid starting a survey during large-scale events, which may engage the respondent's time and attention (Rolland Garros, World Cup, OG, etc.)

The rate of return is very variable from one online survey to another. It principally depends on two factors, namely

• The quality of the survey
  How can one motivate the respondent to participate in the survey? Is the questionnaire sufficiently concise and the questions sufficiently clear to minimise the personal investment by the respondent?
• The qualification of e-mail addresses
  Is the address still active? Is the respondent contacted the target to be consulted?

When two elements are combined, it is possible to secure a rate of return of over 50%.
e-Questionnaire offers the means of analysing this rate of return.

Generally speaking you will receive replies less than 48 hours after the recruitment mail has been sent. This is one of the great advantages of online surveys and one of the characteristics of web surfer behaviour when faced with e-mails.

To avoid seeing an accumulation of messages in their in-boxes, respondents act immediately on seeing an e-mail, either by deleting it, or by dealing with it very rapidly. It is therefore essential to take great care in composing one's recruitment mail in order to arouse the respondents' interest.

Generally speaking, we recommend one recruitment e-mail followed by a maximum of two reminders. In some special cases, it is possible to send a larger number of reminders (friend, partner, superior/subordinate).

Attention! An excessive number of reminders may be considered by recipients to show a lack of courtesy, or indeed spamming* and harm not only the image of the company, but also online surveys in general.

*Définition
"Spamming" or "spam" is the large-scale and sometimes repeated sending, of unsolicited electronic letters to persons with whom the sender has never been in contact and whose electronic address he copied in an illicit manner. Spam are messages sent on the basis of an irregular collection of addresses, either by means of search engines in public Internet address spaces (websites, discussion forums, distribution lists, chat lines, etc.), or if customer addresses were given without the persons in question having been informed and without their being able either to object or to agree. Such collection is unfair and illicit within the meaning of Article 25 of the Law of 6 January 1978.
CNIL – 1999 – Report on the electronic mass mailings

Yes, it is in fact one of the advantages of the solutions offered by e-Questionnaire.

In fact, we offer to place your e-Questionnaires into your company's graphical chart. Once it has been created, this model will remain available free of charge for any the other questionnaires, which you may produce. This offer is available through our “Corporate” edition.

Contact us for more detailed information.

You have two options, to construct one now thanks to e-Questionnaire, or to hire one from a specialised organisation.

Using our panel questionnaire, you can create a questionnaire on your website devoted to the collection of information on respondents (in the context of a registration in a newsletter, for example). Through this questionnaire, you will get an e-mail, as well as a multitude of information, which will be useful to you for « profiling » your correspondent (for example the socio-economic category or SEC). You can then create a panel of respondents, corresponding to certain criteria (for example all upper SEC respondents) and use this panel for distributing a new survey.

If you have a list in Excel for example, all you need to do is export that list into a tabulated text format (separated by semi-colons, for example). This format looks like this model :

• Mr ; John ; Doe ; jdoe@yahoo.com
• Ms ; Dana ; Scully ; dana236@hotmail.com

You can then import this list into the respondent part of e-Questionnaire. An interface will enable you to link every column to a title (title, surname, forename, e-mail, telephone, etc.).

Because the code used for the generation of questionnaires is standard html , which follows W3C recommendations , you will be able to contact a respondent with a Macintosh without trouble. On the other hand, to access an administration interface, which makes it possible to create and to modify questionnaires, we recommend the use of a navigator of the most recent generation; our texts have shown that e-Questionnaire ran on Safari without any problems.

Thanks to e-Questionnaire, you can create a permanent survey, which will be automatically triggered by your systems at particular moments. For example, you have an e-business website and you wish to know the degree of satisfaction of a customer who has just placed an order. You can very simply add the registration of the respondent by e-Questionnaire to your ordering process. The respondent will then automatically receive a recruitment e-mail either immediately or at a later date of your choice.