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Ultimate Guide to Survey Software

The web makes it easy to connect with anyone across the world, but unless you’re talking with them one-on-one it’s impossible to know exactly what they’re thinking.

If you have an online business or run a website, getting feedback from your actual customers and users is invaluable. Without it, you’re not having a conversation; you’re just broadcasting — and who knows if anyone is really listening?

The Power of Surveys

You might have a beautiful website with eloquent copy, but do you know if it actually does what it’s supposed to?

Conducting a survey can help you discover:

Why your bounce rate is so high;
Why your email subscribers aren’t opening your newsletters;
Why no website visitors are navigating where you want them to go;
Why your landing pages aren’t working;
What kind of blog posts will perform the best with your audience;
What your customers really want, so you can develop ultra-popular products and services that meet their needs.

None of us are mind readers, and your audience will probably surprise you with some of their answers!

Why Use Survey Software?

Why not just send an email to your subscribers and let them hit “reply” to answer your questions?

If you have a very small audience, and they’re all comfortable giving you 100% honest feedback in a direct conversation, that might work.

Otherwise, your best option is to use survey software.

That’s because:

It makes it easy for people to answer your questions — you’ll get more responses.
The anonymity makes people more comfortable sharing their honest opinion.
You’ll be able to reach a wider audience by publishing your survey in a variety of ways (some of the software below actually lets you purchase responses from a targeted audience).
Your surveys will be faster and easier to setup.
It’s more accurate: there’s not as much room for human error.
Your surveys will be easy to style: many of the options here have beautiful looking form templates that are mobile-friendly and look great on any device.
You’ll be able to analyze and visualize the results with all the reporting features included in the software below.

Ultimate List of Survey Software

Ready to start surveying, analyzing the responses, and translating that data into action to improve your site? Try one of the software applications below to get started.

Self-Hosted Standalone Survey Software

You can install these software applications on your web hosting account, set up surveys, and publish them on the web.

phpESP: this is an open source PHP script that lets you create and administer surveys, gather results, and view statistics. It stores all the information in a MySQL database. The name stands for PHP Easy Survey Package.
LimeSurvey: a free, open source tool for creating online questionnaires, formerly known as PHPSurveyor. You can also publish your questionnaire online, and analyze the results in graphs.
Encuestame: a free, open source CMS to make surveys and publish them to various social networks.

Hosted Survey Software

With these software applications, you can create surveys that are hosted for you, and sometimes embed them on your own existing websites with a bit of code.

Survey Monkey: this cloud-based survey software allows you to design your survey and even buy survey responses from a targeted audience. There’s a basic free version for up to 200 responses.
Google Forms: Google’s free survey tool integrates with its Drive apps and saves all the answers into a Google spreadsheet where they can be analyzed.
Typeform: create surveys and other kinds of forms with beautiful designs that are mobile-responsive. You can create unlimited surveys with basic features for free.
FormCrafts: a drag-and-drop online form builder you can use to create mobile-friendly surveys to embed on your website.
Checkbox: a survey tool with advanced features, available in both online hosted and installed server software editions.
SurveyGizmo: use surveys to collect in-depth data and then display it with advanced reporting tools.

WordPress Plugins

If you use WordPress to power your site, these plugins are for you.

WPForms: a drag-and-drop survey building tool for WordPress. Embed your forms in blog posts, pages, sidebar widgets, footer, etc.
PlanSo Forms: create surveys with this drag-and-drop form building tool for WordPress.
WordPress Survey & Poll: quickly create customized surveys and polls to embed on your site or display as pop-ups. Includes a visual builder with a live preview area.
WordPress Simple Survey: easily create surveys, quizzes, polls, and questionnaires and track the results via email or your WordPress dashboard.
SurveyFunnel: a responsive WordPress survey plugin with the goal of helping you to create efficient sales funnels, and increase your opt-in and conversion rates.

Drupal Modules

With Drupal, survey modules are limited, but this one could be what you need.

Survey Builder: provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for building surveys using the Drupal Form Builder module, and creates a back-end interface for storing surveys and their responses.

Joomla! Extensions

Joomla! offers many extensions for creating surveys on your website.

Community Surveys: survey builder with powerful, advanced features like AJAX forms, conditional rules, social integration, and more. Create mobile-ready surveys on your site and use the advanced analytics and reporting tools to view the results. You can even allow your site users to create their own surveys.
Breezing Forms: an advanced form builder for Joomla.
vQuiz: create surveys and quizzes and generate beautiful graphic reports with colorful line charts, column charts, and pie charts.
Survey Force Deluxe: a tool that allows you to easily create surveys or polls right from the front-end, collect data and analyze survey results.
BF Survey: create professional looking surveys and automatically create a database table to store the data for each survey. You can generate PDF files of your survey data, or export it to CSV to analyze in Excel.
Alter Surveys: create surveys or polls and generate customizable graphic reports with your results.

Magento Extensions

If you have an online shop with Magento, getting user feedback is critical.

Amasty Magento Survey: design advanced surveys and polls with flexible layout options. Export the results to PDF reports.
Magento Connect User Survey & Poll: add surveys and questionnaires to any page of your web shop, and create charts and images to analyze your results.

Conclusion

With all the resources above, you’re sure to find the perfect software to survey your website visitors and fine-tune your strategy to meet their needs.