FluidSurveys.com survey software review

If you ask experts what the secret to a good marketing strategy is, it’s very likely that one of the answers would be to ensure that all of your product and service offerings are based on solid market research. Every time you come up with a new variant or a new line extension, and even as you craft your promotional and advertising strategies, you should ensure that all your actions are based on the right market research tools. Market research is important because you have to think of your consumers first and foremost as you craft your strategies. You need to know what works for them and what strategies they will respond to. This is where surveys come in. Conducting a survey can help you get to know your target consumers better, and this can subsequently help you come up with the right kind of marketing strategy.

Here is the place where online survey sites like FluidSurveys step in. FluidSurveys is a do-it-yourself online survey tool that is meant to allow customers from around the world to create their own surveys, collect data from respondents, and analyze results.

To sign up for FluidSurveys only takes a minute. You just need to enter a few details and you are good to go.

A confirmation email follows shortly and you are required to click on a link in the email to activate your account.

We will begin the work on our first survey immediately. To get started, you need to enter the survey name and the default language. You also have the possibility to import a survey from SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang, but we will test that some other time.

After entering the required information, you are redirected to the survey editor. I must say that it looks really nice and slick. A truly modern drag and drop survey editor.

There are 21 question types available. 11 basic questions:

• Section heading
• Yes/No
• Text Response
• Checkbox
• Multiple choice
• Dropdown
• Date/Time
• Text Response Grid
• Multiple choice grid
• Dropdown grid
• Slider

10 advanced questions:

• Score display
• Checkbox grid
• Natrix
• Drill down
• 3D Matrix
• Semantic differential
• File upload
• Net promoter
• Hidden field
• Timer

We will start adding questions to our survey. Here is how the question editor looks like:

There are lots of options that can be configured for each question type. For example, for multiple choice questions you can set:

• Each choice can be exclusive, select all, add text response, static choice
• For each choice you can specify a score
• Display mode (vertical or horizontal)
• How many columns to use when the question choices are displayed
• Display 2 questions side by side (instead of one beneath the other)
• Append to previous question.
• Specify the width of the question display area
• Make question mandatory
• Randomize choices
• Alphabetize choices
• Show number of selected options

There are a number of settings here that we did not find on other survey sites and we liked them very much (and to name only 2 – the exclusive / select all / static choice or the append to previous question that is particularly interesting if you would like to add a comment field to the previous question).

Here is how the survey editor looks after we have added our questions:

Now it’s time to take a look at the design of our survey page. The preview of our survey looks like this:

Very clean, nice looking survey theme. If you are not satisfied with it, you are free to choose from 13 predefined survey themes or customize your own by changing the colors, fonts, etc of all page elements.

Because we are now ready, we will hit the “Publish” button to see our deployment options.

As you can see, the options are:

• Use an online url
• Embed the survey into an existing web page
• Send email invitations
• Use a survey panel to gather responses quickly
• Create a popup to display the survey on your site
• Create a bar code for mobile devices to quickly get to the survey
• Offline mode
• Share on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

There are also a lot of additional settings that can be used to control the survey responses:

• Display options
• Privacy and security
• Quotas and deadlines
• Access restrictions
• Redirection
• Respondent reports
• Other options
• Change page texts and messages

Some of these options are available for free, some of them are only available for advanced paid subscriptions.

The survey is now live and here is the survey url:
http://fluidsurveys.com/surveys/survey-reviews/survey-reviews-net-customer-satisfaction-survey/

After adding several test responses to our survey, it’s time to move to the reporting section of FluidSurveys. Here is how the first page of the section looks like:

There are several areas in the reporting section:

• Statistics
• Reports
• Responses
• Export

The first (statistics) displays quick stats like number of responses, completion rate, responses per day chart, etc. The reports section allows you to create custom reports. We will need to see a summary report for our survey, so we will create one.

The report, we must say, looks stunning.

You have the options here to:

• Edit the report
• Share the report
• Export the report to Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF (these are not available to the free account however).
• Filter survey responses.

In the responses area of the reporting section you can see the list of individual responses, filter them, add / edit / delete / import responses.

We cannot conclude our review about FluidSurveys without mentioning some other great features available for paid accounts:

• Support for multi language surveys
• Piping
• Email Triggers
• Hidden Fields
• File Upload
• Multi user support

Things we liked about FluidSurveys:

• Modern drag and drop survey editor
• Lots of configuration options for each question type
• Nice, powerful reporting section

Things we did not like about FluidSurveys free online survey software:

• To tell you the truth, there are not too many things we did not like here. FluidSurveys is one of the best free online survey tools that we have reviewed so far.

For more details about online survey tools and survey software reviews, visit www.survey-reviews.net.