If you are in the process of creating a personal financial survey for your respondents, you will have to tread very carefully. This is wafer-thin ice that you are walking on. The golden rule is to remember that not all of your respondents are going to be completely comfortable disclosing their financial preferences, budget, or even their annual income. Therefore, avoid making the mistakes that are mentioned in this blog. Let's discuss them right away:

1. Not Focusing On Closed-Ended Questions

When it comes to collecting financial data from your respondents, the questions have to be easy to understand. The data should be very simple and comprehensible. You should be able to capture it easily and analyze it with speed. This is where closed-ended questions come into the picture. Close-ended questions always invite objective and conclusive answers. The biggest benefit of such queries is that the data that you are able to derive can be presented in various easily intelligible formats such as percentages, graphs, pie charts, curves, statistics, and any other form that you prefer.

2. Let's Keep The Survey Questions Neutral

Always keep your questions neutral. You don't want to lead your respondents to give a particular answer or something that you are deliberately looking out for. The question should not convey an opinion under any circumstances. The idea is to keep the tone of the questionnaire very objective so that you can extract the most honest answers from your respondents. It also necessitates that you include options such as "not interested", "not applicable", "doesn't matter", and "strongly disagree" in the questionnaire so that your respondents can refute a claim easily. You can then add different weightage to every option and calculate the score more efficiently.

3. The Incessant Need To Ask Too Many Things

This is something that you will have to avoid. Remember that personal finance is a very crucial matter. Not each one of your respondents is going to be completely comfortable disclosing financial information. The common culprit in your survey research strategies is when you create confusion among your respondents with too many questions that are a little too time-consuming to answer. You should have very clear and sorted options and make sure that the question is highly objective. Do not persuade your prospects beyond a level to answer a particular question. Keep them around 10 or 15 questions initially. Anything more than that is going to be redundant and will come across as a little too prying.

4. Follow-Up Is Also Important

Entrepreneurs don't understand the importance of a follow-up financial survey. Drop in a small questionnaire for your respondents. If they enjoyed your previous survey, they will enjoy the follow-up questionnaire even more. This also helps you assess the impact that your initial survey has had on your respondents.

Conclusion

The survey has to be helpful to your customers and prospects. It must also be able to extract useful information that can be put into action without a lot of processing. If you haven't come up with a survey strategy yet, it is time to do that without making these mistakes.