Surveys are an extremely powerful market research tool. Why guess what your target audience wants if you can ask them?

This post describes a few proven, powerful yet cheap Survey tools that are waiting to be utilised.

If you are thinking “What is a Survey and why should I care?” please click here.

Free Surveys

Google Docs (Budget $0)
GoogleDocs Forms are perfect for Surveys that you do not expect a huge volume of responses and that are likely to be easily analyzed by a human being. All responses will be stored in a spreadsheet that will be hosted on GoogleDocs. In case you do need some advanced analysis you can always Download the Excel spreadsheet and create a Pivot Table, Charts etc.

LimeSurvey (Budget $0 – $50 depending on your skills)
LimeSurvey is one of my favourites. It is Open Source (therefore free) and most importantly – extremely powerful. The beauty of this Survey tool is that you can host it on your own server and go survey crazy without any limitations. Open Source also means to you that you can customize it in any way you want to match your business needs. (A contribution to the developers is always appreciated.) If you have not got the necessary skills to install it yourself, it should not cost you more than $50 to get it installed on your server.

Commercial Surveys (Hosted)

SurveyMonkey (Budget $0 – $200)
SurveyMonkey is a commercial Survey tool. Free version gives you up to 100 responses. Extremely easy to use.

surveygizmo.com (Budget $0 – $599)
Personally I have not used it, however they seem to have a very impressive list of features and competitive pricing. Free account gives you 250 responses per month. Plus Mailchimp clients can benefit from some additional perks and integration into their email marketing.

Zoomerang.com $0 – $599
In addition to the standard features they offer Salesforce CRM integration and access to an Online Panel of over 2mln people (opt-in I hope).

Surveys integrated into your Email Marketing

If you need Surveys to segment your target audience, smoothly integrate them into your email marketing strategy and create email mailings based on the answers you might want to see a list of email marketing service providers that offer Surveys.

What Survey tool are you using?