By Guest . Posted on September 22, 2024What Is a Webinar Feedback Survey and How to Develop Your Own.
Webinars have become an essential tool for many businesses. Along with other remote working tools like virtual contact center software, they saw a surge in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift to remote working, they remain just as widely used today.
As webinars become more of a go-to tool for businesses, it’s important to make sure your webinar is meeting the needs and expectations of the participants on the other side of the screen. One of the most effective ways to do this is through a webinar feedback survey.
This article will explore what a webinar feedback survey is, why it is important, and how to develop your own.
What Is a Webinar Feedback Survey?
A webinar feedback survey is a questionnaire that is designed to gain valuable, actionable feedback from your webinar attendees about their experience.
This feedback may cover things like the quality of the content and the effectiveness of the presenter, to more specific aspects like technical difficulties. It can also give you an idea of how generally satisfied the respondents were. The essential purpose of a webinar feedback survey is to understand what is working well and what needs improvement.
- Understanding Attendee Satisfaction: Perhaps the core reason for doing a feedback survey is to understand the reception of your webinar. You want to know whether your webinar met the expectations of attendees and whether they found the experience valuable on the whole.All the more so if you run a webinar marketing agency, intent on generating and nurturing more high-quality leads.
- Identifying Improvement Areas: Your feedback survey will give attendees the opportunity to provide constructive criticism on any areas they think you could have done better. It could be things like content clarity, your presentation style, or any technical niggles that impacted their experience.
- Improving Future Webinars: Once you have feedback from attendees, you can better understand exactly what they are looking for and shape your future webinars to meet their expectations. With this information, you can also update relevant documents like your brand guidelines, style guide, or Standard Operating Procedures to guarantee every future webinar is in line with those standards.
- Measuring Success: Webinars are often used as a sales or marketing tool. Whether your objective is product demos, networking, or knowledge-sharing, you want to know that your webinars are getting the right results. By using surveys to measure the effectiveness of your webinars you can get a better idea of return on investment (ROI).
- Building Engagement: When you ask your attendees for their feedback, they feel more valued and engaged in the process. In return, they’re more likely to take part in future events you hold.
- Knowing Your Audience: By including questions about the demographics of your audience in your feedback survey, you can get a better idea of the sort of people who are attending.
These insights allow you to better tailor your content to your audience. For example, you might notice that most of your participants are calling in from an 805 area code. You could then use that information to evolve your future webinars using region-specific content, references, and examples that might better relate to the local audience.
Likewise, when you collect information on age ranges, professional backgrounds, and interests, you can better customize your webinars to address the specific needs and preferences of your audience.
Developing Your Own Webinar Feedback Survey
If you want to create a webinar feedback survey that gives you valuable and actionable insights, you need to get a bit deeper than just asking “how did you find our webinar today?”.
Let’s take a look at the steps to take to build your survey and how best to analyze the data to extract meaningful insights.
Step 1: Define the Objectives
Before getting started with your survey, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you are hoping to achieve. Some common objectives of webinar feedback surveys might include:
- Determining Overall Satisfaction: You could use your survey to find out how satisfied your audience was with their experience overall. This will let you know if your webinar matched their expectations and how likely they are to attend future events. You may want to ask how they rate their overall experience or whether they would recommend the webinar to a friend.
- Evaluating Content Quality: While you might think of the content you’ve put together as high quality, you need to be sure that your audience also perceives it that way. You can use your survey to ask questions specifically about the content you delivered and measure how informative, relevant, and engaging it was for attendees.
- Measuring Presenter Effectiveness: Just as important as the content you present is how well you communicate it. Feedback surveys can be used to evaluate how well the presenters put across their content. You can ask questions relating to the presenters’ general communication skills in general, how good their knowledge was on the subject, how involved they were in addressing the audience, and how well they responded to questions.
- Identifying Technical Issues: There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to participate in a webinar and technical glitches getting in the way. Whether it’s connectivity issues, audio lag, or poor video quality, these sorts of problems can all have a big impact on how much your attendees are able to enjoy your webinar. You can use your feedback survey to check how smoothly things went for your attendees from a technical perspective and identify any issues you need to address. To ensure a seamless experience next time you host a webinar, ensure you’re using the best conference call service available.
- Gathering Suggestions for Future Topics: Rather than trying to guess what your audience is interested in, you can use feedback surveys to ask them directly. Reach out to your attendees for suggestions on future topics they’d like to see covered.
That way, you will already have an engaged audience ready for your next event. For example, if you’ve recently hosted a webinar on the benefits of cloud computing, your attendees might ask you to follow up with more detailed coverage of the topic “What is cloud modernization?”
Step 2: Choose the Right Survey Tools
When it comes to creating and distributing your survey and analyzing the feedback you collect, using the right tools can make the whole process a lot easier.
If you prefer not to create a survey from the ground up, there are several platforms that provide customizable survey templates, such as SurveyMonkey and Typeform. You can also build your survey in a shareable file like Google Forms.
To get even more out of your survey, consider using advanced technologies like Custom AI or GPT AI. These tools can help you to to write focussed questions, structure your survey, and even offer interactive features to take your survey to the next level.
For example, you could integrate AI ChatBots or AI Agents that turn your survey into a two-way conversation rather than just asking your audience to fill out a form. These ChatBots can offer friendly assistance to make the survey more user-friendly and even be prompted to probe for more detail on certain areas of the survey based on respondents’ answers.
Step 3: Design the Survey Questions
How you design your survey shouldn’t be an afterthought – it can be just as important as the questions you include. To make sure your survey is both user-friendly and leads to meaningful feedback, consider the following pointers:
- Keep It Simple: Your audience should be able to immediately understand what you are asking without needing to decipher your questions. Avoid lengthy questions, use clear and concise language that can be easily understood, and get straight to the point.
- Use a Mix of Question Types: Ideally, you want to be able to collect a good balance of quantitative and qualitative data, so include a variety of question types appropriate to what you are asking.
You could start with a simple yes/no question – for instance, “Will you use any of the branding strategies discussed in the future?”. Then, you might ask your audience to rate their overall satisfaction on a scale from 1-5. After that, you could include multiple choice answers for future topics they’d like to see covered. Other questions, such as improvements they think you could make, would be better suited to open-ended, optional, free-text questions towards the end of the survey.
- Be Specific: To make sure your feedback is meaningful, don’t be too vague. “How informative was the content covered in the webinar” and “How well did the presenter communicate the content” will give you more useful feedback than just asking “How did you find our content today?”
- Avoid Leading Questions: A question should never lead a respondent toward a given answer. Here are some example questions written in a neutral tone to give you an idea:
“How would you rate the overall quality of the webinar?”
“How effective was the presenter in delivering the material?”
“Did you face any kind of technical issue when joining/using the Webinar?”
Step 4: Test the Survey
After you’ve put the survey together, test it for flow issues and technical glitches before hitting the send button. It’s always preferable to run a pilot with some internal respondents before distributing the survey more widely.
Step 5: Distribute the Survey
Once you have tested your survey and you are happy with it, it’s time to distribute it to your webinar attendees. You can do this with a follow-up email or build it into the webinar platform itself.
Just remember, timing is everything. If you wait too long to solicit feedback, your registrants might forget important details or lose interest altogether. So make sure to distribute your survey promptly while your webinar is still fresh in their minds.
Step 6: Analyze the Feedback
Collecting feedback is only worth your time if you then turn it into something that you can act on. Once you’re happy you’ve gathered enough data to give meaningful results, you need to analyze the responses and look for any patterns or trends. Look for recurring themes like common issues reported or frequently mentioned areas that need improvement.
Trying to manually analyze all your feedback data can be a time-consuming and overwhelming task. So, leverage technology, whether it is with your survey tools or using analytics with AI, to simplify this process for you.
These tools can do the majority of the legwork for you, quickly analyzing and categorizing vast amounts of data at the click of a button. Additionally, you might want to think about using B2B intelligence platforms, such as competitors to ZoomInfo, to add more depth and detail to your analysis.
Step 7: Make Improvements
Use the feedback that you analyzed to determine ways you could improve future webinars. It might be that you want to update content, tweak the presentation style, or include new topics based on what your participants have suggested. You also need to make sure that any technical issues that your feedback has pointed to are resolved straight away.
For example, if your attendees raised the issue that the text was hard to read over images and that charts blended into the background, you could easily fix this by using a transparent image in your subsequent presentations.
Step 8: Communicate the Results
Assure your respondents that their feedback has been taken seriously and appreciated by feeding back what you’ve done with it. This can be done through targeted follow-up emails or a quick recap of the survey results and actions in your next webinar session.
Consider how any new changes will impact future sessions, too. For example, if international attendees’ feedback showed that they struggled to access the webinar, let them know that you’ll be solving this by using a different platform or implementing a rotating proxy, or residential proxies for future events. This shows you’ve actioned their feedback and re-engaged attendees you may otherwise lose.
Leveraging Advanced Technologies
Online platforms and tools can make the process of creating and distributing your feedback surveys easier, but you can also tap into advanced AI technologies that can make your surveys even more effective.
AI tools don’t just help to write your survey questions, you can also use them to automate various aspects of the survey process, dig deeper into insights, and make the whole survey experience more engaging for participants. Here’s how you could use AI to help with creating your webinar feedback survey:
Custom AI
Custom AI can be used for automating sending the survey and reminders, conducting an analysis of open comments to identify themes that appear multiple times, automatically putting together a feedback report for presenters, and identifying the next webinars to conduct based on the interests of participants.
GPT AI
AI ChatBots fueled by GPT AI are capable of leading participants through the process of taking a survey and responding to their questions in real time. Text feedback analysis with GPT AI can extract meaningful insights and conduct a sentiment analysis of the text feedback. AI Agents can also summarize overall feedback and give actionable recommendations.
Final Thoughts on Improving Your Future Webinars Through Feedback Surveys
When you’re putting the time and resources into hosting webinars, you want to be sure that your attendees are enjoying them and finding them valuable. Webinar feedback surveys can lift the lid on your participant experiences, helping you to identify areas you can improve on, and ultimately make your future webinars even better.
