What Survey Questions Should I Ask My Attendees After a Webinar?

How To Send The Right Survey Questions After You Host A Webinar

Presenting a webinar and other virtual events can require an investment of time and resources if you want to deliver an effective event for your company. As more organizations turn to virtual events and online seminars to help work with stakeholders and engage their customers, they must know how to get survey feedback from event attendees to ensure future events are a success. 

You have to ensure the webinar goes off without a hitch by using the most reliable technology to enhance the experience of your attendees and provide as many networking opportunities as possible while the event is live.

You likely spend a lot of time working on pre-event marketing activities to drive enrollment, but are you putting the same time and effort into your follow-up activities? 

The truth is that many event planners and companies overlook the importance of post-event survey questions, which means they are missing out. You can ask the right questions after a conference to learn takeaways about what your audience enjoyed during your live event, and how you can improve your next webinar.  

Photo by Lukas

Let’s take a look at some post-webinar survey questions that you can ask to gain valuable feedback in order to help you plan future events today!

1. Learn More About Your Target Audience

An online survey sent after a webinar allows you to obtain more information about your target audiences, such as their likes, dislikes, and reasons for attending your webinar. You can use this information to plan future events and address problem areas to make your next webinar a huge success. 

This is an especially important benefit since you do not meet your target audience in person when your company hosts a virtual event or webinar. Sending a survey or questionnaire to attendees after your live event also allows you to gain insight into the demographics that form your target audience.

2. Specific Questions Get You Specific Answers

Your audience is busy, so if you want to gain valuable insight from survey responses then you need to ask specific questions of your audience. Not only will targeted post-webinar survey questions help you understand the needs of your audience, they will also improve response rates since your audience will know that they are being asked concise questions instead of general ones. 

Far too many webinar hosts send generic feedback emails that ask for feedback, but not feedback about specific topics. Be sure to ask specific questions to understand attendee satisfaction, and ask important questions like what parts of the virtual event they liked the least so you can improve on future events. 

3. Incentivize Filling Out the Survey

As we mentioned before, your audience is busy and might not have time to fill out your feedback survey. If you want to improve your response rates then you will need to find a way to encourage them to fill out the survey in order to gain more attendee feedback. 

By offering prizes and rewards such as gift cards and discounts on future webinar registration fees, you provide a motivational factor that increases the percentage of attendees that complete the survey. You also build your client list while acquiring the information you need to improve the quality of your webinars.

4. Builds Trust

Asking for attendee feedback demonstrates to your audience that you respect their input, and this can help you build their trust since they know their ideas matter to you. 

Knowing you value the feedback of attendees can help you build more trust between you and your target audience. A request for feedback tells your target audience that you trust them enough to give them a say in how future webinars should go.

5. Improve Future Presentations

There are many benefits to sending post-webinar survey questions, but perhaps the greatest benefit of asking for feedback from the attendees of your last webinar is to use the feedback to improve the next webinar presentation. 

You can learn about what attendees think of the delivery of content, your public speaking skills, and the relevance of the content. This information is valuable as you look for ways to improve pre-event marketing and find other ways to improve attendee satisfaction during your next webinar. 

How to Create a Webinar Survey

The goal of sending out a survey that contains questions for attendees to answer is to motivate as many attendees as possible to take the time to complete the survey. 

You can increase the number of returned surveys when you follow a few helpful tips to ensure you receive feedback from as many attendees as possible and improve your response rates. 

1. Keep It Short

The longer the survey, the less likely an attendee takes the time to complete it. Your goal should be to present quality questions, rather than focusing on the number of questions listed on the survey. 

Before you send out the survey, ask someone you trust to review it to determine whether you have overloaded your webinar attendees with questions.

2. Limit Answer Options

Since you ask close-ended questions, you should limit the number of possible answers. In addition to limiting answers, avoid vague answer options that confuse your target audience. Multiple-choice questions are a good way to gather useful information, but you may need to limit the number of answers respondents can submit to ensure you don’t get conflicting answers. 

Five answer options should be the limit for each question you ask of attendees. However, not every question deserves five answer options. You might have a few questions that require only a yes or no answer.

3. Easy Questions First

Speaking of yes and no answers, questions that offer just two options should lead off your survey. For example, you can start with the question, “Was the audio clear during the presentation?” Another example of a two-option answer question is asking a question that requires either a true or false answer.

What Questions Should You Ask After an Online Event?

Presenting a webinar involves completing several tasks, from promoting the online event on social media to researching the topic you have chosen to discuss. After presenting the webinar, you should ask questions for your attendees to answer by sending them a survey. 

Although you have numerous options for questions, including the following five questions will help you obtain the feedback you need for presenting future webinars.

Photo by Christina Morillo

1. What Part of the Webinar Appealed to You the Most?

With five answer options, you should receive feedback that lets you know what to keep and what to remove from your next webinar. 

Rank the responses by assigning a value from one to five, with one representing the least favorite part of the webinar. Answer options for a closed-ended question can include visuals, content, and speaking style.

2. What Topics Should I Discuss at Future Webinars?

This is the one question you can create to be either close-ended or open-ended. You can choose five of the topics you want to present for future webinars or allow the attendees to write down an answer to an open-ended question.

The one downfall of asking an open-ended question is that it might receive more than a dozen different responses.

3. How Did You Learn About This Event?

This question is all about gaining insight into your marketing strategy. If the predominant answer is “From my Facebook page,” then you understand you need to promote your next event heavily on Facebook. Maybe the most frequent answer is “From a professional colleague” or “By reading my blog.”

4. Do You Consider the Platform to Be User-Friendly?

A critical part of pulling off a successful webinar is to use a platform that is easy for attendees to navigate. You can discover whether the login page presented an issue or if the presentation had a few glitches that negatively impacted the quality of the audio.

5. How Do You Rate the Performance of the Speaker?

Although this question produces specific feedback, you should provide the attendees of your webinar with the opportunity to elaborate on the answer. You can add a section at the end of the survey for respondents to discuss one or more answers in detail.

Photo by Vanessa Garcia

Gain Valuable Feedback From Your Audience To Improve Your Next Online Event

You put a lot of time and energy into producing a great webinar and online event, and you can't underestimate the value of information from your audience. 

The more they tell you how things are going and what needs improvement for future events, take their feedback seriously so that next time around everything will be even better!

Be sure to look for a webinar platform that provides you with different types of surveys to send out post-webinar survey questions to your attendees. If your webinar platform does not support survey questions, you will need to use a third-party tool like Survey Monkey or another free tool. 

Feel free to reach out to our experts today with any questions about how to plan and produce a great webinar or online event today!