Imagine being asked to tell your name, department, floor, work role, and manager’s name every day you enter the office premises. You’d be annoyed because your company’s ID card should be sufficient. Isn’t it? Likewise, if your research asks your users for their demographic information in every instance of a consumer insights survey, the audience might ghost the forms. Increasingly so with time.

Hence, keep demographic data compartmentalized from your studies. Run a profiling survey to record your users’ comprehensive profiles at the right time—only once in many months. Let’s help you with some best practices to follow for demographic questions.

Best Practices to Follow While Demographic Data Collection

1. Ask on the Right Occasion

Once a new respondent enrolls in your survey panel, you first send them a welcome email. That’s when you should embed a profile survey form or link. This helps you to segment your users properly and send them apt surveys based on their age, location, gender, education, and product preferences.

If your survey needs data that might change over a few months or a year, like marital status, family size, latest education, or job profile—which often change for so many reasons—you can request your users to review and update the data yearly.

Sometimes, your users might skip a few fields in their profile for certain reasons. You can send them reminders to fix the missing values every few months. Limiting such requests to once or maybe twice annually is a great practice.

2. Inform Them of the Pitfalls of an Incomplete Profile

An incomplete profile simply means wrong surveys for the respondents. And wrong surveys end with time waste, survey abandonment, and skewed product reviews. But these are the consequences usually a brand suffers.

So, remind your users of the disadvantages they invite with incomplete data. Because of wrong or missing profile data, users often receive surveys they have no reason to fill out. For instance, if the country or city is not mentioned, your user staying in a beach-side town might get a survey from a municipal liaison committee from New York for suggestions to improve public transport. This kind of survey is a sheer annoyance to the users not related to the region.

Moreover, they lose time scanning unnecessary emails and lose rewards from paid survey sites in India, the US, and other countries. And rewards are the main reason for a user to fill out the survey, right?

3. Keep Demographic Questions Short and Comprehensive

Allow your users to breathe through the profiling survey. Yes, a long and exhaustive survey of user data is most effective for later when you send them the actual consumer insights survey, customer satisfaction research, and product feedback survey. But a long profile form is not impactful for unseasoned users.

Imagine your profiling survey as a glimpse of your actual market research forms. So, an epic demographic collection can turn them away before they actually start with your studies.

Keep profiling surveys to questions with only radio button options to make it fast. Yet keep others as an option with a text box in sensitive questions where users think twice before revealing their gender, political leaning, religious sentiments, and such areas.

It is better to keep the profiling questions between 15-20. If a product survey needs more data beyond the existing records, you can divide the online form into 2 sections with profile and product questions segregated. Knowing how long is too long for an online survey leads to a good response rate.

4. Engage Them with the Profiling Questions

What and where is the fun with profiling questions, you ask? It’s simply boring demographics. Nope. This is where you get creative to awe your new users.

Ask them fun questions. Or questions that engage them, make them feel pampered. For example, questions about hobbies, entertainment preferences, sports, movies, music, food, travel, and achievements engage users.

Since a few of these data fields might not always be useful, you can keep the questions simple and quick with multiple-choice answers. However, limit the questions to 2-4 if your form has 20 questions. This neither annoys a user nor projects you as salesy and business-minded.

5. Allow Them to Skip Answers

Let your users choose not to answer. But don’t make the questions optional for these. Nearly 50% of the questions in your demographic profile stand to be sensitive. So, add “prefer not to answer” and “other” with an optional text box for such questions.

These options won’t load your database with missing and null values and still give you a way to bifurcate such users. Such choices make users comfortable answering personal questions and develop their confidence in your surveys.

Also, know the best questions to ask your customers for acing market research.

Bonus: Cite the Reasons for Collecting Personal Details

Like any process or industry that handles private data, you should reveal the purpose of collecting demographic data to your users. It is their right to know how you’re going to use their information and when and where.

You should also reveal any third party involved in between that would handle your users’ data in any capacity. For instance, if you’re planning to hire an analytics company to generate results or a third party to generate survey forms, you must name them.

It’s also a good practice to circulate your data-sharing policy as a link to your users and collect consent that they’ve read all the terms and conditions before submitting the form.

Do You Struggle with Demographic Data Collection?

Demographic data collection is an unsavory but fulfilling process. It shapes your panelists’ profiles and customer database. Only with the right segmentation can you conduct fruitful market research, or else your efforts might fall flat. But don’t fret when you have partners like Opinionest, one of the best online survey sites in the market.

We work with several clients in all industries for years. Should you have needs to consult a team of experts, you can initiate a discussion here.