You have completed your feedback survey—a big milestone in your market research plan. The response to your study is good; glad you followed our tips to increase the product survey response rate. But the next challenge is to analyze survey data. And even market research experts sometimes fail to synthesize the data well in the lack of the right process.

Here is a quick guide on how to analyze survey data that includes wrangling data and segregating the useful numbers, reporting, and making decisions.

How to Analyze Survey Data?

Prerequisite: Map Research Goal Vs. Survey Questions

Map your survey questions with your market research goals before conducting the survey. This will help to correlate your results directly with the research goal. Now, use these steps to evaluate the data.

1. Analyze Quantitative Data

Tabular Analysis

The simplest way to analyze your resultant data is to tabulate it across a spreadsheet. Whether you use MS Excel, Google Sheets, or any niched reporting tool, several functions are available to examine data, find the results in percentages, and establish correlations in the raw data.

For quantitative data analysis, we suggest going for percentages rather than numbers in comparative calculations.

For instance, you conducted an offline event, your first ever, to introduce your new cosmetic line to your distributors with a turnaround of 150 participants. And one of your market research goals is to learn how well your event premises was organized. Here is sample data to synthesize your participants’ experience.

This analysis shows that most respondents complain about your event premises and arrangements. While individual shop owners have equally divided views, wholesale distributors have more negative experiences than retail distributors.

Also read 5 popular statistical survey analysis methods.[H2] 

2. Don’t Ignore any Hypothesis

An observation that might pass now as trivial could be your breakthrough to improve your product in the future. For instance, your cosmetics don’t include haircare products as of now. As your survey didn’t include any questions on this, only 1.2% of your distributors point it out in the section “anything else you’d like to add”. 1.2% might seem very small now, especially when the response is overwhelmingly positive.

But don’t ignore this number. This could be a huge profit-making business for your brand. Statista mentions a CAGR of 3.03% between 2023 and 2027.

So, jot down every corollary coming out of your data.

3. Analyze Patterns

Make a list of patterns you see in the data you’ve tabulated. Anything unexpected, repeated, or just weird? You might see something like none of your distributors from a particular region turned up. Is that strange? Are you losing a market? Or is it a result of some raised import-export charges or new taxes?

If anything is recurring over time in your analysis (for seasoned market research consultants), do make a note.

Chances of having patterns that don’t have proper reasons are possible too. You might like to follow up with a certain set of participants for more clarity in such cases. Or discuss it with your team members and get wider and more diverse opinions on your analogy. If nothing works, leave the corollary be and let time show its cause.

4. Analyze Qualitative Data

Responses to open-ended questions are gold mines for your business and market research. Here are some popular ways to analyze them:

Word Cloud

Convert your text-based answers using a word cloud and see what comes up prominently in the cloud. These are the words or phrases your responders used frequently. Word clouds allow you to set your preferred fonts, designs, and colors. You can even hide irrelevant words.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis helps you determine how your audience feels about your survey topic on a wider level. You understand their leaning toward positive, neutral, or negative sentiments. And you can focus on areas that demand your attention for enhancements.

Stay tuned to learn more about qualitative data analysis on our blog page soon.

Also read how to collect psychographic data of your users.

5. Visualize Data

Several tools exist that help you drill down into the data to reach the finer grains of the feedback. For instance, when you use a niched business intelligence tool to analyze the data tabulated above, you can learn which shop owners liked your event based on their areas and yearly revenue. All you need is to use more demographics to segregate the data. These are called filters.

For visual appeal, you can create graphs and charts. Such reports are not only easy to understand without analyzing a lot but are also good to present to the C-suite.

You can highlight data that cross the benchmark with either better or worse performance in your reports. Such markers help make better decisions and chalk out strategies that can handle negative scenarios or reap benefits from positive ones.

6. Interpret Hidden Insights

Your report only shows you what is available. For instance, none of your distributors from a tier-1 city joined the event. And hence there’s no data to analyze their feedback. And it didn’t come up in your report.

Reason? The city had a curfew during that week. Now this data isn’t available in your survey. This is where benchmarking can help. You can include a few granular-level parameters to compare your data before sending your survey.

7.     Make Decisions

You didn’t think a lot about premises before conducting the event because your focus was only on the product. But the poor feedback on your event reveals something terribly wrong with the arrangement, overshadowing the enthusiasm for the new product. You organized the event in the summer but missed maintaining a soothing temperature in the venue, causing the two hours event a painful chore.

This hidden insight comes out when you go down on the collected data to figures as mundane as opinions on the temperature setting.

The above corollary helps you better care of your venue arrangements in the next event.

How Opinionest Can Help You With Surveys

Now that you know the data analysis process and deriving hidden analogies, you must partner with a market research brand that can serve all your goals. We boast of having 13+ years of experience in the industry and having a panel with over 4 million panel members. If you don’t want to settle down for anything but one of the best online survey sites, contact us here

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