How to set up a customer survey using Google Forms

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If your desire is to sell more products, it’s not just good enough having a great product, you also need great copywriting to communicate the benefits and value of what you offer. Understanding your customer through deep research is the key to writing great copy. In this tutorial you’ll find out how to create a survey to send to your customers to get “voice of customer” data for the most impactful copy you can write.

How to set up a customer survey using Google Forms

You probably already know the secret to writing any winning copy is to have done your research. Sure, you can have a fair stab at what you think your customers need or want, but there’s nothing quite like using your customers own words to tap into their psyche to help them make the decision to buy your products.

So how do you capture the voice of your customer, or even do basic research?  Well, I have a blog post which gives you a little more information on the various ways to do this here: 

How to use market research and voice of customer data to your advantage

...but in this tutorial I’m showing you how to set up a survey using Google Forms so you can ask them directly.

You can watch the video below, or scroll down to see a step by step guide. Let’s go!

7 easy steps to set up your survey with a google form 

STEP 1: Hopefully you use Google regularly and already have a gmail account or a GSuite account. Either way you should see your avatar in the top right screen of your Chrome browser (you are using Chrome, right?).

Click the little grid image next to your avatar to open the apps options, then scroll down the list and look for the purple image of Google Forms and click the icon. Once you’re in the Forms section, click the + button to Start a New Form. 

STEP 2: Brand your form by selecting your choice of colours from the colour palette icon in the top right navigation bar. You can also add a branded image to the header in this section.

STEP 3: Name your form and then add your questions to the form.  

Use the drop down on the right to choose which type of question you want to use. 

You can also select a variety of other options for the form like adding a title or a new section – select these from the icons on the right hand side of the questions box.

Sections create “pages” when your customer is filling in the form so they’ll need to submit their answers for each section as they go.

At the end of the form you may like to add a thank you message and/or your logo. You can do this by selecting the “image” option from the questions area. I used an image made in Canva (500 x 200) for my footer on the Google Form.

STEP 4: Once you’re happy with the content, you can then preview using the “eye” icon in the top right navigation bar to check how it looks from your customers point of view.

STEP 5: Now in the Settings you need to select a few things.

Check the box “collect email addresses” if you want to be able to contact your customers again as this puts a compulsory email field in the survey. You can then also check the box below to allow your respondents to get a copy of what they entered. If you want your survey to be anonymous, then uncheck these fields. 

Uncheck “restrict to users…” so that anyone with the link can fill out the form. This is an issue many people encounter when sharing a Google Form they send it out but then no-one can fill it in because it’s restricting who can use it.

If you’d like your customers to be able to return to the survey and change their answers, make sure you check “edit after submit”. 

The other tabs are self explanatory, so you can see how you can use a Google Form for a quiz with assigned points etc.

STEP 6: If you’d like your customers responses to be added to a google sheet, you need to go to the top of the survey and toggle from Questions to Responses. 

Click the green Google Sheet icon to either create a new spreadsheet with the answers (recommended) or to select a current spreadsheet you already have in your Drive (this can be useful if you have several surveys of the same type that you use for different purposes eg. your email list, your FB audience etc the answers will be collated in the same spreadsheet but you’ll be able to see where they came from).

STEP 7: The final step is to share your survey. You’ll need to press the “send” button in the top right to choose to either directly send to some, or get a link that you can send out in a mass email to your subscribers or share on social media.  There’s also the option to embed the form on your website if you prefer by using the code supplied. 

Keep your Drive organised

And there you have it.  A simple and free way to survey your customers, subscribers and audience, using a customisable Google Form. My advice is to make sure you’ve organised your form and response sheet (if you chose to use one in Step 6) by adding them to an appropriate folder in your Drive. If you need to see how to better organise your Google Drive, see this post here: How to Organise your Google Drive

If you have any questions about using Google Forms or your Google Drive, please feel free to drop me a message using the contact form here.