SurveyMonkey serves up online surveys

How often do you want to know what your customers think? Or how about your sales force, suppliers, or user groups members? The more you rely on the Web and e-mail to mediate interactions with these key groups the more useful you will find online surveys.

I just tried an interesting service that offers both paid for and free surveying called SurveyMonkey (see links below).

SurveyMonkey allows you to create questionnaires using any Web browser. The editing system uses a form that breaks the survey into parts that can be individually edited, removed and have logic added.

There are lots of question types supported including:

* Single answer (vertical, horizontal, or a menu).

* Choice of single answers from a menu or multiple answers (vertical or horizontal).

* Matrices with one or multiple answers per row (with or without a menu).

* Open ended questions on single or one or more lines with a prompt.

* Essay style.

* A constant sum.

* Date and or time.

You can also specify presentation elements of descriptive text, images, or spacers.

Logic in the sections allows you to conditionally jump to following sections depending on the choices made. This is great for surveys where the questioning needs to follow a path through independent sets of questions.

Once you’ve specified your survey you can deploy it. SurveyMonkey can create a link for you to send in your own e-mail messages (respondent’s identities are not tracked0 or it can create a link for your own Web site that will direct respondents to your survey (again respondent’s identities will not be tracked). Alternatively, you can send a link to an e-mail list managed by SurveyMonkey (in which case respondents are tracked).

You can also create pop-ups for your Web site that will either pop-up an invitation to take your survey when someone visits a specific page on your Web site or actually pop-up the survey form (neither allows identity tracking). 

After you turn your survey loose SurveyMonkey collects and analyzes the results for display and you can optionally download them.

SurveyMonkey is free for surveys of up to 10 questions and 100 people per survey while professional subscriptions, which also offer additional features, are $19.95 per month for up to 1,000 responses per month (additional responses are 5 cents each).

SurveyMonkey is extremely competitive as it is better featured and better priced than the alternatives.