A Small Business advantage in running surveys is that you as the survey creator are usually already intimitately knowledgeable about the likes and dislikes of your customer base. Take advantage of your intuition and educated guesses to craft short, pertinent questions that are founded on good relationship assumptions.  

Contrast your advantage to that of a manager at a large business organization. It is very common for the survey creator in a big outfit to have had little or no interaction with the customers and is therefore forced to ask a lot of tangential and orientation questions before being able to ask the real questions. This is why the very format and opening questions in surveys emanating from big corporation often come across as disconnected to the customer.

As a Small Business survey creator, you can conduct surveys that are much shorter in time and length and much smaller in distribution size. You can spot intuitively which questions will have a good response rate and which ones will not. So stop asking those questions for which answers you already have a good grasp of and focus on being nimble and fast and frequent.