Over the years, in working with thousands of clients, we at Sogolytics have come up with numerous tips to boost your survey response rate. I am sharing 7 of them with you right here!
1. Create awareness and buzz about the survey
Even before you send the survey out, take all possible opportunities to create a buzz about the upcoming survey. Whether it’s an all-hands meeting with employees or a newsletter to customers, let them know about the upcoming survey and why it’s important for you and for them.
2. Plan your survey and launch it at the right time
Just like everything else in life, planning your survey ahead of time will go a long way. It will help you focus on the right questions, the right group to target and give you ample time to create the buzz. Also, avoid launching a survey just before or after a major holiday, or early Monday or late Friday. Plan to send reminders to non-respondents.
3. Keep the survey short
Specially, if you’re reaching out to your customers, who are crunched for time, long surveys will scare them. Focus on just few topics and just ask relevant questions. If you have the demographic data of your customers, why ask again, simply use features like pre-population to make the survey experience fast.
4. Focus on the email subject line
Seemingly a minor thing, yet plays a critical role in increasing the email open rate and in-turn boosting the survey response rate. Think of ways of grabbing the reader’s attention quickly. Avoid using hype, all caps, or exclamation marks. Also avoid the words “help,” “reminder,” and “free.” Those equal “ignore.”
5. Craft email invitation carefully and keep it short
Keep your email invitation concise: state the purpose of the survey, why it’s important to participate, and the estimated time for completion. Depending on the survey, also include your privacy policy and reassurances regarding data security and anonymity (e.g., an employee engagement survey). Using anonymity itself has been shown time and time again to improve survey response rate.
6. Design your survey to attract and engage participants
I can’t emphasize enough, how important it is to get the look and feel of your survey right. A well crafted survey is a work of art and it needs to reflect that from the get go. Take care of the branding but also make sure that you’re using the right question type to engage your participants.
7. Offer meaningful incentives
I am not asking you to throw money away. Research shows that small incentives such as coupons are not very effective. Instead, offer to share the survey results and explain how the feedback will impact your organization’s decisions.
While we’d be happy to share more tips with you, hopefully this list will give you a great start in increasing your survey response rate!
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