Wondering what your customers want? Or scrambling to ascertain the perfect activities for your employees?
The best way to get the answers is by just asking. Whether it’s to better your workplace, your customer experience, or even just conduct market research, asking the right audience the right questions can unveil a wealth of insights.
But, what if they don’t answer?
This question haunts many, so here are some ways in which you can prepare your survey to increase response rates and get the insights you need!
Start With the Invitation
The invitation can determine if participants will even open your survey, so start here.
Here are some things you can do:
- Target the right channels
If your audience is most active on email, send the invitation there. If you think you have a better chance of getting responses via social channels, you can post the survey link there. It all depends on what you understand about your audience.
It’s important to connect with your audience on their turf, making it easier for them to simply click and engage with an invitation. The lesser work (and clicks) it takes for your audience to participate, the more likely they are to do so. - Personalize communication
If you’re sending an email or reaching participants via SMS, be sure to personalize (especially if you have the data and the permission)! Simply mentioning the participants’ names can have an impact.
It makes them more likely to click on the link, just to see what this is about.
- Highlight the value proposition
What’s the value your survey is offering? For some, it might be guaranteed anonymity or absolute confidentiality, for others it might be a gift voucher or even a discount code. Whatever it is, be sure to highlight this in your invitation – it will help your audience participate more willingly.
- Time it right
A survey sent at 2 am will likely be ignored. To improve participation, you don’t just need to send the survey, but send it at the right time.
If you’re looking to understand how your customer support team performed, send it immediately after the interaction while the experience is still fresh. If it’s an annual survey, send it on the days your participants are most active (hint: avoid holidays, this is when most people are in no mood to be looking at their phone.)
8 Survey Tips to Improve Participation
You’ve got their attention, now what? To increase survey participation, you don’t just need people to click on the link and start you survey, you need to ensure they complete it.
Here are 8 ways in which you can not only increase survey participation, but also reduce survey abandonment.
- Be clear
One of the biggest turn-offs for participants is simply not being able to understand what is being asked. Stay as far away as you can from double-barreled questions to ensure it’s easy for participants to answer what is being asked.
For example, a rating question asking, “Did you love our amenities and the food?” might give some participants pause, because what if they loved the food, but not the amenities?
Instead, split it into two questions to make it easier for participants to answer honestly. - Keep it short
One of the best ways to help your participants complete the survey is to make sure they are on the survey for the least amount of time.
With every question you include, ask yourself, “is this really important?”
If your answer is anything along the lines of, “nah” simply skip the question and move on to the next.
- Ensure relevance
Imagine you’re running a pet food company and have a long survey with many sections. Some asking about dog food preferences, others about cat food, and still more about the various other pets people have.
Now, if you send this to all your customers, you’ll end up with a high abandonment rate. Why?
A customer is bound to have one pet or another, right? But they don’t usually have all of them! If you send our an extensive survey filled with asks for all pet owners, your participants are bound to get frustrated in sections that don’t pertain to them – and as a result, simply quit the survey mid-way, increasing abandonment.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, use skip logic! Ensure that participant that saying they have a dog, a cat, or another pet are only shown the relevant sections.
- Indicate progress
What makes you keep at a game, no matter how long it takes? Because it’s full of little wins, and you likely know how far until it’s over.
Indicating progress can make a slightly long survey feel less daunting as participants can estimate just how much more they have to answer!
- Use multiple question types
Having the same question type over and over again can get a little boring. As a consequence, it can leave participants disinterested, providing incorrect answers, or perhaps just opting out of the survey altogether.
By using different question types, you can make it easier for participants to feel more engaged.
- Include interactive questions
A great way to connect with your participants is by including their answers in the survey questions. It allows for the survey to feel like a conversation!
You can use piping to do just this.
For example, you can ask participants, “What kind of destinations do you love best?” and provide the relevant options, such as: beaches, mountains, jungles, cities.
Based on whatever the participant selects, you can pipe their answer into a follow up question later in the survey, like so, “What do you love best about jungles?” (here, we’ve assumed the participant answered jungles).
By increasing interactive design, participants feel heard and are more likely to actively engage with the survey, giving you genuine responses!
- Schedule reminders
Sometimes, you can do everything right and the survey is still just ignored. It might be that the survey is buried under a pile of e-mails or just that other work came along and distracted your potential participants from, well, participating.
In such cases, setting up reminders to nudge responses can be a big help! Sogolytics allows you to set up automated reminders (even for anonymous surveys) to enhance your response rate!
- Optimize for mobiles/smartphones
All of this is of no use if you aren’t making it easy for your participants to engage with your survey. Since people tend to use their phones for most tasks, it’s reasonable to think that many might be accessing the survey from their phones as well.
If your survey isn’t optimized for mobiles, it might just increase participant frustration and negatively impact survey participation.
Online surveys can be a source of insights, especially when they’re done right. However, it’s not important to just increase your response rate, but rather, to increase authentic and candid responses.
After all, incorrect data is worse than no data at all. So, instead of just looking to enhance survey participation, look to also increase survey engagement. Engaging surveys capture participant attention and interest, and will elicit honest answers that reveal valuable insights!
