Improve Your Survey Response Rates

Why settle for biased survey results?

Use these tips to improve your response rates instead.

Ask the Right People

It helps to identify your target audience.  Why?

• You’ll be able to write better survey questions.
• You’ll be able to optimize your survey.
• You’ll be able to determine the most effective survey distribution channels.

KISS: Keep it Short and Sweet

Pay attention to the survey’s length.

Review the scope, focus on getting the insights that you need.  Ask the necessary questions and avoid survey fillers, simplify the design process.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Avoid respondent fatigue, a survey should last between 5-10 minutes.
• Try to keep open-ended questions to a minimum.
• Avoid complexity, write easy-to-comprehend questions.
• Make sure the survey’s flow makes sense to the respondent.

Get Creative

Motivating respondents is good way to increase survey response rates.

Here are a few things you can do:

• Branding: add your logo, colors, assets and your typography. This adds credibility to your survey; therefore, respondents are more likely to participate.
• Make it an interactive survey. When necessary, add multimedia components to your questions. Just keep the content relevant.
• Offer incentives as a way to thank respondents for their participation. They should spark interest, not sway or influence responses.

Get that Survey Invite Ready

The survey design is complete? It’s time to send out those invitations.

Wait, make sure that your survey is mobile-friendly and optimized for every device. Take a few minutes to test the survey out to ensure compatibility.

Are you ready for the invites? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Customize it: personalize the message, add a warm and friendly tone to it. Write a captivating subject line and, if possible, use branding.
• Get the point across: explain the purpose of the survey. If you are offering incentives, this would be a great spot to let respondents know. Also, be honest of survey lengths.

Follow Up

Some respondents might not able to take your survey right away, it is common to follow up with a few reminder emails. Keep it to a couple, include the survey link and an inviting message.

Show them how valuable their feedback is, another way to follow up is to share the survey results with the participants.  This is a great way to keep respondents in the loop and they will feel inspired to participate in your next survey.

These tips can help you to improve survey response rates, adopt the right strategies to collect useful data.

Do you have any other tips that you would like to share to improve survey response rates?