How To Improve Survey Response Rates?

Author
Dropthought
Published on:
Fri Aug 04 2023
Categories
Customer Experience

A survey is one of the most effective and popular ways to get feedback from your customers, users, or anyone else who is interested in your product or service. Surveys can help you improve the quality of your product/service by identifying areas where improvements are needed and identifying what people like best about what you do.

But if you want users to take the time to complete your surveys, then the surveys must be interesting and easy to complete.

Mastering Feedback: Proven strategies to improve Survey Response Rates

Here are some top strategies that you can follow to improve survey response rates:-

1. Send survey invitations with a personalized message

Personalizing the survey invitations is effective in improving survey response rates. Address recipients by their names and consider tailoring the introduction based on their previous interactions with your organization.

2. Use incentives

Incentives are a great way to encourage people to give responses. They can be as simple as a thank you message, or they can be something more substantial like a gift card or discount on a product.

Incentives work best when they are targeted at the right audience, so make sure that your incentive is appropriate for your target person.

3. Send reminders before deadlines and follow up if they don't respond

Reminders are a great way to get the attention of the people who have not responded to the survey. Make sure that your reminder is clear and simple so that it doesn't confuse people, or else they may abandon the survey in frustration. If a person doesn't respond to your first reminder email, follow up with another one.

4. Give respondents the option of providing anonymous feedback

To ensure that your respondents feel comfortable while giving honest customer feedback with no risk of being identified, consider adding an option for "anonymous" or "confidential" responses at the end of each question. You could also make it clear in your survey instructions that all responses will be kept confidential and private unless otherwise specified by the participant.

5. Be Clear

This can be as simple as making sure that the questions are phrased in a way that makes sense for the survey taker and answers their questions. If people don't understand what's being asked of them, they won't respond at all.

6. Choose the right timing

Timing plays an important role in getting feedback and improving survey response rates. Consider your target audience's schedule and preferences when deciding when to send out survey invitations. Avoid time periods of holidays or times when people might be less likely to respond to surveys.

7. Be concise

Having a short survey is one of the best ways to improve survey response rates. The more concise your question is, the more likely people will be able to understand it and provide an answer.

Concise surveys also require less effort from respondents; they don't need to spend as much time reading through your survey or thinking about what they want to say in response. Also best to keep open ended questions to a minimum. As a general rule, open ended questions should not be more than 15% of the entire survey.

You will get higher survey response rates when you ask concise questions compared with longer ones.

8. Provide context

Providing context is one of the most important steps in your survey creation process, as it can help increase survey response rates. To provide context, you should:

  • Explain the purpose of your survey. If possible, include a brief overview of what it will be used for and why it's relevant to your target audience.
  • Give special instructions if necessary (for example, "Please only answer questions that apply to you"). This will help ensure that respondents are completing the survey accurately by understanding what information is needed from them.

9. The survey should be mobile-friendly

To improve survey response rates, make sure the survey is mobile-friendly with a responsive design that adapts to various screen sizes. By making it easy for respondents to complete the survey on their smartphones or tablets, you increase the potential respondent pool and improve overall survey response rates.

Conclusion

Improving survey response rates requires a combination of thoughtful planning, concise and relevant questions, personalized invitations, etc. By optimizing the survey experience for respondents and showing the value of their feedback, you can develop higher customer engagement and can improve survey response rates.

If you are looking to measure and optimize personalized customer experience, then Dropthought can certainly help!

Dropthought is a user-friendly, omnichannel, and real-time customer experience management platform. We empower companies in different verticals to create delightful experiences for customers across their journey. Get the detailed analysis and insights from data to exactly know what your customers think and what actions you need to take to delight them.

With a dedicated customer success team, we would ensure that you are optimizing your Customer Experience programs and strategies to create great experiences!

Learn more by simply clicking here.