Surveys responses are a great way of collecting valuable marketing intelligence.
The only problem is that countless companies know this and send out surveys endlessly. Due to this, many recipients are ‘fatigued’ and no longer complete surveys.
But, you can break through the clutter! In this post I’m going to share with you some tips on how to achieve the highest possible response rates. I’ll also provide some tips about post-survey activities that are great for fostering ongoing engagement.
- Reward participants: Let’s start with the obvious, reward your participants. They have taken the time out of their day to help you with your business. Say thank you with a discount or other incentive.
- Set expectations: Tell people how long it will take to complete your survey. There is nothing worse than starting what you think is a two minute survey only to be confronted with a ‘never ending’ questionnaire.
- Grow your sample size: If you need as many responses as possible (and they don’t need to come from your existing client base) make it easy for participants to share the survey. Also remember to put it on your website, social media pages and promote it via email.
- Short and painless: Only ask participants for information that you actually intend to use for a specific purpose. If you can’t use the information collected by a particular question maybe it’s not worth asking.
- Explain why: Tell participants how you are going to use their information so they understand why it’s important. It’s also a good idea to include a link to your privacy policy.
- STRONG call to action: If your aim is to get recipients to fill in your survey you need to make this call to action very strong and enticing. You can do this by using action orientated words, images, layout, buttons, fonts and colours.
- Correct fields: Make sure that you use the correct field format for each question. For example use a date field for a date of birth, a text field for names and when you only want a participant to choose one option use radio buttons. This makes it very easy for participant to complete the survey and also preserves the accuracy and integrity of the data.
- Post survey updates: People like to know that their feedback had an impact and if you tell them what improvements resulted from their feedback they are much more likely to participate in your next survey as well.
- Breaking it down: Think about collecting information in stages. Realistically how much can you do in response to your findings? Collect some information starting with the most important, make improvements then collect more.
- Attention: By the time participants reach the end of a survey you generally have their complete attention. This is a good time to ask participants to tell a friend, subscribe to a new offering or check out your social media.
So there you have it. Follow these tips and you will set your survey up for a great response.
Do you have any great tips for getting people to respond to surveys? Let me know in the comments section below.
