7 Tips to Increase Responses from Your Online Surveys

Conducting online surveys can be very beneficial for your business. You get to ask your customers how your service or product can improve. You can also ask your users about their pain points. This could be very helpful in developing your service or product. And this will also save a lot of your time and resources. You wont be assuming while developing as you will have solid data in hand.

But your data might not always be accurate. If very few people participate in your surveys, then you can’t assume their responses to represent what your whole customer-base feels about your product / services. The only way to develop meaningful insights from surveys is to ensure that maximum people participate in them.

Otherwise, you can never be really sure.

Here are seven points to improve the response rates of your surveys:

Always Have a Clear Goal

To make your online surveys effective, have a clear objective about why you are conducting them. Knowing your goal will help you build effective survey questions and identify your target customers for the survey. List out the actions that you will you take with the survey data. This information will be helpful in designing the survey questions.

If you don’t care about this step, you might just end up with a survey with inconclusive questions. Besides, this will definitely impact your users’ responses. Most will simply abandon it thinking that there’s really no direction to it.

Know Your Target Audience

Know who your target audience are before sending them your online surveys.

Who are they? What they do for living? What’s their education background like? What age groups do they belong to?… Such questions will help you segregate your email list properly. Just sending surveys in bulk emails will not get you proper response.

Ask Required Questions Only

Keep your online surveys streamlined. Don’t ask questions whose answers you will not use. For example, if your product / services will not need information about the customer’s age, sex or location – then don’t put such questions in your survey. Questions which are relevant to all your customers should be kept and hypothetical questions should be avoided.

Keep Your Surveys Short

Keep your online surveys short because people will not complete your survey if they seem endless. Short surveys have higher completion rate. Statistics have shown that surveys above 15 question are dropped out. If you have lot of questions then see how you can logically create follow-up surveys to your current survey.

Ask Short and Objective Questions

Keep your questions short. Longer questions may cause confusion or misunderstanding. Asking short questions with clear objective answers will help readers to answer quickly and easily. This trick will encourage customers to complete the surveys as there’s no ambiguity at any stage.

Include Open Ended Questions

Open ended questions will allow you to dig deeper into your customers minds as there will be a more detailed answer than Yes/No. Customers will be able to articulate in their own words and will find it simple to answer. Just objective questions (Or only Yes/No ones) might not feel enough. Perhaps, your customers too might be wanting to share more information with you.

Keep Your Surveys Simple

Questions should be easy and effortless to answer. Your readers will avoid complicated questions as they will have to waste time thinking about the answer. Questions should be easy to understand and easy to answer.

Bonus Tip

Incentives: Reward your customers for taking up the survey

Simple and user friendly design: Don’t clutter your surveys with useless graphics – keep the design simple and appealing

Catchy subject line of the email: Use subject lines that will encourage higher open rates (higher response rates will obviously follow)

personalized email survey: Try to customize certain elements of the email – this can be really helpful in making connections

Conclusion

Your customers give you the privilege of sharing their time with you by taking up your online surveys. Make sure that you don’t waste it and take full advantage. The points that I have outlined above will surely help you get better response rates from your survey

What tricks do you use to boost response rates? Do share in the comments below.