Tips To Increase Survey Response Rate

At times, drawing in the anticipated survey response rate can be an arduous task. After all, who has ever heard of birds completing their songs? Have you? Considering how it’s difficult to usher in the desirable response, what if you end up getting nothing but mere peanuts in hand?

If you’re already investing a lot of efforts and getting no response in return, it all will be for nothing. Improving survey response is quite critical, owing to several reasons. To begin with, a better rate can bring you better brand coverage. And then, with completed surveys, the engagement rate can skyrocket as well. 

As per the experts, those who are getting responses even less than what they had hoped for can easily turn the table by a bit of profound research, thought, and care when it comes to understanding customer satisfaction best practices.

With just a bit of concentration, you can do so much more than expected. Having said that, here are some of the considerable tips that will make your response rate shot high.

Understand Your Customers:

Even before you begin the process, you must ensure that you have adequately comprehended the requirements and needs of your customers. Whether you’re shooting up emails to an irrelevant set of the audience or using wrong email addresses, the chances of getting responses will be zero.

It can be the first dent in your expectations. Surprising as it may turn out to be; apparently, even the high-staked organizations that spend thousands of dollars every year on email marketing have incorrect contact information.

Right from concentrating upon the customer data to understanding the behavior of your target audience, conduct profound research and know as much as you can about your consumers. Only then you can increase the chances of a good response rate.

Be Attentive Towards Design:

The design is an extensively important aspect of your survey form. Unless it’s not attractive enough, your users won’t be urged even to have a glance at it, let alone answering each of your questions patiently. A good design is quite crucial as it supports the entire intuitive flow of the form. 

Having said that, you need to add several elements or hire a professional designer to get it done. On the contrary, by using certain premium WordPress plugins, you can easily create your entire form, until you’re wary of what your users like and dislike.

By keeping your target group in mind, make an appealing and easy to use form. Keep the logical questionnaire and ensure that the readability is appropriate. If you wish, you can also add an image or a GIF to improvise the outlook.

Correct Inviting Text:

Language is one of the most crucial aspects of a survey email. If it’s not compelling enough, your users won’t be forced to fill up the form. So, there are certain things that should be kept in mind while writing the email content. 

To begin with, make sure that the language is on point and simple. Not every other user would be able to decode your difficult words and terms. And then, tell your customers why they’re receiving the email: “You are receiving this invitation because you recently subscribed to our newsletter or shopped from our site.” 

Let them know the purpose of the survey. For instance, “We request you to fill out the columns so that we can provide you with a better experience.” And then, let them know the exact time that they’ll have to invest in filling the form.

Use Incentive Option:

The entire process of surveys to gather adequate information from prospective clients can be considered as a special social exchange case. This theory proclaims that you motivate your customers by providing them with something in exchange to survey responses. 

What you give in return doesn’t always have to be monetary. It can be a small incentive. You can also include certain discounts or deals in the offer. If not that, then a couple of gifts and giveaways will surely do their magic.

Likewise, there can be several other things that you can provide in exchange for an honest response. Primarily, make sure that your offer resonates the requirements of your customers. If not, this technique might fail drastically. 

Use Humans & Not Technology:

This step might seem too obvious. However, often, several companies wish to get survey responses on the email address that can be accessed by everyone at the time. What you must keep in mind that real customers don’t like responding to bots as much as they’d like to talk to a human. 

For this, you literally don’t have to let each member of your team call users and ask for their responses. On the contrary, instead of using an email address related to customer support, such as [email protected] or [email protected], you may use an ID with a real person’s name.

As long as it resembles a human, you can also create fictitious email ID or codename. Furthermore, if you wish to get more honest responses, send forms from an email ID that doesn’t interact with customers on a daily basis. And then, you can use an automated survey funnel to track replies and make changes to the strategy accordingly. 

Prior Notice to Customers:

If you alert your customers that they might expect a survey will make them even more willing to reply to the questions and increase your response rate. If your business is dealing with direct consumers, you must train your staff properly to alert customers that they might look out for a survey.

And, if your business is targeting other businesses, you can consider sending a prior notice from a person who can be easily recognized by the company. It can be your manager, business leader, or even the CEO.

Let them know that survey invitation is coming up and what exactly you are expecting from them in return. Also, make sure that your pre-notification also includes what is in there for customers. This step can be more compelling. 

Let The Subject Line Clarify Your Expectations:

One thing that you must keep in mind is that not every person is going to open your emails to find out what’s stored inside, regardless of how important the information to them might be. Therefore, the only way to get a high click-through rate is by making the most out of the subject line. 

If your survey takes a lot of time to be completed or contains monotonous questions, let your customers know about it beforehand. Ha, just kidding. You must never send a survey that’s long or boring as it can be a major turn off for customers. 

On the other hand, what you must do is let them know about its positive points, it can be ease of answering, gifts in return, or anything else. Once you’ve minimized the burden from them, they’ll reply to your questions without hesitating a bit. And then, you can use any CRM tool to keep the data of those who replied and who ignored.

One Call to Action:

Now that you’ve simplified your survey forms, it’s time to concentrate on the call to action button. It goes without any saying that a compelling and attractive CTA button can fetch you a higher number of responses when compared to any other element.

Of course, the urge to add several CTA buttons might be overpowering you, irrespective of your research saying otherwise. You may want to redirect your users to products or services. Or, you may also want to link social media platforms in the email and let users know about them. 

However, you must resist it as much as you can. The more the CTA links in your survey email, the more cluttered it’s going to become. And, it may lead to nothing but more confusion among users. This can be the primary reason behind your customers neglecting the survey form. So, avoid this activity at all costs. 

Responsiveness is Important:

To increase your survey response rate, you need to make sure that your users can read every word of the email without any problem. Accordingly, a total of 48% of emails were opened on mobile phones or in 2014. The number must have grown even more.

Despite making the survey email and form simple, elegant, and approachable, if it’s not responsive, all of your efforts will go in vain. Considering the varied usage habits of your customers, ensure that the mail gets opened on every device and screen size. 

Moreover, not just it should be easy to click and read on a mobile device, but your users should be able to complete the entire form and send it across through the mobile itself. Therefore, you must keep in mind that the responsiveness isn’t compromised.

Wrapping Up:

From far off, the objective of gaining an adequate survey response rate might seem difficult to be achieved. However, if you put a bit of effort and time, everything can be done. So, follow these effective tips and enjoy the fruits of your hard work.