6 Effective Ways to Improve Your Survey Response Rate

You spent weeks working on the perfect survey and you were sure to get the desired results. After, so many weeks of hard work, you are not getting the feedback that you expected. People are not finishing up your survey and some delete it as soon as it gets to their inbox. If you are not getting the response that you expected you are probably making one of these mistakes

What is a survey?

A survey is a method of gathering information from a sample of people, traditionally intending to generalize the results to a larger population.

 6 Common mistakes and how to Improve Response Rate

• Length- Your surveys are too long. People are busy and they do not have the time to go through a 30-minute survey. Even 5 minutes sometimes is too long, so depending on the survey make sure it’s not too long. Try to make your surveys are as short as possible, more than 15 minutes is a little too much.
• Repetition- Make sure you are not repeating your questions over and over, don’t reword and repeat questions.
• Relevance/Sensitivity- is the information relevant? How sensitive is this information? If you are in the tech business, asking questions about what I eat for breakfast, will make me log out. Are you a cleaning company asking respondents about their income or age? These are questions that people don’t necessarily like to share unless they have to. This makes people question if the survey is legit.
• Incentives- You are not offering Incentives or maybe not the right ones. People like rewards, you can’t get a child to do a chore without offering them something. This can be in the form of anything money, discounts on the next purchase or a sample product. Some respondents do it purely for the money, you have people waiting for the next survey because they can get something out of it.
• Readability- are the questions too difficult to understand? Is the target audience, first-year college students or high-level executives? The language used in your survey should be easily understood by the respondent.
• Questions- In addition to readability asking the right questions, that keep the respondent hooked is another way to improve the response rate.  Depending on your audience and survey type, your survey may be better suited for multiple choice or text entry questions. Sometimes slider or multi-select questions can give you better results. Take a few minutes, Qualtrics has a list of commonly used survey questions.

It’s not easy to come up with a survey that can engage and give you the results that you want, it has become too easy for people to make surveys and yours can get lost in the crowd. We get emails every day asking us for a few minutes to complete surveys. This is why many of us press delete before reading. It gets overwhelming, but you can come out a winner if you structure the questions correctly, make them easily readable with the respondent in mind. You offer incentives to the respondent, but also the right incentives. These days everything is about personalization, I understand that this can be expensive and time-consuming.

People do not have the time and sometimes, there are not enough people on our team to do the extra work. You can use third parties like Survey Monkey, this has a free option and Client Heartbeat a little pricier. They both have great reviews, another option is Artificial Intelligence.