Increasing survey response rates can be a daunting task. Thankfully, there are strategies that have proven effective in boosting response rates from as low as 0.5% to an impressive 17%.
Merren’s 4 Effective Strategy for The Marketer
Customers don’t want to answer surveys anymore. Certainly not any long, boring online survey. Most surveys that land in the inbox these days have less than 5% open rate- i.e., less than 5 in a 100 would even bother to click the link and land on your survey web page. The completion rates are less than 0.5% and falling. Long story short, if you send 1000 invites, you will get 50 people who would reach your survey form and perhaps 5 would complete it.
Compare this to 17%+ completion rates that we have achieved at Merren. How? Here are some of the strategies that will bring you increase your survey’s response rate:
1. Use a multichannel approach for a high response rate:
If you wanted to ask a hairdresser a question and you sent them an email with a survey link, the chances are that they would not open it. They will certainly not open it at the workplace. They probably will forget about it once they get home after work. You send the same respondent a message on Facebook Messenger (or using WhatsApp surveys) or SMS, you are much more likely to get a response. Why? Because you used a low friction, always-on, low context switch medium. Messenger based applications perform better than browser based mediums.
2. In-moment surveys get faster, better quality response:
Seeking response from your target audience without changing the “context” improves both open and completion rate. This leads to better quality of response. Maintaining context works in two ways:
- Maintaining the mental context: Your customer has just interacted with your brand. Now you ask them a question where the experience with your brand is still fresh. In this case, you are more likely to get a response in the moment. Comparatively, if you ask them about the experience later in the day, the number of responses will have drastically dropped. Why? By now, the customer’s mental context has switched.
- Maintaining the medium context: When you send your customer an email survey with an external link, the link takes them to a browser. In this manner, you are changing the customers’ (medium) context. Instead, get your customer to submit their response in the interactive email itself. In this way, the average response rate would be higher. To solve this issue of external links, AMP email is a dynamic platform. It enables users to respond within the same window without getting directed into an external link.
3. Conversational tone improves survey completion rates:
Customers prefer conversations over an intimidating questionnaire. Using conversations to collect information automatically enhances the online survey response rates. Small changes like below increase the survey response rate, sometimes potentially from non responders as well:
FROM : “Name”
To : “Hi, can you please tell me your name”
From : “Age”
To : “It’s nice to meet you <First Name>. Can I know your age?”
4. Split surveys into smaller questions for greater response rate:
Long, boring survey questions will suffer from poor completion rates. If your survey respondents need to work hard to give you customer feedback, they will avoid it. Break them into smaller, context relevant pieces and you can be assured of a good survey response rate.
How do you make your feedback forms shorter? Break the information you seek into four bucket:
1. Critical: Must have questions that will help you with the decision making.
2. Support: Questions that validate and verify the findings of your critical questions.
3. Good to know: Questions that would be helpful to know and understand, but do not directly pertain to the decision at hand.
4. Everything else.
Keep all As, rationalize Bs, actively reduce Cs and eliminate Ds.
Customer satisfaction extends more than just conversational surveys. In addition, conducting a friendly follow up or an incentive along with the feedback form is immensely helpful . You can certainly push up the completion rates beyond 17% (or 0.5% if you continue to use the traditional, browser-based surveys). Ultimately, the number of people who will actively be a part of your customer satisfaction survey will eventually increase when you follow these strategies. There is an art to incentives too. Studies show that even a small incentive for feedback can bring a high or acceptable response rate in your feedback forms. Using Merren, different organisations can curate customer satisfaction forms and share it via messenger mediums for a faster response.
Why is your survey response rate important?
Survey response rate is important because it directly affects the quality and accuracy of the data collected. When you collect data from all current and potential respondents, the sample size will truly represent your customer base. This will increase the validity and reliability of the findings.
A low feedback rate can introduce response bias into the data. It does not accurately reflect the opinions and experiences of the total number of people or respondents. This can lead to inaccurate conclusions or misleading information in the data.
Furthermore, a high response rate can help to reduce the potential for nonresponse bias. A nonresponse bias occurs when the opinions and experiences of those who do not respond differ significantly from those who do respond. By achieving a high response rate, researchers can ensure that the survey research done is more representative of the population and less likely to be influenced by nonresponse bias.
Conclusion
It is a matter of a survey design including survey length and the medium on which it will be deployed. The effective way to establish a high response rate is to check every criteria before designing a survey. For any organization to create a more effective marketing strategy, obtaining an acceptable or high response rate from their target number of respondents is the way to go.
If you want to upgrade your surveys into a conversational format, try our 14 day free trial here. We offer messenger survey templates that your customers will love to answer. Create your own net promoter score or NPS format using Merren’s templates. Simple to create and easy to access, supercharge the way you collect feedback from your customer base.
