Tips to Help Business Owners Increase Their Survey Response Rate

Gathering feedback through surveys can help business owners better understand both their customers and employees. You might want to uncover your customers’ level of satisfaction with your new products/services or perhaps you’d like to know how your employees are coping in the workplace.

The quality of your surveys is crucial to getting the responses you desire. Taking time to consider the types of questions is important to yielding insights that will allow you to take the necessary steps to reach your goals.

Your survey response rate is an important indicator of your survey’s quality. If no one cares to respond to your questions, the survey becomes useless.

Well designed surveys can yield richer, more useful data. But keeping your participants involved can be challenging. Lack of engagement, identity protection, and lengthy surveys are a few known issues that often hinder participants from completing a survey.

Try these tips and watch your survey responses pour in!

Shorten Surveys

Long surveys are inconsiderate of your respondents’ time, especially when your survey is peppered with unnecessary and repetitive questions. So, keep surveys brief and to the point, with the goal of your questionnaire in mind. Here are the tips and tricks on how to shorten your survey length

Make Surveys Engaging

Always design your surveys with your participants in mind. If your participants become bored, you won’t get quality responses.

Adding photos or even short video clips to your surveys can break the monotony of text and make your surveys more visually appealing. Your participants may actually enjoy taking your surveys and offer more meaningful responses.

Respect Participants’ Privacy

People are more hesitant than ever to take surveys that will compromise their privacy and identity. Therefore, collect only the least amount of data needed. At SurveyPlanet, you can also choose to anonymize your surveys, which can yield a higher number of participants and a better survey response rate.

Make Surveys Transparent

Participants like to know how survey answers are used or processed, so take time beforehand to brief them on the overall purpose of the survey. It is also helpful to share the number of questions that they will be answering. Being honest up front will also help yield quality answers from your respondents.

Send Trial Surveys

The fastest way to know who will likely respond positively to a survey is to send a trial survey. The trial can be made up of 1 or 2 questions, most likely to see if prospective respondents are willing to take a quick survey and the best time to take it. This way, you will easily know whom to include when you share your survey link using email or your website.

Remind Participants

Remind participants positively of the preferred time to take surveys. A reminder is a great tool to allow potential participants to prepare for the survey. If they are still not available at the indicated time, provide the option to reschedule their survey and send another reminder when the new schedule is near. Try these simple-yet-sure ways and receive a better survey response. Overall, preparing a high-quality survey questionnaire will also earn a good survey response rate.

Final Thoughts

A survey is an essential tool that organizations use to know the preference of a majority of a particular population. A survey questionnaire is considered an official research method recognized by academics and many scientific communities. Businesses, big or small, use surveys to get the pulse of their target market in the fastest way possible.

Photo by Khachik Simonian on Unsplash