Want to tap into your customer’s mind to find out what they actually think about you? Want to enhance your internal processes to increase the likability of your brand? To achieve success, you need to qualify leads and measure customer satisfaction. Top performers are achieving this with online surveys.
Improving your product should be your #1 priority. Great online surveys provide clear, reliable, and actionable insights to enable marketers to do this. When an online survey is done right, you get a higher response rate and higher quality data about your prospects and customers.
Below is a list of the top 10 tips that will enable you to achieve survey success.
- Define the purpose of your survey
Without clear goals, you won’t achieve clear results. Poor results don’t provide real decision-enhancing value. A survey that’s done right focuses on objectives that are clearly understood. Focus on such things as what the survey is trying to achieve, why the survey is being created, how the data collected will be used and what decisions you hope to impact with the results.
- Keep the survey short
A shorter survey generally has a higher response rate among respondents. You want to keep your audience focused so they don’t lose interest or abandon the task leaving you to interpret partial data. According to our findings, a survey should take between 5 minutes or less to complete. Forget about questions that don’t directly provide data that’s needed to help meet your objectives.
- Simple questions, better data
Your questions should get to the point. Don’t use your industry jargon assuming your audience will understand it because chances are they won’t. Make the questions as direct as possible. Things like: What has been your experience working with our team? Are you satisfied with the help you’ve received?
- Use close-ended questions
Give your respondents a choice. Simple Yes or No questions make it possible to have clear results. Multiple choice or a rating scale does the trick. Close-ended questions are preferred for the purpose of analysing data. No doubt that open-ended questions can also lead to information and insights, but they should be used as supplementary questions.
- Keep a logical order to your questions
Your surveys should flow in a logical order. In the beginning, you should offer a brief introduction to give respondents the desire to complete the survey. For instance, you can ask a question like “Help us improve our service. Please answer the following questions.” Following the introduction, use broad questions and then move to narrower questions in scope. Work to collect demographic data and save the more sensitive questions to the end. Things like contact information should go last.
- Timing is everything
Sending an asset at a set time and basing this time on factors such as when an individual is most likely to be replying to emails works to increase open and click rates. Sending out a survey at the right time based on previous respondents’ behaviours increases the quality of the responses. If you want to get the right response, consider your audience and where they are in your sales funnel.
- Make your first survey page is simple
No need to make instructions long and no need to serenade your survey with too many graphics. The simpler your survey, the easier will it be for your audience to complete it. While you may think that graphics are going to pull responders in, the reverse is true. Make your survey simple to read and strategically place your graphics.
- Send a reminder
You can significantly boost response rates by sending out reminders to those that haven’t yet responded. It may not be appropriate for all surveys, but when you see that the response has been low, sending out a reminder might just sway your recipients to take another look. Send a reminder via email and give your audience a heads-up reminder to fill it out.
- Offer an incentive
In order to improve response rates, you can offer an incentive depending on the type of survey and the audience. When people get something for their time, they are often very responsive. CommuniGator research has shown that incentives boost response rates by 45% on average.
- Go mobile
Mobile research has shown that almost 50% of respondents take surveys using a mobile device. Make sure that your survey’s branding is intact and functions well across all mobile devices. Mobile compatibility increases response rates greatly and serves up a pleasant mobile survey experience with respondents.
How well do you know what your audiences are thinking? Perhaps it’s time to revamp your survey process!