8 tips for maximizing survey response...

8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential

1

© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com


You’ve built a survey and are ready to make it available to potential respondents. But how do you

convert those potential respondents into completed responses? Especially when it is so easy for surveys

to get lost in today’s already survey-saturated Web. Information is your ultimate goal. Without a good

number of responses you may not be gathering enough usable data. For example, if you send a survey

to 100 people and 10 people respond, the information you’ve collected only represents the feelings of

10% of your target respondents. That won’t give you an accurate representation of what your survey

sample thinks. As a general rule, the more responses you can collect, the better.

This best practice guide offers several tips, eight to be exact, on how to optimize surveys to make sure

they get noticed and improve your survey response rate.

1. Optimize Email Invitations

When inviting potential respondents to take a survey via email there are a number of ways to optimize

the email to make sure your survey invitation is seen by recipients.

Before you can even think about responses you need to make sure the survey invitation is reaching the

eyeballs of potential respondents, which is not always a sure-thing when using to email as your

distribution method. After all of the careful consideration you took while creating your survey, the last

thing you want is for recipients to miss your email invitation due to spam blockers and lousy subject

lines. When building body copy and subject lines try to avoid using words or characters that have

potential for triggering spam alerts. The more obvious of these include:

Free

Amazing

Prizes

Click Here

Form

Win

Please Read

The list of words you shouldn’t say via email is actually quite extensive. Conducting a simple Web search

for “spam words” should turn up a number of online resources to help you proofread email subject and

body text.

It is important that you trigger a connection with the email recipient at first glance, beginning

with the “From” information and subject line. Make sure the email “From” name is something

http://www.checkbox.com/blog/2011/02/6-ways-to-improve-email-invitation-open-rates/


2


your recipients will recognize. If recipients don’t know who the sender is right away, they will

get suspicious and are less likely to open your email invitation. If your organization isn’t clearly

presented in the “From” email address used, make the effort to create a new email address or

be sure to at least include your company name in the email subject line.

While we’re on the topic of subject lines, remember: less is more. A general rule of thumb is to

limit subject lines to 50 characters or less. Keep it simple and remember to avoid “spammy”

words and characters.

Finally, when a recipient opens your email invitation make sure the survey activation link is

clearly marked among your message text. This is easier to do if you formatted your email in

HTML. If you chose to send your email in plain text, make sure the email isn’t too wordy and

place the survey URL on its own line so that it stands out from other text. Within a handful of

seconds a recipient should be able to tell:

a. who the invitation is from

b. what the invitation is for

c. how to access the survey

Send a test invitation to friends or colleagues to see how long it takes them to answer to those

three questions.


3


Recommended Tool: Checkbox’s Email Invitations Wizard allows you to create an unlimited

number of email invitations for any given survey. Depending on your plan you can deploy

between 5000 and an unlimited number of invitations to recipients per month. After an

invitation is sent you can filter recipients by who has responded, opted-out, or deleted an

invitation, and send reminders if desired.

2. Make a Good First Impression

A potential homebuyer makes up her mind within the first 8 seconds of walking through the

front door. A website viewer decides whether or not to stay on a page in under 3 seconds. The

same rules apply to survey respondents. It’s all about the first impression. If potential

respondents don’t like what they see right off the bat, they could lose interest without even

glancing at the first question. Make the extra effort to create a dynamic style template for your

surveys.

A good survey design includes:

a. Majority of survey located “above the fold” - All of the important information you want

to present to a respondent (messages, questions, logos, buttons, etc.), should be clearly

placed “above the fold,” a term borrowed from print media that translates to the web

as “visible without scrolling.”

b. Strategic color placement – create some visual interest without overpowering the

survey questions.

c. Contrasting text – make sure important information stands out.

d. Branding! – include a company logo in the header or footer of your survey and use your

brand colors in survey elements like borders, progress bars, and navigation buttons. You

want respondents to recognize your brand in those first precious seconds so be sure to

reflect your company or organization in your survey design.

e. No third party branding - If you are using a third party survey creation tool to build

surveys or forms, try to find one that doesn’t brand every page of your survey with their

own company logo. This can be confusing to respondents and diminishes the

professionalism of your survey.


4


No Style Applied:

Style Applied:


5


Recommended Tool: Create customized survey style templates within Checkbox’s Styles

Manager. Templates can be applied to multiple surveys to maintain a consistent campaign look

and feel. Customizable features include progress bars, background colors and images, buttons,

borders, matrix styles, headers, footers, body text, and more! No technical knowledge is

required to create customized survey templates.

3. Set Expectations

The information included on the first page of a survey should clearly identify who the survey is

from, what it is for, and should set expectations for how long the survey should take to

complete. Time yourself taking the survey to gauge an estimate. Knowing the time required to

complete a survey in advance allows respondents work it into their schedules. If no estimate is

indicated and a respondent begins a survey assuming it will only take 5 minutes, he is more

likely to abandon the survey after the 5 minutes he allotted himself have elapsed.

Another best practice is to include survey progress markers, such as page numbers and

progress bars, on every page of a survey. Progress markers track respondents’ progress though

a survey, encourage them to continue, and set expectations for how much more time will be

needed to complete the survey. If there is no end in sight, respondents may be more likely

abandon the survey.

Recommended Tool: Mention the survey length or estimated completion time in a Message

Item at the beginning of your survey. Checkbox also offers progress markers such as “page___

out of ___” indicators and a customizable progress bar that let the respondent know how far

they are in the survey.


6


4. Simplify

The “above the fold” rule doesn’t stop on the first page of a survey. If at all possible, avoid long

lists of survey questions. Scrolling through pages wastes time and can be frustrating for a

respondent, reducing the likelihood that they will complete your survey. Try to keep the

number of questions on a page under 5 to ensure your navigation buttons (next, back, submit)

are kept in sight at all times. Having the buttons visible encourages respondents to continue.

Ask conditional qualifying questions to determine whether certain questions or pages can be

hidden from a respondent later in the survey. This not only tailors your survey to each

individual respondent, but condenses the overall survey by weeding out irrelevant questions.


7


Use conditions and skip logic to condense and personalize surveys. Had the survey creator in the

example above asked a qualifying question about whether or not the respondent donates

online, those respondents who do not donate online could have skipped over this page entirely.

In the same vein as conditions/skip logic, text merging can be used to prepopulate default

values, such as contact information, to save the respondent time.

Recommended Tool: Set up page conditions, item conditions, branching rules, and use merging

to tailor surveys to respondents.

5. Positive Reinforcement

Although we like to think that respondents want to spend their free time completing our

surveys, the truth is most of them need a little motivation. Offering an incentive for completing

a survey is a sure-fire way to increase a survey’s response rate.

Commonly used incentive offers include:

Gift certificates

Vacation draws

Store credit

Free training

Although incentive offers almost always yield a higher number of responses, be aware that the

quality of responses can sometimes be compromised by the desire win a prize. If you think

respondents might be racing though surveys for the reward without putting much thought into

their answers, consider changing the incentive offer or removing it all together.


8


A tip for positively reinforcing respondents to complete surveys on the long term is to divulge

survey response data. Unless explicitly told, respondents don’t usually expect to see the results

of a survey they take, but if the opportunity arose, they would jump at the chance to see if their

opinions align with the masses. Not only are respondents curious about the data, they like the

feeling of inclusion they get when such information is shared with them.

Rewarding respondents with the knowledge that their participation in your survey directly

influenced positive changes in your organization will likely encourage them to not only

complete future surveys, but provide thoughtful responses. Below are two examples of how

you could reveal response data to respondents:

a. Display hard facts, such as an aggregate visual report, at the end of a survey to show

respondents where they fit in.

b. Email respondents with results after the survey closes: “80% of students indicated that

evening classes are preferred over morning classes, therefor we will be increasing the

number of evening course offerings beginning Spring 2012 semester…” or “As a result

of your helpful feedback, EcoLight.com has decided to extend our holiday support

hours from 9AM-5PM to 8AM-midnight through January 10, 2012…”

Recommended Tool: Checkbox’s reporting tool allows you to generate engaging, sharable visual

reports. The application also doubles as an email tool, which can be used to distribute response

or incentive information to respondents.

6. Make it Count

Give respondents a meaningful reason (other than a prize) to complete your survey. Think

about who is responding to your survey and establish your relationship with them right away.

Are your target respondents employees? Customers? Whoever your respondents are, they

aren’t going to give your survey a second look if they don’t feel invested in it in some way.

In your survey email invitation or on the welcome page of your survey, explain (as concisely as

possible):

a. your relationship to the respondent

b. why the respondent is being asked to take the survey

c. why they should complete the survey


9


The latter could be accomplished by describing how the respondent feedback could benefit

them down the line.

In the welcome message above you can easily pick out the relationship between the survey sender and respondent (respondent attended sender’s show), why the respondent is being asked to take the survey (sender requests attendee opinions, comments and questions), and how completing the survey will benefit the respondent (relevant and useful content in future shows and the chance to win two free passes to next year’s show).

7. Test

Before making a survey live to potential respondents, make sure you and a few others test the

survey for grammar, flow, and ease of use. If you include conditions in a survey, test all of the

possible logic paths. Remember, if you have difficulty taking a survey so will your respondents.

Avoid confusion and survey abandonment by always testing surveys before launching it.

Recommended Tool: Checkbox allows you to test surveys at any point during the survey

creation process. You can even share a test link to allow others to submit “test responses,”

which are separated from actual responses.

8. Remind, Remind, Remind

Sometimes all respondents need to complete a survey is a little push. Just because they didn’t

respond to your survey the day you launched it doesn’t mean they didn’t want to. Maybe they

simply got busy and forgot. Because this is often the case, it doesn’t hurt to send or post a

reminder towards the end of a survey response period.

Create a sense of urgency in survey reminders by informing respondents that time is running

out to get their voices heard. Don’t get carried away, though. One or two reminders should be

enough to boost your response rate.


10


Filter Recipients by Response Status:

Send a Reminder Email to Recipients Who Haven’t Responded:

Recommended Tool: Using Checkbox’s powerful Invitations Manager you have the ability to

filter recipients by response status and send reminders to anyone who hasn’t responded.

8 tips for maximizing survey response...

Documents