Maximizing Survey Response Rates

Good response rates are essential for accurate, useful results. Low response rates and insufficient sample sizes:

• Erode the validity of your results
• Force you to qualify your reports and conclusions
• Lower confidence in your findings.

If you face these challenges, you’re not alone! Many companies face the same dilemma.

Response Rates and Completion Rates

In a moment, I’ll offer some suggestions on boosting your response rates, but first let’s examine two important terms: response rate and completion rate.

• The response rate is the percentage of people who respond to your survey, whether they submit just one page of the survey or all pages.
   
• The completion rate is the percentage who complete the entire survey—that is, they answer all or most questions relevant to them and submit the last page of the survey. Completers are a subset of responders, since not all respondents will complete the entire survey.

Together, response rates and completion rates let you diagnose whether a problem may lie with your means of engaging respondents, your survey design, or both (see chart below).

Both the response rate and the completion rate are important. These numbers ultimately determine how confident you can be in your results, including how representative your data are of your population.

When you're confident in your results, you can also feel positive about:

• the investment your company has made to support or deny its hypotheses
• presenting your findings to senior management and to the various other stakeholders
• making recommendations and basing strategic initiatives on your findings

Here's a surprise. Sometimes what's most important is not the percentage of respondents but the actual number. Granted, they're related and both are important. But when we refer to "statistically valid" sample sizes (which we’ll address in a future article), we are talking about the actual number of responses, not the percentage.

Based on a decade of online survey experience, CustomerSat has compiled the following best practices for maximizing your survey response rates. Note that not all items are applicable to every type (transactional, relationship, employee, etc.) of survey.

Reexamine Your Contact List

The first step in boosting response rates is to take a fresh, hard look at the quality, accuracy, and validity of the names in your database. Is each one the correct contact at that company? Is the contact information (especially the e-mail address) of each person up-to-date?

Also, are they the right people to be surveyed? It’s essential to make sure you have the right audience to start with, as relevance of the survey to the potential respondent is an important factor affecting response rates. Note that the closer your relationship to the individuals in your database, and, hence, to those being surveyed, the more likely they are to respond to your survey invitation.

Pre-Survey Communications

Don't surprise them. A few days or a week before the deployment of your survey, notify potential respondents that a survey invitation is on its way. Include the following information in your pre-survey announcement:

• Objectives of the survey
• Why it's important
• What you’ll be asking them about
• How the survey will be delivered/conducted
• Timing of the survey(s), i.e., when and how frequently
• How their feedback will be used, and how quickly you'll act on it
• How they'll find out about improvements/changes based on their responses

The survey announcement should also include your contact information (or a designated party's) in case respondents wish to verify the validity of your request.

Encourage your salespeople or account managers to mention your survey to customers a week or two before it is deployed. Ideally, mention of surveys should be a regular part of their business conversations. They should inform customers that their feedback is an essential part of your company's continuous improvement process, and that customer satisfaction is your number-one priority.

In business-to-business (B2B) surveys, we typically see better response rates among non-management professionals and middle managers than among senior executives. To get senior executives to respond, a pre-survey phone call or email message from one of your executives at the same level as the customer executive can help.

Your Invitation Influences Response Rates

Your e-mail invitation is crucial to persuading customers to participate in your survey. First, you need to make sure the maximum number of invitations is actually delivered. How? Craft your invitations carefully to avoid spam filters. The more invitations delivered, the better your chance of getting a great response.

Here are some general tips about writing your e-mail invitation to ensure optimum delivery rates:

• In the subject line, avoid words like “feedback,” “survey,” “opinion,” etc. It’s difficult to avoid these terms in the body of the e-mail, but use them judiciously.
• Avoid using the words “unsubscribe” or “remove” in the opt-out link area.
• Work with your CustomerSat Project Manager to identify other specific keywords to avoid.
• Text e-mails are less likely to get caught in spam filters than HTML e-mails.
• Of course, be sure to comply with all CAN-SPAM rules and guidelines.

Be compelling and relevant in the wording of your invitation. Entice the recipient to participate and to provide feedback. Be specific and honest in your request. Ask for open and candid feedback.

Personalize your survey e-mails whenever possible. Address each invitation to the individual ("Dear Jane Doe"). Customize it, if applicable (“Please tell us about your experience regarding Case Number 12345, which closed on 1/17/2006.”).

Use different subject lines for different groups, to make them more relevant:

• “About your relationship with X"
• “A message from our CEO”
• “A message from your regional manager, Y”
• "About your XYZ product (usage),” etc.

Similarly, modify the content of your invitations to interest different audiences. A little extra effort here can pay big dividends.

Add the survey close date, if known. If hyperlinks are set to expire on a certain date, inform the respondent that s/he has only X days to complete the survey.

Translate the invitations into the customer’s native or preferred language, if known.

Check your timing. Holidays, days of remembrance (e.g., 9/11), major industry events and even fiscal issues (month-end, quarter-end) can sabotage response rates. Plan your deployment dates to avoid those dates. Even the day of the week your survey is deployed can impact response rates. Send out your invitations early in the week; Tuesdays and Wednesdays are typically the best response days.

Sign it with a recognizable, relevant name. A customer support survey, for example, should be signed by the VP (or Director) of Customer Support, rather than by a marketing executive.

Survey Design Affects Completion Rates

Your e-mail invitation attracts people to your survey. But that's only the beginning. To motivate people to participate, the survey itself must be interesting, pertinent, and professional. Here are a few suggestions:

Keep the length manageable without losing actionability. A survey that's too long (or just seems too long) can discourage potential participants.

Employ dynamic surveys. Display only questions that are applicable to the respondent, based on your upload data or their responses to previous questions. This keeps your survey relevant and brief.

Customize your surveys, when applicable. One way is to refer to a case specific to each respondent, e.g., “Please tell us about your experience implementing Product X on 1/17/2006.”

Appearances count. Design your survey to be aesthetically pleasing and professional looking. Unless it’s a blind survey, use your company’s logo, colors, familiar look and feel, etc. Your company's marketing communications department and CustomerSat Project Manager can guide you.

Be professional. Make sure all typos, grammatical errors, etc. have been corrected. Ask others to proofread it before it's sent out.

Be clear. Word your questions clearly and unambiguously. Ambiguous questions slow down and frustrate respondents. Use simple, declarative sentences as much as possible. Provide concise instructions for complex questions. Better yet, simplify them.

Translate surveys into each customer's native language, and give them the option to select their preferred language.

Allow adequate time for people to respond. Two to three weeks is usually sufficient.

Use multiple channels. Some customers may prefer phone interviews on speech-enabled IVR to online surveys, for example, so they can respond while commuting to work. Use whichever feedback channel the customer prefers.

Reminders and Follow-Up

Use the same guidelines for your reminder’s subject line and content as outlined above for the invitation.

Send out at least one reminder as a follow-up to non-responders. Use multiple reminders if necessary. We’ve seen response rates double after a single reminder. Timing is important, too. Don’t send a reminder too soon. Wait about three to five days after the initial invitation to send a reminder for a brief service transactional survey; a five to seven day delay is a good benchmark for a longer relationship survey covering experiences over an extended time period.

Engage your salespeople or account managers to follow up with non-responders, particularly non-responders from key accounts or key segments.

Place follow-up phone calls. These can be a reminder to customers to participate online, or you can actually conduct the surveys by phone.

Incentives and Confidentiality

Offer an incentive. Incentives are quite common for business-to-consumer (B2C) surveys, less so for B2B. Incentives motivate people to respond, all right—but beware. They entice everyone to respond, even folks with no opinions and those who accidentally slipped into your upload file and shouldn’t have been invited to participate. Frankly, in a B2B situation, the strength of your relationship, and the knowledge that improvements are based on their feedback, should ideally provide your customers enough incentive. But sometimes some customers need a little nudge, and incentives can provide that.

Confidentiality or anonymity may be important to respondents. When appropriate, assure respondents that their responses will be treated confidentially (respondent identity is kept confidential), or if necessary, anonymously (respondent cannot be identified).

After the Survey

After each survey wave is closed, be sure to do two things:

• Communicate the results back to your customers
• Make improvements to your processes, products and services as a result of the survey—and let customers know what those improvements are.

Subsequent survey announcements (and other customer communications) can mention some initiatives undertaken or changes made as a result of previous surveys. That assures customers that you really are using their feedback, which encourages future participation.

The suggestions offered in this article for improving response rates span the times before, during, and after survey deployment. At every opportunity, let customers know that surveys are an integral part of your business processes. Your message should be: This is part of how we do business. This is how we ensure satisfaction among our customers. You are important to us, and so are your opinions and feedback. This message should be reinforced regularly in various customer touchpoints.

Responses Boost Confidence

When your surveys regularly garner enough responses to be statistically valid, you'll gain confidence. You and senior management can trust not only that your results are representative of your customer population, but also that resources can be allocated toward future strategic initiatives as a result of the data.