The whole purpose of market research isn’t gathering data. That’s just one of the many steps for better customer engagement and experience. And to improve your product or service based on users’ inputs. But what if you don’t get enough responses through your online surveys? Poor response means lesser data for a market research consultant and closes the doors of enlightenment about your offering’s effectiveness.

Let’s tell you 5 proven steps to pull your response rates to higher levels.

How to Increase Your Survey Response Rate?

    1. Customer List: Latest, Refined, and Segmented

If several respondents have stopped responding to your surveys, it’s time to refresh your list. Reach out to all the customers from your CRM tool to check if they’re still interested in receiving your surveys. Chances are, some customers might have stopped responding due to a time crunch. Or they might have shifted their loyalties to some other brands.

Always add an unsubscribe option in your emails to keep your list updated.

Once you have updated the users’ list, segment again and make sure you’re inviting for the survey only in the related niche. If you send a survey link to foodies about movies, it still might make sense because entertainment and food go together. But surveys related to parenting may attract few responses from the group of foodies.

    2. Emails: Personalize and Brand the Perfect Way

It isn’t a secret in the marketing world that you need to address your customers by their names, preferably with their first name. If you send an email that starts with “Hello participant” or “Hello {first name}” instead of “Hello Rachel”, you’re going to put off your users. Ensure your CRM program lets you use the correct first name instead of a fragmented code.

Gone are the days when people uses sexist salutations like ma’am and sir. Instead, be inclusive to be diverse—one that doesn’t divide their users’ gender into 2 traditional slots. Inclusivity in surveys is the key to being a global brand.

Also, when we say personalize, it includes your identity. No user likes to open an email that looks like spam. So, use mail merge programs to include your company’s name—or your first and last names—alongside your email address. Embed your logo and render it your branding with the fonts and colors your brand is known for.

Once you connect with users by hitting all the correct chords, your response rate will shoot up automatically.

    3. Forms: Make Your Surveys Readable and Interesting

Keep your surveys succinct and precise. Don’t stray away from the topic. For instance, when you’re drilling down on parenting, don’t focus on good schools. The latter can be a part of the core topic but shouldn’t supersede the topic itself.

In marketing, follow Keep It Simple Silly or KISS. Add multiple choice questions in your surveys and use numbers wherever possible. Numbers attract attention and are easy to understand than confusing smileys. Not all generations understand the symbolic language, but numbers are universal.

While designing your surveys, you can be thoughtful but not necessarily comprehensive. After all, you’re a human and don’t know what is going on in a user’s mind. So, allow them to input what is not available in the form. Give them space on the forms to pour their ideas, views, and suggestions.

How about sharing random 1-question surveys once in a while which evoke emotions in your users. An open-ended question that hardly consumes 2-3 minutes from your users. Such surveys are fast, and users won’t feel drained. Moreover, open-ended questions are known to get in-depth qualitative data for a market research consultant.

    4. Invitation: Your First Notification Matters

An email invitation or an app notification is the first step in inviting your users for surveys. Make it about them, not you or your survey. Don’t brag about your company or product; don’t stuff your email with a long survey description.

Apart from personalizing your emails, as mentioned above, carve an interesting subject line. “A survey for you” says nothing interesting and reads spammy. Instead, “Rachel, how did you find the latest school supplies?” is a catching subject line.

Add your contact details and ask your users to call or email you. And follow up if you get a response from them without fail. This shows you care about your users more than just a thumbs up in surveys.

Provide a glimpse of your survey in the email, not just a link. Any question from the survey, preferably the first one, or a quick 1-minute-long video warm-up users with your surveys.

    5. Outcomes: Share the Survey Results

Share the survey results with your users. If that is a confidential report, share some interim data. Even better if you share the improvements and new features/benefits in a product that have been introduced after a survey result.

Sometimes, you can’t share the complete stats with your audience. In that case, publish a summarized report globally on your blog posts or as a study and share some crucial numbers they might find interesting.

To share a report with users who haven’t participated may not be necessary. Still, you should make the respondents aware of the changes in the products based on their inputs. Invite them again for more participation. Remember, your users aren’t participating only to earn money through surveys in India, the US, or France, but they also care about what they use.

Make Great Online Surveys with Opinionest

Surveys offer your audience chances to make easy money online in India and outside. They offer you insights into users’ mindsets. But most of all, online surveys are the long-term game you play to improve your product and services alongside increasing engagement and better marketing prospects. If you’re keen to set the ball rolling in the right alley with surveys, contact the Opinionest team now.