When it comes to collecting information from your audience, a survey can be a powerful tool. However, getting your audience to actually complete the survey is the first battle that you’ve got to face. If you can’t convince them to start answering your questions, then your survey will have limited value to it.
Luckily, there are ways that you can get your audience to become respondents using these simple words of encouragement.
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1. The First Message To Get Respondents
When you first send a message to your audience asking them to complete your survey, you need to show appreciation for their time and make them feel special. Two simple lines can help you achieve this. The first is “we want to know what you think” and the second is “please take five minutes to complete our survey”.
By including these two lines you are demonstrating that your respondents’ views are particularly important to your business and that what they say will count. You’re also showing that you appreciate it will take their time to complete the questionnaire.
Saying please and thank you can also help with improving response rate. Research in 2017 showed that saying “thanks in advance” within your email can give you a response rate of close to 60%.
2. Provide Incentives To Improve Survey Adoption
You can’t always rely on goodwill to get audiences to complete surveys. Sometimes, you have to give something to get responses to your survey emails. There are many incentives that you can use and they don’t all have to cost you money.
For one, you can offer to release the results of the questionnaire to audiences once you’ve collected enough data. This can sometimes be a great way to get people to answer your survey as it intrigues them. This can be especially good if you’ve got a competitive group of people completing the survey and they want to know how they compare to peers.
Or you could try offer a reward for completing the survey. A common option is the discount code or an entry into a prize draw. However, there are concerns that people might rush through a set of questions to just get to the end and win the prize. This shouldn’t really be too much of a concern as research has demonstrated that 94% of respondents will still give honest answers, even if they are trying to win a prize or claim a reward.
3. Give A Reason For The Survey
One of the main reasons why people complete a task is because someone has given them a logical reason why they wanted the task to be completed. The ‘because’ factor is an important psychological factor and research has proven people are more responsive even if you just use the word ‘because’ in your request.
Therefore, when you are setting out your first, and subsequent, messages to your audience about the survey, remember to tell them why you’re doing it. This will help people understand why their time is so important and they’ll be more inclined to respond. You can use incentives in this part, but if you combine the reason for you to ask for the survey and then add benefits, you’ll have a much better uptake.
4. Follow Up On Those Who Didn’t Give Responses
When you set out to gather respondents, you’re going to have people who want to give you their opinion but forgot, or were too busy the first time you asked. This doesn’t mean it is a failure, you should always seek to offer audiences several chances to give their answers.
This can be done via a reminder email that direct them to the original survey. You should reduce the negative emotions of those that don’t want to answer the questions by apologizing to people for contacting them again.
Of course you should remind them of the reasons why they should complete the questionnaire including your reasons for collecting the information and any incentives you’re offering. Don’t be afraid to also promote your survey on social media for example. Sometimes it takes nudges on other platforms to get people to respond to your survey request.
5. Be Conversational And Personal
When it comes to responses on email, the best content includes some personalization (i.e. name) and a conversational tone. You must do your best to match those trends to get people to believe you’re specifically writing to them and not sending out hundreds of generic emails to all your past customers.
You can also include information about their visit to you; to add that personal touch include the date of their visit and who served them.
Conclusion
Creating your surveys is only half the battle. You also need to get people to complete them. That is why you need to use the best language and tactics in your emails, and other marketing materials, to improve uptake in your business’ request for questionnaire respondents.
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French – avoir un maximum de réponses à un sondage en ligne, click here
German – mehr Antworten auf eine Online-Umfrage zu erhalten, click here
Portuguese – obter o máximo de respostas em uma pesquisa online, click here