When you’re creating a survey you want to get the best responses from your audience to make informed decisions. However, as attention spans get shorter, are long questionnaires becoming too much for audiences and are people becoming bored?
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The Decreasing Attention Span That Can Be Losing You Responses
Research has found that the human attention span has fallen. In 2000, it used to be about 12 seconds. Now it is estimated that the average attention span is eight seconds.
However, this doesn’t tell the entire story. The research for the average attention span is often questioned by journalists. In addition, other researchers have found that people’s attention spans are often dependent on the person, situation and the task.
For instance, those watching online videos tend to switch off around four minutes and twenty seconds into the video. On the other hand, the average time spent for reading one piece of content online is seven minutes.
Those who are taking a poll can sometimes last up to 20 minutes, but most research says that 10 minutes worth of questions is the maximum amount of time you really want to aim for. This allows your respondents to answer all the questions you want responses for without them getting bored. But you might want a smaller questionnaire to get more responses as the longer the survey the less people that will complete it.
How Many Questions Can You Get In A Survey?
The average time it takes to complete one question in a poll is on average seven and half seconds. Therefore, if you really want to maximise the number of responses from your questionnaire then you can easily divide the time to take the poll by the average time to answer a question.
You might also want to lower the number to accommodate those who will get bored. Therefore, if you assign ten seconds for every question, you can create a questionnaire that is about 60 questions long. This is a good set of questions, but it does push respondents to the max. Therefore, you can look at ways to reduce the length of the survey with some simple tricks.
How To Get More Respondents To Answer Your Questionnaire?
There are many ways to improve the response rate of your poll. The first thing that you should look at is simplifying the wording of your questions. If the respondents have to continue to re-read questions to understand what you want from them, it will increase the length of time it takes to answer one question and the number of queries you can ask.
There are several things you can do to make the wording on your surveys easier to understand. For instance, you can use simple words, keep to the point and avoid leading questions and double negatives.
Also, if you have several queries that are the same format, you can group them together to shorten individual questions and make it quicker for your audience to answer. For instance, if you are asking about a particular product and are asking questions like “do you like the design of the packaging?” and “do you like the taste of the product?” you can shorten these.
You should first ask the respondents to rate your product based on certain factors and then list those factors. You can use specific labels such as “satisfied”,”not-satisfied”, “good”, “not good”. This allows you to collect lots of data without seeming like you’re asking too much from the audience.
Another way to maximise the response rate is to limit the scope of your poll. You’re better off having several surveys than one big survey that aims to collect information on a wide range of subjects. This also gives you the added benefit of tailoring your questionnaire to specific audiences.
You can also try to restrict the number of open-ended questions where the audience has to type an answer. You’ll find that audiences will tend to write very short responses if they’re not bothered and it can be time consuming that can result in higher disengagement rates for your questionnaire.
How To Keep Your Audience Answering Surveys
Keeping your audience engaged with your survey is important. If they’re engaged then they are more likely to complete your questionnaire and give you meaningful results that you can actually use in decision making for the business. One of the key aspects of this is to time the delivery of the poll correctly.
If you ask questions too long after the event, audiences can sometimes become frustrated that the questions don’t seem relevant. Therefore, ensure that you are delivering your questionnaire at the right time. This could be after a promotion, purchase or in relation to a holiday.
With these points in mind, you should be able to design and deliver a poll that can help you get the maximum number of responses.
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