6 Tips To Help Your Business Increase Survey Response Rates
To grow your company and help it improve, you need feedback from the people who matter most — your customers. Surveys are an excellent way to gather feedback to help you improve various areas of your business including your customer service, product, brand, and reputation. Unfortunately, on average only 10 to 15 percent of recipients outside of your company will respond to most surveys. However, there are a few ways you can increase survey response rates.
Use Text Messaging to Increase Survey Response Rates
If you want higher survey response rates, your survey should be quick to complete and not require customers go out of their way to respond. Text messaging is immediate and individuals can answer right away. Ninety-one percent of U.S. citizens have their mobile devices with them at all times, making it easy to reach your target. If you choose to conduct text messaging surveys, keep the questions very simple — rating systems are generally a good idea. Even with the simplicity of text, if individuals must type out long responses, they are less likely to respond. You can also send texts with links that take customers to a short online survey on your site or on a survey platform.
Keep the Survey Short
Don’t ask pages worth of questions. Keep the survey short. This is particularly important for surveys sent via text messaging as you don’t want customers scrolling through pages of questions. They will get frustrated and stop before submitting any feedback. The ideal survey length is 10 questions or less. This means you must choose your questions and the feedback you want to receive very carefully.
Avoid Too Many Surveys
While you want to continually gather feedback from customers, it is imperative that you don’t bombard them with surveys. The less you reach out to customers for feedback, the more likely they are to respond. If customers receive numerous surveys, they won’t respond and just assume another survey is coming shortly. When using text messaging, this is particularly true as they are less likely to even read your message if they constantly see you reaching out to them for feedback.
Provide Incentives
Individuals are more likely to participate in surveys if they know they will receive something in return. Coupons, discounts, merchandise or monetary payment can be a great motivator that pushes individuals to provide their feedback. If you offer these incentives via text, customers are more likely to respond right away to immediately receive their reward.
Explain The Purpose of the Survey
Provide an ample amount of information regarding what the survey is for and why you need the information. If it is a company or a cause that people are passionate about or want to support, they are more likely to sit down and answer your questions. However, again, be selective about what information you are offering as nobody wants to read through pages of information.
Send Out Reminders
If your response rate is low, send one or two text reminders to customers regarding the survey. This is just a gentle reminder of the importance of the survey and how it won’t take much of their time to complete. Be careful you don’t overdo these reminders, however. Just one or two should do.
Increasing your response rate is possible by being proactive and utilizing the right technology like text messaging for surveying your company’s customers, prospects and also employees.
To learn more about using text messaging to increase survey response rates, contact us.
