Running surveys on your customer base can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. You put all the work and energy into crafting questions to help you get deeper insight for your business and receive such a low response rate. We’ve been there too. After years of running regular surveys for publishing brands, we found some tried and true tricks to get your response rate up, clearer answers, and actual usable data. Before setting up your next customer or client survey, take a look at these tips and tricks to set yourself up for success.
Best Practice: Tips for Surveying Your Customers
All questions should reflect your end goal.
It can be tempting to cover several topics in one survey. Keep each survey very focused and specific to one topic, since splitting the focus can create confusing questions. This will help get the clearest and best possible results. If you are looking to get insight into two different types of problems, plan for launching two surveys and stagger their timing. Be ruthless in cutting unnecessary questions and you will get better results.
Ask basic demographic data.
This is your chance to learn more about your customer! Since most demographic data provided by analytics sites is estimated, it gives you a good idea but not necessarily the most accurate one. Now is your chance to ask age, income range, location, and anything other general demographic data that is important for your business and segmenting your customer lists. You can later use this data to target your customers by location, age, or whatever is appropriate for your products or services.
Keep it short.
Keep your language clear and concise, focusing on the simplest and shortest way to phrase your question to avoid survey abandonment. A survey should take three minutes or less for someone to complete. Remember, you’re asking for your customers and clients to do your business a favor. Be mindful of their time and you’ll have much better success at getting them to that thank you page.
Avoid leading questions.
If you lead the customer to an answer there’s no point in sending a survey. For example, instead of “We’ve recently put in a lot of time and energy to create a world class website. What do you think of the new website?” ask “What do you think to the recent changes to our site?” Keeping your questions basic without a lead in will give you more honest answers.
Ask one question at a time.
It can be tempting to throw all of your ideas into a long, related series of questions. Though this seems like an effective way to make use of limited questions, it will actually just produce conflicted or confusing answers. It’s better to ask 3 short questions, versus 1 long, complicated one.
Show how long it will take to complete the survey.
Keep your customer top of mind, you’re asking them to take their time and help your business. Include a completion percentage or total number of questions until the end on every page. Understanding how long a customer needs to commit to a survey before starting it will lead to more completions.
Send at the beginning or end of the week.
A SurveyMonkey report showed that people are most responsive on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays. For best results, plan to start promoting your surveys on these days.
Allow a month run and promote your survey across all marketing channels.
If you use the Internet to promote pieces of content, you have a content promotion plan across several channels like social media, email, and your website. Make sure you’re utilizing all these same places to promote your survey so that you catch a good sample size.
Offer a prize.
Offering an incentive can be the key to a success survey and a waste of time. Even something simple like a $10 gift card to one random winner will increase your response rate. People are more likely to complete a survey if there is a chance of them getting something out of it, even if that chance is small.
Promote the incentive.
When marketing your survey make sure to call out what survey takers can potentially win and how easy the survey is to fill out. Specifically, call out the time it takes to complete (Take our 2-minute survey!) and what they can win (For a chance to win a $15 Amazon Gift Card!).
Include an end of survey Thank You page.
Make sure to thank your customers for their time and included details on when and how a winner will be chosen if you offered an incentive. You can use the thank you page as an opportunity to link to another survey or additional information about your company.
Want to have our tips handy when building your next survey?
