Can Surveys Be the Best Thing Ever?

What methods can you use to determine if your product or services are satisfying the requirements and desires of your clients?

Find out what people think by conducting surveys.

But, what if customers don’t answer?

The typical rate of return for surveys is between 5 and 30 percent. In most cases, organizations are not successful in this metric.

If you are part of this group, there is no need to continue searching. This article will provide some great advice on how to amplify your survey responses and attain a larger-than-usual response rate.

Why Does Survey Response Rate Matter?

The goal of a rapid or inquiry poll is to get input and comprehend what customers think of the firm’s services, products, and interactions they have had.

A low quantity of responses to surveys can present problems for businesses, besides making it tricky for teams to interpret customers’ complaints and what must be done in order to deliver excellent customer service.

Here are a few problems low response rate creates for companies:

A low response rate creates bias, popularly known as non-response or sample bias. It occurs when non-response is not equal between the respondents’ categories.

An example of why surveys may not be successful is if sent via email, customers may not respond, as the survey could get lost in spam. Additionally, if questions are too personal, people might be hesitant to answer, as they may fear being judged.

The response rate of surveys is directly perceived to reflect their effectiveness and quality. If a survey is incomprehensive, lacks simplicity in terms of language, and has no definite purpose, it is bound to get low survey answers.

If the customers do not fill out surveys, it becomes challenging for product teams and the company to confirm whether they are on the right track since they don’t know how customers perceive their products/services. If a company is merely relying on the experts’ opinions, things are bound to go downhill.

What does an increase in response rate indicate?

Defines a clear purpose of survey questions.
Shows it was worth it for customers to take it.
A successful instant reward program for completing surveys and much more.

A Survey Helps to Better Understand Your Audience

What Is Your Biggest Challenge?

A survey will provide you with information regarding what inspires your target group.

What is the most significant difficulty they are facing?

If you can pinpoint and provide a solution to an issue that your intended market has, then you will have their focus.

When I devise a plan for the distribution of content, I collect data from multiple sources to gain insight into what the target audience is doing.

Data analytics and social media platforms provide lots of knowledge regarding how users behave on your website and their interactions with your company.

But you want to get in their head. The only way to accomplish this is to inquire.

Once you are conscious of the issues and topics that are relevant to your viewers, you have the perfect foundation to create your ideas and content titles.

Every item of material should be concentrated on addressing or emphasizing a difficulty or problem. The more niche a title is, the better.

Set up an Auto-Respond on Email Sign-Ups

An excellent approach to discovering comprehension is to query every person when they make a purchase or get in touch.

Upon finishing an email subscription, sign-up, or contact form, an automated response email containing one or two questions should be sent out.

For example:

What is the biggest challenge you face?
What one product would make a major difference to you right now?

The knowledge obtained from these perspectives can then be used to assist you in targeting other individuals in similar circumstances that face the same issues.

Articles that are extremely particular and supply practical data which will help readers in some capacity are the finest.

Segment Your Audience

To learn more precise information, you can include a questionnaire in your e-mail registration form to divide your viewers.

Using MailChimp makes it effortless, as one can employ the Groups attribute which will then attach opted-in checkboxes to your subscription form. If you’re aiming your message at people within the European Union, then you must observe GDPR regulations.

For example, if your sign-up form is for a content marketing newsletter, you can ask:

Do you work for a brand in-house?
Do you work for a content agency?

Once you have cut your readers into distinct groups, you can either draw out material applicable to everybody and transmit it through a general newsletter or disperse individually tailored substance to every segment according to their individual troubles.

A Survey Will Feed Your Content

To Inform Your Content with Unique Data

When crafting a piece of work, a writer should connect any proof that upholds their perspective or statement, or provide facts and data.

If you provide innovative research, information, or numbers pertaining to your profession or specialty, you have a resource that others will more likely link to.

One strong set of data and research can be applied to several channels of content to gain maximum value:

A webinar and/or industry talk
A gated whitepaper/ebook download
A data visualization

How Do I Generate Data for My Brand?

Administer an inquiry to mirror the present condition of your field – the Content Marketing Institute performs this frequently. BuzzSumo also regularly produces in-depth industry research.

Examine your customer information and search for an understanding of purchasing habits.

An index or map that reveals a regional preference can be very appealing for publicity and promotion, particularly when targeting local media outlets.

Begin by forming ideas or collecting information that would be beneficial or appealing to your audience.

If your research provides an answer to your queries, then you can construct the content around it in order to create an impressive story to show the journalists.

Journalists are likely to spread a story that offers enthralling, new information or figures along with an attractive headline that will capture the attention of their target audience. This is the key to securing top-tier media links.

Depending on the information you have, you can design an interactive graph or map, a delineated illustration, a technical document, or a website page with animated features.

Once you’ve grabbed their focus, graphical images that support your information can back up your efforts to get the reaction that you desire.

How to Get People to Take a Survey: Tips to Boost the Survey Response Rate

It does not have to be an exhausting challenge to satisfy customers and have a relationship with a business, contrary to what some may think. If you analyze closely, everything you do in your quest to boost customer interaction, sales, and even collecting feedback leads to a few things:

Making customers feel valued, heard, and entertained.

It is obvious that the best way of getting more people to take your surveys and increasing response rates is to make use of these elements in your plan. This guide will show you how to get folks to fill out a survey.

1. Norm of Reciprocity: Create an Exchange

The most effective way to generate interest from customers to complete your surveys is to utilize psychological tactics to persuade them to participate.

This is effective as it allows you to gain insight into what drives the people who will be completing your survey, making it easier to obtain the data you require.

In 1974, Phillip Kunz, a sociologist from Brigham Young University, sent out 600 Christmas cards which were written by hand to people whom he didn’t know. He believed that if someone did something kind for you, you would find a way to pay them back. One’s ability to empathize is rooted in psychological factors and is linked to neural pathways in the brain’s cortex, particularly the supramarginal gyrus.

Kunz’s study worked. He got back over 200 responses from others, a great deal of which came with personalized Christmas cards. A few pieces of correspondence even extended to three or four pages in length.

It didn’t make a difference that Kunz’s individuals were unfamiliar with him; after they acquired something, their inclination to sympathize was provoked and they felt responsible for repaying something.

Send out a survey only when you have received something to merit it, using the logic of reciprocity.

Once you’ve aided your customers with taking action, send out a questionnaire. The norm of reciprocity will encourage your customers to take action such as responding to your survey in return for your efforts.

2. Incentive Theory of Motivation: Entice Them with a Promise

The incentive theory of motivation states that people are motivated to take action when they are given positive incentives, such as monetary compensation, rewards, or acknowledgment of their efforts.

But most people have a present bias. We usually opt for obtaining smaller benefits now rather than waiting for a larger one at a later date. Even if customers are aware that providing feedback in the survey can be beneficial to them in the future, they would still appreciate having a little something for taking the time to do so right away.

Due to our current inclination, the rewards for your customers must come as soon as possible–if not, they won’t experience the “rush” that will persuade them to participate in your survey. You have to assure customers who participate in your survey that they will be given a reward.

Inform that a survey will appear shortly below. This text shows your customer that they can be immediately rewarded for doing you a favor by partaking in a survey, capitalizing on their preference for instant gratification, and providing them with motivating, beneficial rewards.

3. Leverage-Salience Theory: Pique Your Users’ Interest

An article released in Public Opinion Quarterly, a publication out of Oxford, conducted research to prove the Leverage-Salience Theory of Survey Engagement. This theory examined the elements that would induce people to complete a survey—the level of interest in the topic, trust in the surveyor, or the advantage received from participating.

The results of their research showed as expected that individuals tend to reply to surveys more frequently when they find the subjects engaging.

Relevance theory demonstrates that we are drawn to matters that we consider to be connected to us personally. In order for individuals to take part in your survey, it is not only important to make the purpose of it clear, but also to make the survey personalized to each person’s particular experience.

4. Reframe Each Survey to Be Customer-Centric

You can use segmentation to break down each customer’s experience as it occurs and craft your survey prompts and questions to be as precise and applicable as possible.

Using Qualaroo or a similar feedback program might be beneficial for this. You can use it to make surveys from the beginning or choose from any templates and it offers powerful targeting selections, including segmentation.

Here’s how to personalize each customer’s experience:

Phrase your survey prompts around each customer’s experience. In an analysis of one million surveys, Price Intelligently found that using customer-centric language spiked their response rates. So instead of saying “help us make our product better,” make subtle changes to prompt your users by saying “improve your product experience.”

Personalize each customer’s survey. You can keep each customer interested in your survey by asking questions via branching logic, which can help you automate the personalization process.

Making individualized survey experiences for each customer will increase their interest and make them more likely to complete it.

Tips for Setting Survey Questions

1. Don’t Ask Yes/No Questions

Instead of posing simply a “yes” or “no” query, where the respondent will likely answer affirmatively, construct your question so that it offers different alternatives.

2. Keep It Short

With the free option, SurveyMonkey limits a survey to a maximum of 10 questions.

My goal is to keep your survey to a maximum of 10 questions unless there is a tangible cause and rewards are given for additional questions.

The shorter the better.

Don’t overload people with too many questions and options.

Make your inquiry as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible, and refrain from asking redundant queries.

3. Limit the Use of Matrix Questions

It has been demonstrated that providing a plethora of options leads to an inability to make decisions.

People taking the survey are inclined to speed through it, randomly selecting options in an effort to swiftly finish, which makes the results of the research not valid.

A complex inquiry that necessitates a table answer should be confined to five header selections and no more than two matrix inquiries in one survey.

How Many Responses Do You Need to Be Statistically Accurate?

It is important to be able to provide evidence that survey results have meaning and prove something when looking to get press coverage or when producing and releasing research data. What size of population group do you need to consider?

In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of public opinion across the nation, you’ll have to generate a sizable amount of survey responses compared to one that is limited to content marketing agencies that work within the city of Leeds (such as myself).

The number of responses needed for a survey to be considered valid should be dependent upon the scope of the survey. For a nationwide survey, 1,000-2,000 responses should be gathered, whereas a more specific survey could be deemed valid with only 300 respondents.

A formula exists to figure out how many answers are required to make sure the results are accurate (Pollfish has made calculations like this while you are constructing your survey).