8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
You’ve built a survey and are ready to make it available to potential respondents. But how do you
convert those potential respondents into completed responses? Especially when it is so easy for surveys
to get lost in today’s already survey-saturated Web. Information is your ultimate goal. Without a good
number of responses you may not be gathering enough usable data. For example, if you send a survey
to 100 people and 10 people respond, the information you’ve collected only represents the feelings of
10% of your target respondents. That won’t give you an accurate representation of what your survey
sample thinks. As a general rule, the more responses you can collect, the better.
This best practice guide offers several tips, eight to be exact, on how to optimize surveys to make sure
they get noticed and improve your survey response rate.
1. Optimize Email Invitations
When inviting potential respondents to take a survey via email there are a number of ways to optimize
the email to make sure your survey invitation is seen by recipients.
Before you can even think about responses you need to make sure the survey invitation is reaching the
eyeballs of potential respondents, which is not always a sure-thing when using to email as your
distribution method. After all of the careful consideration you took while creating your survey, the last
thing you want is for recipients to miss your email invitation due to spam blockers and lousy subject
lines. When building body copy and subject lines try to avoid using words or characters that have
potential for triggering spam alerts. The more obvious of these include:
Free
Amazing
Prizes
Click Here
Form
Win
Please Read
The list of words you shouldn’t say via email is actually quite extensive. Conducting a simple Web search
for “spam words” should turn up a number of online resources to help you proofread email subject and
body text.
It is important that you trigger a connection with the email recipient at first glance, beginning
with the “From” information and subject line. Make sure the email “From” name is something
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
your recipients will recognize. If recipients don’t know who the sender is right away, they will
get suspicious and are less likely to open your email invitation. If your organization isn’t clearly
presented in the “From” email address used, make the effort to create a new email address or
be sure to at least include your company name in the email subject line.
While we’re on the topic of subject lines, remember: less is more. A general rule of thumb is to
limit subject lines to 50 characters or less. Keep it simple and remember to avoid “spammy”
words and characters.
Finally, when a recipient opens your email invitation make sure the survey activation link is
clearly marked among your message text. This is easier to do if you formatted your email in
HTML. If you chose to send your email in plain text, make sure the email isn’t too wordy and
place the survey URL on its own line so that it stands out from other text. Within a handful of
seconds a recipient should be able to tell:
a. who the invitation is from
b. what the invitation is for
c. how to access the survey
Send a test invitation to friends or colleagues to see how long it takes them to answer to those
three questions.
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
Recommended Tool: Checkbox’s Email Invitations Wizard allows you to create an unlimited
number of email invitations for any given survey. Depending on your plan you can deploy
between 5000 and an unlimited number of invitations to recipients per month. After an
invitation is sent you can filter recipients by who has responded, opted-out, or deleted an
invitation, and send reminders if desired.
2. Make a Good First Impression
A potential homebuyer makes up her mind within the first 8 seconds of walking through the
front door. A website viewer decides whether or not to stay on a page in under 3 seconds. The
same rules apply to survey respondents. It’s all about the first impression. If potential
respondents don’t like what they see right off the bat, they could lose interest without even
glancing at the first question. Make the extra effort to create a dynamic style template for your
surveys.
A good survey design includes:
a. Majority of survey located “above the fold” - All of the important information you want
to present to a respondent (messages, questions, logos, buttons, etc.), should be clearly
placed “above the fold,” a term borrowed from print media that translates to the web
as “visible without scrolling.”
b. Strategic color placement – create some visual interest without overpowering the
survey questions.
c. Contrasting text – make sure important information stands out.
d. Branding! – include a company logo in the header or footer of your survey and use your
brand colors in survey elements like borders, progress bars, and navigation buttons. You
want respondents to recognize your brand in those first precious seconds so be sure to
reflect your company or organization in your survey design.
e. No third party branding - If you are using a third party survey creation tool to build
surveys or forms, try to find one that doesn’t brand every page of your survey with their
own company logo. This can be confusing to respondents and diminishes the
professionalism of your survey.
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
No Style Applied:
Style Applied:
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
Recommended Tool: Create customized survey style templates within Checkbox’s Styles
Manager. Templates can be applied to multiple surveys to maintain a consistent campaign look
and feel. Customizable features include progress bars, background colors and images, buttons,
borders, matrix styles, headers, footers, body text, and more! No technical knowledge is
required to create customized survey templates.
3. Set Expectations
The information included on the first page of a survey should clearly identify who the survey is
from, what it is for, and should set expectations for how long the survey should take to
complete. Time yourself taking the survey to gauge an estimate. Knowing the time required to
complete a survey in advance allows respondents work it into their schedules. If no estimate is
indicated and a respondent begins a survey assuming it will only take 5 minutes, he is more
likely to abandon the survey after the 5 minutes he allotted himself have elapsed.
Another best practice is to include survey progress markers, such as page numbers and
progress bars, on every page of a survey. Progress markers track respondents’ progress though
a survey, encourage them to continue, and set expectations for how much more time will be
needed to complete the survey. If there is no end in sight, respondents may be more likely
abandon the survey.
Recommended Tool: Mention the survey length or estimated completion time in a Message
Item at the beginning of your survey. Checkbox also offers progress markers such as “page___
out of ___” indicators and a customizable progress bar that let the respondent know how far
they are in the survey.
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
4. Simplify
The “above the fold” rule doesn’t stop on the first page of a survey. If at all possible, avoid long
lists of survey questions. Scrolling through pages wastes time and can be frustrating for a
respondent, reducing the likelihood that they will complete your survey. Try to keep the
number of questions on a page under 5 to ensure your navigation buttons (next, back, submit)
are kept in sight at all times. Having the buttons visible encourages respondents to continue.
Ask conditional qualifying questions to determine whether certain questions or pages can be
hidden from a respondent later in the survey. This not only tailors your survey to each
individual respondent, but condenses the overall survey by weeding out irrelevant questions.
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
Use conditions and skip logic to condense and personalize surveys. Had the survey creator in the
example above asked a qualifying question about whether or not the respondent donates
online, those respondents who do not donate online could have skipped over this page entirely.
In the same vein as conditions/skip logic, text merging can be used to prepopulate default
values, such as contact information, to save the respondent time.
Recommended Tool: Set up page conditions, item conditions, branching rules, and use merging
to tailor surveys to respondents.
5. Positive Reinforcement
Although we like to think that respondents want to spend their free time completing our
surveys, the truth is most of them need a little motivation. Offering an incentive for completing
a survey is a sure-fire way to increase a survey’s response rate.
Commonly used incentive offers include:
Gift certificates
Vacation draws
Store credit
Free training
Although incentive offers almost always yield a higher number of responses, be aware that the
quality of responses can sometimes be compromised by the desire win a prize. If you think
respondents might be racing though surveys for the reward without putting much thought into
their answers, consider changing the incentive offer or removing it all together.
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
A tip for positively reinforcing respondents to complete surveys on the long term is to divulge
survey response data. Unless explicitly told, respondents don’t usually expect to see the results
of a survey they take, but if the opportunity arose, they would jump at the chance to see if their
opinions align with the masses. Not only are respondents curious about the data, they like the
feeling of inclusion they get when such information is shared with them.
Rewarding respondents with the knowledge that their participation in your survey directly
influenced positive changes in your organization will likely encourage them to not only
complete future surveys, but provide thoughtful responses. Below are two examples of how
you could reveal response data to respondents:
a. Display hard facts, such as an aggregate visual report, at the end of a survey to show
respondents where they fit in.
b. Email respondents with results after the survey closes: “80% of students indicated that
evening classes are preferred over morning classes, therefor we will be increasing the
number of evening course offerings beginning Spring 2012 semester…” or “As a result
of your helpful feedback, EcoLight.com has decided to extend our holiday support
hours from 9AM-5PM to 8AM-midnight through January 10, 2012…”
Recommended Tool: Checkbox’s reporting tool allows you to generate engaging, sharable visual
reports. The application also doubles as an email tool, which can be used to distribute response
or incentive information to respondents.
6. Make it Count
Give respondents a meaningful reason (other than a prize) to complete your survey. Think
about who is responding to your survey and establish your relationship with them right away.
Are your target respondents employees? Customers? Whoever your respondents are, they
aren’t going to give your survey a second look if they don’t feel invested in it in some way.
In your survey email invitation or on the welcome page of your survey, explain (as concisely as
possible):
a. your relationship to the respondent
b. why the respondent is being asked to take the survey
c. why they should complete the survey
8 Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Potential
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
The latter could be accomplished by describing how the respondent feedback could benefit
them down the line.
In the welcome message above you can easily pick out the relationship between the survey sender and respondent (respondent attended sender’s show), why the respondent is being asked to take the survey (sender requests attendee opinions, comments and questions), and how completing the survey will benefit the respondent (relevant and useful content in future shows and the chance to win two free passes to next year’s show).
7. Test
Before making a survey live to potential respondents, make sure you and a few others test the
survey for grammar, flow, and ease of use. If you include conditions in a survey, test all of the
possible logic paths. Remember, if you have difficulty taking a survey so will your respondents.
Avoid confusion and survey abandonment by always testing surveys before launching it.
Recommended Tool: Checkbox allows you to test surveys at any point during the survey
creation process. You can even share a test link to allow others to submit “test responses,”
which are separated from actual responses.
8. Remind, Remind, Remind
Sometimes all respondents need to complete a survey is a little push. Just because they didn’t
respond to your survey the day you launched it doesn’t mean they didn’t want to. Maybe they
simply got busy and forgot. Because this is often the case, it doesn’t hurt to send or post a
reminder towards the end of a survey response period.
Create a sense of urgency in survey reminders by informing respondents that time is running
out to get their voices heard. Don’t get carried away, though. One or two reminders should be
enough to boost your response rate.
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© 2012 Checkbox Survey Solutions ∙ 44 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472 ∙ www.checkbox.com
Filter Recipients by Response Status:
Send a Reminder Email to Recipients Who Haven’t Responded:
Recommended Tool: Using Checkbox’s powerful Invitations Manager you have the ability to
filter recipients by response status and send reminders to anyone who hasn’t responded.