10 Tips to Improve Your Survey Responses

The following offers tips from Zoomerang, on how to improve the quality and quantity of your survey response rates.

1. Clearly define the purpose of the survey.

Good surveys have focused objectives that are easily understood. For a survey to be successful you need to spend time up front to identify, IN WRITING:

What is the goal of this survey?

-	What do you hope to accomplish with this survey?
-	Why are you creating this survey?

How will you use the data you are collecting?

-	What decisions do you hope to be able to provide input to from this survey? (This will later help you identify what data you need to collect in order to make these decisions)

Sounds obvious, but we have seen plenty of surveys where a few minutes planning could have made the difference between receiving quality responses (defined as responses that are useful as inputs to decisions) instead of un-interpretable data.

Consider the case of the software firm that wanted to find out what new functionality was most important to customers. The survey asked ‘How can we improve our product?’ The resulting answers were anything from ‘Make it easier’ to ‘Add an update button on the recruiting page’. While interesting information – and perhaps the insight that users viewed the software as ‘hard to use’ should be examined – this data is not really helpful for the product manager who wanted to take an itemized list to the development team using customer input as a prioritization variable.

Spending time identifying the objective might have helped the survey creators determine: 1) are we trying to understand our customers' perception of our software in order to identify areas of improvement e.g. hard to use, time consuming, unreliable or 2) or are we trying to understand the value of specific enhancements. For example, please rank from 1 – 5 the importance of adding X new functionality.

Fuzzy goals lead to fuzzy results and the last thing you want to end up with is a set of results that provide no real decision enhancing value. Upfront planning helps ensure that the surveys ask the right questions to meet the objective and therefore the data you collect is useful.

2. Keep the survey short and focused

Short and focused helps with both quality and quantity of response. It is generally better to focus on a single objective than try to create a master survey that covers multiple objectives.

Shorter surveys generally have high response rates and lower abandonment among survey takers. It’s human nature to want things to be quick and easy – once a survey taker loses interest they simply abandon – leaving you with the task of determining how to interpret that partial data set (or whether to use it all).

Make sure each of your questions is focused on helping to meet your stated objective. Don’t toss in ‘nice to have’ questions unless that don’t directly provide data to help you meet your objectives.

Time a few people taking the survey. Ideally the survey should take 5 minutes or less to complete. 6 – 10 minutes is OK, however, we see significant abandonment rates occurring after 11 minutes.

3. Keep the questions simple.

Make sure your questions get to the point and avoid the use of jargon. We on the Zoom team have often received surveys with questions along the lines of. “When was the last time you used our RGS?” (Huh? What’s RGS?) Don’t assume that your survey takers are as comfortable with your acronyms as you are.

Try to make your questions as specific and direct as possible. Compare: What has your experience been working with our HR team? To: How satisfied are you with the response time of our HR team?

4. Used closed ended questions whenever possible

Closed ended questions can take the form of yes/no, multiple choice or rating scale. Closed ended questions make it easier to analyze results. Open-ended questions are great supplemental questions and may provide useful qualitative information and insights, however, for collating and analysis purposes close-ended questions are preferable. One caveat is to make sure your closed ended question doesn’t force survey takers into picking a ‘less bad’ answer.

5. Keep rating scale questions consistent

Rating scales are a great way to measure and compare sets of variables. If you elect to use rating scales (e.g. from 1 – 5) keep it consistent throughout the survey; use the same number of points on the scale and make sure meanings of high and low stay consistent. Also, use an odd number in your rating scale to make data analysis easier. Switching your rating scales around will confuse survey takers leading to untrustworthy responses.

6. Logical ordering

Make sure your survey flows in a logical order. Begin with a brief introduction – do not reveal the survey objective. Next, it is a good idea to generally start from broader based questions moving to those narrower in scope. It is usually better to collect demographic data and ask any particularly sensitive questions at the end (unless you are using this information to screen out survey participants). If you are asking for contact information, place that information last.

7. Pre-test your survey

Make sure you pre-test your survey with a few members of your target audience to find glitches and unexpected question interpretations.

8. If sending survey by email avoid Friday, Saturday or Sunday

In general, we have found that avoiding these days helps improve results. In addition, Mondays are also good days to avoid as many people have loaded in-boxes they are wading through Monday morning.

9. Consider using reminders

While not appropriate for all surveys, sending out reminders to those who haven’t previously responded often can often provide a significant boost to response rates.

10. Consider offering an incentive

Depending upon the type of survey and survey audience, offering an incentive is usually very effective in improving response rates. People like the idea of getting something for their time and we have found that incentives typically boost response rates by 50% on average.

One caveat is to keep the incentive appropriate in scope. Overly large incentives can lead to undesirable behavior e.g. people lying about demographics etc in order to not be screened out from taking the survey.

Get your survey started today! Zoomerang