More and more companies ask their customers for feedback nowadays. We at CheckMarket think that the increase of customer-centricity is great, but unfortunately there’s not only good news attached to it. People are getting a bit tired of filling in surveys, because they simply receive lots and lots of invitations on a regular basis. Survey fatigue is coming to the surface. Since getting valuable feedback is essential, how do you make people open your invitations? These 5 tips will help you get your feedback requests clicked on more easily.
1. Don’t send out too many surveys
Really, don’t… It’s all about timing and relevance. People already get a ton of emails a day, so you have to find the right time in the customer journey to ask for feedback. Send short transactional surveys right after someone interacts with your company. This can be a purchase, a delivery, etc. These invitation emails are most likely to be opened when they are most relevant to your audience, so you need to figure this out first.
Send out relational surveys using larger time intervals in between them, such as every 6 months or even a year. These surveys are used to evaluate a customer’s overal satisfaction and relationship with a company or organization, so you don’t have to measure this monthly. Here it’s also important to keep track of the people you recently invited and make sure they won’t be invited again too soon. We recommend using email batches and drip surveys to spread your invitations over time rather than all at once. This way, you receive feedback constantly.
When you don’t keep timing and relevance in mind, chances are your audience gets annoyed quickly. This can damage your organization’s image, so don’t get on your respondent’s nerves. It’s very difficult to restore your image after it’s affected. So think carefully about your survey goal and create an efficient feedback system.
2. Put some effort into your invitations
In an ideal world you easily reach your entire customer base or target audience, but the average response rate for surveys via email is only around 10-15 percent. Boosting that number is what we’re going for, so let’s put some extra effort into your email invitation. Create an engaging subject line, write a compelling text, improve the design, provide a deadline and the exact duration of your survey, etc. Also, stress the importance of your respondents’ feedback and thank them in advance. You’re asking for a favor, so you should treat them right.
Before you press send you need to do some testing to see which subject line, body text, layout and from name works best. Change things up a little every time you send out some test invitations and use the one that gets clicked on the most.
The purpose of the invitation is to get your audience to fill in your survey. That’s why the step from email to survey has to be as easy as possible. Sure, you can add a button or a link to your invitation, but it’s even better to embed the first question. Why? Because respondents can start filling in your survey directly from their email. This works wonders for your response rate. Less clicks equals more responses!
3. Use incentives as extra motivation
Incentives can help you to increase response rate. It’s simple: the better the incentive, the higher the response. When choosing the right incentive, you need to think carefully about your target audience. While movie tickets or discounts are great for consumer surveys, they will have less impact on a B2B audience. Small side note: a great incentive doesn’t do the trick by itself. You still need a well-designed survey and an optimized email invitation.
4. Send out tailored reminders
If a respondent doesn’t respond right away, take a second chance by sending out reminders. Don’t just send the original email invitation again, but alter and shorten the text and subject line. Once again, let them know the importance of their feedback and remind them about the incentive you’re giving. Sometimes, respondents only complete a survey partially. That’s when reminders can come in handy too. Thank partial-respondents for their time and effort and politely ask them to continue.
5. Create an engaging survey
Let’s summarize. You got your audience’s attention, they opened your invitation and clicked through to your survey. So, now what? Your survey needs to be completed of course, so you need to make the respondent’s experience as pleasant as possible. If you do so, they will not only get to the end more easily, they will probably fill in your next surveys as well. If you bore them now, chances are that this was your last survey they filled in.
Look at it as a chance to create a loyal relationship with your customers, so treat them well. Here are some practical guidelines. Choose the right amount of questions, don’t make matrices too long, add a fun design to your survey, use images or videos to engage respondents, etc. The best way to check whether you made a killer survey or not, is to fill it in yourself. Let colleagues fill it in as well. If someone starts yawning, you know you need to make some changes to convince your audience. Good luck! ?
Do you experience survey fatigue from your audience? How do you try to avoid it? Let us know in the comments below!
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