When you send surveys to your target audience, how sure are you that the responses received are enough? The appropriate survey response rate for your industry is something you need to know.
To evaluate whether or not your survey campaigns are successful, you must determine an acceptable response rate. This is essentially part of your market research.
In this post, we will take a look at survey response rates and how they impact business growth. What factors affect good survey response rates? What might be some of the best ways to hike up these rates?
Let’s dive straight in! Now’s your chance to fully explore everything you need to know when it comes to survey response rates.
Collect feedback with JustFeedback
JustFeedback helps your business increase profits and reduce risk by improving your customer experience
What is a survey response rate?
We should first define a survey response rate before discussing its importance. A survey response rate is calculated based on the percentage of people responding to a survey.
This response rate is calculated by dividing the number of respondents to a survey by the total number of people you sent it to. What follows is the formula you can use —
Survey Response Rate = (Number of people who responded) / (Total number of people survey sent to) X 100
A typical survey response rate should reveal exactly how effective your organization is in encouraging people to respond to any surveys you send out.
Let’s take an example:
Imagine you send out a survey to 1000 people and you receive 300 responses to it. In this instance, your survey response rate will be calculated at 30 percent.
Why are survey response rates important?
Examining your survey response rate is a crucial task when it comes to understanding your survey performance. It is only once you start monitoring the rate of survey responses that you can achieve good results.
Being capable of achieving an acceptable survey response rate is vital. This is because a low response rate can result in sampling bias.
On top of sampling bias, you might also encounter non-response bias — which occurs when inaccurate responses are given to a survey.
In other words, a low average survey response rate provides an inaccurate overview of an issue and could potentially cause harm.
Both the volume and quality of your survey responses can have an impact on your understanding of any results. Survey response rates are used to draw valuable conclusions about the performance of survey campaigns.
This could lead to ineffective follow-up actions — possibly impacting customer satisfaction and experience.
What is a good average survey response rate?
This is a highly debated topic. The number of people you are targeting is required before sending your surveys.
Your sample size and the number of responses you wish to receive from your surveys should be calculated beforehand.
These factors are important to discuss because you want to determine an acceptable response rate.
However, you can always base your estimations on the typical average survey response rate which is between 5-30 percent. If you receive 50 percent or more, consider yourself a response rate superstar.
If you are in a B2B industry, you should expect a survey response rate 10-15 percent higher than those of B2C companies.
Age is also a factor that has to be taken into account. Remember that a younger audience is more likely to answer a survey than an older one.
Differences in response rates between employees and customers are significant. Survey responses from employees can be 20-40 percent higher than from a customer base.
What are the factors that affect survey response rate?
Here are some factors you should consider when calculating or standardizing your survey response rate.
1. Survey purpose
What is the objective or goal behind running your survey campaign?
It is imperative to determine the “why” behind the survey if you want to receive a survey response rate that is of any value. The objective should tie in with what you want to achieve with a particular survey.
Once you have a clear goal in mind, you will find it easier to convince recipients to complete the survey. This plan will also help you improve your email subject line and prevent it from being too vague.
Once you have understood your purpose, stick to it and remain specific.
2. Survey UX
Experience is where it’s at in terms of survey responses. You will have to provide a top-notch experience for your survey recipient.
This is only possible if you pay adequate attention to how the surveys look and read. You will have to ensure that everything on the survey is clear and easy to follow.
A huge part of survey UX comes down to personalization. We highly recommend you send personalized invites for your surveys while ensuring the language used matches the target demographic. Your survey needs to have the human touch.
3. Length of survey
Modern-day customers are savvy. At the same time, they are very easily distracted. How do you intend to keep their interest as they tackle your survey?
The best way is by shortening your survey.
The longer the survey, the higher the chances of respondents quitting halfway through it. This is why we suggest you stick to essential questions whose answers you need to know. Your surveys should not take more than five minutes to complete.
If it does, you will experience a 15 percent drop in response rate.
4. Target audience
Who do you want to complete your surveys? What do you already know about them?
These are the questions you should ask yourself before drafting any surveys as the questions your surveys will be designed to ask will depend on the target audience.
As a result, your response rate will heavily depend on the target audience. Be careful not to make the mistake of sending out the same survey to different target audiences.
As mentioned further up the post, response rates differ dramatically between B2C and B2B audiences.
5. Incentives
Why should the target audience consider filling out your survey? You are sending the surveys as part of your research campaigns, but what’s in it for your respondents?
Offering interesting incentives is a way of encouraging respondents to complete your survey. A 10-15 percent can be expected to the average response rate when an incentive is added to a campaign.
Remember that both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives can be used to achieve this.
- Intrinsic rewards allow the audience to understand that their responses will help you serve them better.
- Extrinsic rewards can include coupons or discounts to compensate respondents for the time they have taken to complete your survey.
6. Campaign management
The survey campaign doesn’t solely involve defining the target audience and questions. It is also about ensuring adequate brand perception and visibility. A high response rate also depends on how you manage the campaign.
We highly recommend you build a team of professionals that can focus on working on brand perception, security, and respondents’ privacy.
The team should foster the anonymity of all respondents and must follow up with them in a positive manner. The team must be able to create exciting survey campaigns to increase survey response and completion rates.
How to boost the survey response rate?
Let’s take a closer look at some practical tips you can implement to increase the survey response rate on your campaigns.
1. Add exciting incentives
Let’s start out with the basics. Incentive-based survey campaigns are successful time and time again. Therefore, you should not think twice before incorporating incentives or rewards into your survey campaigns.
Incentives tend to increase survey participation and boost online survey response rates.
However, you must make sure each respondent receives the incentive. We advise you to tell all respondents why they have been chosen for a particular survey and how their responses will help your company to shape its products and services.
Remember to explain exactly how you will use the survey feedback.
2. Involve a survey panel
If increasing survey participation is your objective, we have a perfect tip you can implement with immediate effect. Create a dedicated survey panel for your company.
If your budget allows for it, you can build and manage your own research panel, which will essentially establish a group of pre-selected respondents.
In this case, the respondents are generally volunteers who will complete the surveys. This tactic helps you save time and avoids having to build a long list of respondents for each new survey campaign.
3. Theory of cognitive dissonance
Have you ever wondered if we’d go so far as to suggest using psychological theories to help make your surveys work?
Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing! We recommend you use the theory of cognitive dissonance. This idea states that as you reduce dissonance, the respondents then make the decision to respond.
What do we mean by this? Basically, you can increase the chances of getting a response if you frame the survey in a way that aligns with the respondents’ values and beliefs. So, when crafting the survey, try to consider the respondents’ personal values.
4. Use the right channels
The modern world of communication is run through an array of channels. As a business owner or researcher, you will have to choose from a wide range of communication channels. How exactly are you going to shortlist the right channels?
You need to begin by discovering which channels your target audience uses the most. If you don’t have the time to conduct research, you can simply run an email survey. However, make sure the survey is responsive.
5. Keep it concise and focused
Good luck if you expect your respondents to work their way through a long survey. It’s never going to happen. It has been reported that the average person’s attention span has been declining over recent years. But could this serve as a blessing in disguise?
This reduced attention span gives us the opportunity to focus on those questions that matter most.
Shortlist the most critical questions and make sure your survey is short and to the point. Polish the questions to make them clear and precise. Conciseness should be the order of the day here, especially if you’re not offering any incentives.
6. Have realistic expectations
What are you expecting out of your surveys? More importantly, what do you think the respondents are expecting when they receive the surveys? You need to approach this with utmost honesty.
You must ensure that respondents receive what you promised them when they click on the survey link. This could, for example, refer to the time required to complete a survey or the number of questions within one.
7. Personalize the surveys
We have always been proponents of personalization.
When aiming to boost survey response rates, we suggest you envisage ways to personalize the surveys for your respondents. You could increase the response rate by up to 48 percent by personalizing a survey.
The idea behind personalization is to add a human dimension to your survey invites. Make sure you use the respondents’ first names in the invites, for example. The more personalized the survey, the more interesting it is to fill out.
8. Gently remind the respondents
You’ve developed a survey and sent it to a list of respondents, right? You’re halfway there already! You might have even started receiving some responses.
However, to make the survey campaign a success, you must follow up with your respondents and remind them to take your survey.
We highly recommend you send a gentle reminder to your survey respondents. This could boost the survey response rate by up to 36 percent. A gentle nudge to fill out a survey or provide feedback can go a long way.
9. Choose the right software to send surveys
Are you planning to send the survey invites manually? This could take up a lot of time and effort. We don’t recommend it.
The more accessible and more effective alternative is to use survey software. Using survey software can help develop a questionnaire, track survey results, and generate actionable insights.
Survey software also comes loaded with pre-designed survey templates you can use to hit the ground running. However, we recommend you examine what exactly you need from the software before shortlisting a few options.
10. Make the survey relevant
Relevance is a significant factor that will impact your survey response rate. You know you have to complete market research and know who your audience is. But are the questions in the survey relevant to this target audience?
The topic of the survey should be strictly relevant to the respondents. You can ensure this by figuring out the key pain points of the target audience.
Once you target the pain points in the survey, gaining the respondents’ attention and boosting survey response rates will become easier.
11. Make it easier to complete the survey
How can you make the surveys easier to complete for your respondents? It’s simple. You have to ensure that your surveys are easily accessible.
This is an excellent start to the process.
Make the surveys accessible by embedding them on your official website or social media channels. The surveys should open up on mobile devices and load seamlessly.
Final thoughts on boosting average response rate
We’ve given you a lot to go on in this post, but it doesn’t stop there! You can always learn from the results you gain and take further steps.
To significantly increase your average response rate, you can connect with your respondents and collect feedback about your survey campaigns.
The more you know, the better, right?
We highly recommend putting the tips mentioned in this post into action. However, you can always start out with just a few instead of implementing the whole lot in one go.
Most importantly, you should keep your respondents at the center of your survey and build strategies around them. Did you find this post helpful?
Stay tuned for more informative posts in the future.When you send surveys to your target audience, how sure are you that the responses received are enough? The appropriate survey response rate for your industry is something you need to know.
To evaluate whether or not your survey campaigns are successful, you must determine an acceptable response rate. This is essentially part of your market research.
In this post, we will take a look at survey response rates and how they impact business growth. What factors affect good survey response rates? What might be some of the best ways to hike up these rates?
Let’s dive straight in! Now’s your chance to fully explore everything you need to know when it comes to survey response rates.
Collect feedback with JustFeedback
JustFeedback helps your business increase profits and reduce risk by improving your customer experience
What is a Survey Response Rate?
We should first define a survey response rate before discussing its importance. A survey response rate is calculated based on the percentage of people responding to a survey.
This response rate is calculated by dividing the number of respondents to a survey by the total number of people you sent it to. What follows is the formula you can use —
Survey Response Rate = (Number of people who responded) / (Total number of people survey sent to) X 100
A typical survey response rate should reveal exactly how effective your organization is in encouraging people to respond to any surveys you send out.
Let’s take an example:
Imagine you send out a survey to 1000 people and you receive 300 responses to it. In this instance, your survey response rate will be calculated at 30 percent.
Why are survey response rates important?
Examining your survey response rate is a crucial task when it comes to understanding your survey performance. It is only once you start monitoring the rate of survey responses that you can achieve good results.
Being capable of achieving an acceptable survey response rate is vital. This is because a low response rate can result in sampling bias.
On top of sampling bias, you might also encounter non-response bias — which occurs when inaccurate responses are given to a survey.
In other words, a low average survey response rate provides an inaccurate overview of an issue and could potentially cause harm.
Both the volume and quality of your survey responses can have an impact on your understanding of any results. Survey response rates are used to draw valuable conclusions about the performance of survey campaigns.
This could lead to ineffective follow-up actions — possibly impacting customer satisfaction and experience.
What is a good average survey response rate?
This is a highly debated topic. The number of people you are targeting is required before sending your surveys.
Your sample size and the number of responses you wish to receive from your surveys should be calculated beforehand.
These factors are important to discuss because you want to determine an acceptable response rate.
However, you can always base your estimations on the typical average survey response rate which is between 5-30 percent. If you receive 50 percent or more, consider yourself a response rate superstar.
If you are in a B2B industry, you should expect a survey response rate 10-15 percent higher than those of B2C companies.
Age is also a factor that has to be taken into account. Remember that a younger audience is more likely to answer a survey than an older one.
Differences in response rates between employees and customers are significant. Survey responses from employees can be 20-40 percent higher than from a customer base.
What are the factors that affect survey response rate?
Here are some factors you should consider when calculating or standardizing your survey response rate.
1. Survey purpose
What is the objective or goal behind running your survey campaign?
It is imperative to determine the “why” behind the survey if you want to receive a survey response rate that is of any value. The objective should tie in with what you want to achieve with a particular survey.
Once you have a clear goal in mind, you will find it easier to convince recipients to complete the survey. This plan will also help you improve your email subject line and prevent it from being too vague.
Once you have understood your purpose, stick to it and remain specific.
2. Survey UX
Experience is where it’s at in terms of survey responses. You will have to provide a top-notch experience for your survey recipient.
This is only possible if you pay adequate attention to how the surveys look and read. You will have to ensure that everything on the survey is clear and easy to follow.
A huge part of survey UX comes down to personalization. We highly recommend you send personalized invites for your surveys while ensuring the language used matches the target demographic. Your survey needs to have the human touch.
3. Length of survey
Modern-day customers are savvy. At the same time, they are very easily distracted. How do you intend to keep their interest as they tackle your survey?
The best way is by shortening your survey.
The longer the survey, the higher the chances of respondents quitting halfway through it. This is why we suggest you stick to essential questions whose answers you need to know. Your surveys should not take more than five minutes to complete.
If it does, you will experience a 15 percent drop in response rate.
4. Target audience
Who do you want to complete your surveys? What do you already know about them?
These are the questions you should ask yourself before drafting any surveys as the questions your surveys will be designed to ask will depend on the target audience.
As a result, your response rate will heavily depend on the target audience. Be careful not to make the mistake of sending out the same survey to different target audiences.
As mentioned further up the post, response rates differ dramatically between B2C and B2B audiences.
5. Incentives
Why should the target audience consider filling out your survey? You are sending the surveys as part of your research campaigns, but what’s in it for your respondents?
Offering interesting incentives is a way of encouraging respondents to complete your survey. A 10-15 percent can be expected to the average response rate when an incentive is added to a campaign.
Remember that both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives can be used to achieve this.
- Intrinsic rewards allow the audience to understand that their responses will help you serve them better.
- Extrinsic rewards can include coupons or discounts to compensate respondents for the time they have taken to complete your survey.
6. Campaign management
The survey campaign doesn’t solely involve defining the target audience and questions. It is also about ensuring adequate brand perception and visibility. A high response rate also depends on how you manage the campaign.
We highly recommend you build a team of professionals that can focus on working on brand perception, security, and respondents’ privacy.
The team should foster the anonymity of all respondents and must follow up with them in a positive manner. The team must be able to create exciting survey campaigns to increase survey response and completion rates.
How to boost the survey response rate?
Let’s take a closer look at some practical tips you can implement to increase the survey response rate on your campaigns.
1. Add exciting incentives
Let’s start out with the basics. Incentive-based survey campaigns are successful time and time again. Therefore, you should not think twice before incorporating incentives or rewards into your survey campaigns.
Incentives tend to increase survey participation and boost online survey response rates.
However, you must make sure each respondent receives the incentive. We advise you to tell all respondents why they have been chosen for a particular survey and how their responses will help your company to shape its products and services.
Remember to explain exactly how you will use the survey feedback.
2. Involve a survey panel
If increasing survey participation is your objective, we have a perfect tip you can implement with immediate effect. Create a dedicated survey panel for your company.
If your budget allows for it, you can build and manage your own research panel, which will essentially establish a group of pre-selected respondents.
In this case, the respondents are generally volunteers who will complete the surveys. This tactic helps you save time and avoids having to build a long list of respondents for each new survey campaign.
3. Theory of cognitive dissonance
Have you ever wondered if we’d go so far as to suggest using psychological theories to help make your surveys work?
Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing! We recommend you use the theory of cognitive dissonance. This idea states that as you reduce dissonance, the respondents then make the decision to respond.
What do we mean by this? Basically, you can increase the chances of getting a response if you frame the survey in a way that aligns with the respondents’ values and beliefs. So, when crafting the survey, try to consider the respondents’ personal values.
4. Use the right channels
The modern world of communication is run through an array of channels. As a business owner or researcher, you will have to choose from a wide range of communication channels. How exactly are you going to shortlist the right channels?
You need to begin by discovering which channels your target audience uses the most. If you don’t have the time to conduct research, you can simply run an email survey. However, make sure the survey is responsive.
5. Keep it concise and focused
Good luck if you expect your respondents to work their way through a long survey. It’s never going to happen. It has been reported that the average person’s attention span has been declining over recent years. But could this serve as a blessing in disguise?
This reduced attention span gives us the opportunity to focus on those questions that matter most.
Shortlist the most critical questions and make sure your survey is short and to the point. Polish the questions to make them clear and precise. Conciseness should be the order of the day here, especially if you’re not offering any incentives.
6. Have realistic expectations
What are you expecting out of your surveys? More importantly, what do you think the respondents are expecting when they receive the surveys? You need to approach this with utmost honesty.
You must ensure that respondents receive what you promised them when they click on the survey link. This could, for example, refer to the time required to complete a survey or the number of questions within one.
7. Personalize the surveys
We have always been proponents of personalization.
When aiming to boost survey response rates, we suggest you envisage ways to personalize the surveys for your respondents. You could increase the response rate by up to 48 percent by personalizing a survey.
The idea behind personalization is to add a human dimension to your survey invites. Make sure you use the respondents’ first names in the invites, for example. The more personalized the survey, the more interesting it is to fill out.
8. Gently remind the respondents
You’ve developed a survey and sent it to a list of respondents, right? You’re halfway there already! You might have even started receiving some responses.
However, to make the survey campaign a success, you must follow up with your respondents and remind them to take your survey.
We highly recommend you send a gentle reminder to your survey respondents. This could boost the survey response rate by up to 36 percent. A gentle nudge to fill out a survey or provide feedback can go a long way.
9. Choose the right software to send surveys
Are you planning to send the survey invites manually? This could take up a lot of time and effort. We don’t recommend it.
The more accessible and more effective alternative is to use survey software. Using survey software can help develop a questionnaire, track survey results, and generate actionable insights.
Survey software also comes loaded with pre-designed survey templates you can use to hit the ground running. However, we recommend you examine what exactly you need from the software before shortlisting a few options.
10. Make the survey relevant
Relevance is a significant factor that will impact your survey response rate. You know you have to complete market research and know who your audience is. But are the questions in the survey relevant to this target audience?
The topic of the survey should be strictly relevant to the respondents. You can ensure this by figuring out the key pain points of the target audience.
Once you target the pain points in the survey, gaining the respondents’ attention and boosting survey response rates will become easier.
11. Make it easier to complete the survey
How can you make the surveys easier to complete for your respondents? It’s simple. You have to ensure that your surveys are easily accessible.
This is an excellent start to the process.
Make the surveys accessible by embedding them on your official website or social media channels. The surveys should open up on mobile devices and load seamlessly.
Final thoughts on boosting average response rate
We’ve given you a lot to go on in this post, but it doesn’t stop there! You can always learn from the results you gain and take further steps.
To significantly increase your average response rate, you can connect with your respondents and collect feedback about your survey campaigns.
The more you know, the better, right?
We highly recommend putting the tips mentioned in this post into action. However, you can always start out with just a few instead of implementing the whole lot in one go.
Most importantly, you should keep your respondents at the center of your survey and build strategies around them. Did you find this post helpful?
Stay tuned for more informative posts in the future.