Compelling Survey Invitations
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 17, 2009
You've gotten the recipient to jump all the hurdles to get to the survey except for the last one - reading the invitation and clicking on the survey link.
You now have the challenge of writing a short but motivating invitation that will prompt your recipient to become a respondent.
As with any attempt at marketing, you have less than eight seconds to make a first impression. A clever use of images can help catch people's attention. You need to tell recipients what you want them to do as soon as possible in the invitation. Know your audience and write the invitation with this knowledge in mind. Keep the invitation short-but cover the key points.
Patrick Glaser's "A Playbook for Creating Survey Introductions for Online Panels" provides a useful outline for a survey invitation, along with example phrases.
I wish I could give you some proven catchphrases for subject lines that work with every survey, but what worked once--"Help us improve our products" or "Share your opinion"--might not work on the next round of survey invitations to the same audience. Experimentation and inventiveness are essential.
Do not make privacy claims that you may not keep. This tends to happen by mistake rather than from any intention to mislead recipients. Often you are surveying your customer base and will want to set up survey alerts and email triggers so that you can respond directly to dissatisfied customers to address their problems; don't then tell them in the invitation that their survey responses will only be used when aggregated with other responses.
Similarly, do not offer incentives that you can't deliver. Again, this tends to happen by mistake, when an organization promises every respondent a reward, then has far more awards than imagined. See last week's post for strategies for survey incentives.