Survey Invitation Best Practices
Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Feb 25, 2011
The goal of an invitation to an online survey is to inspire people to stop reading all their email and spend their valuable time taking your survey. The best survey invitation will compel 100% of recipients to take your survey (and I’ve seen this happen for a few employee-feedback studies). A good invitation will provide you an optimal response rate of at least 20%. And, of course, a bad invitation can lead to a 0% response rate (which, fortunately, has only happened to me once in 15 years).
What are the best practices you should follow to create effective invitations?
Sometimes people like to send out an email in advance of the actual invitation, letting potential respondents know that they will soon be receiving an invite to an online survey. Such pre-notification messages don’t improve response rates, unless the pre-notification is sent via a different mode: a postcard in the mail, a letter or phone call, for instance. In my experience, such pre-notifications are not cost-effective. Which brings us to the invitation itself…
The first thing most respondents see for your invitation is the subject line and sender in their email In Box. Many researchers shy away from the word survey, but Dan Zarrella found that survey was the third most powerful word to include in the subject; stay away from mentioning incentives or discounts in the subject line. Short, plain subject lines are often very effective: “Please take our survey” outperforms “Share your feedback with your recent transaction to earn valuable discounts”.
The sender is important but the best practice for your organization may require some experimentation to discover: the American College of Cardiology had higher response rates to surveys sent out under the president’s name, whereas the University of Albany found no difference; some organizations use the brand name as the sender, a special research address, or even a fictional person. You’ll need to test this to see what works best for you.
When the recipient clicks on the email, the first thing they should see is their name. Personalized survey invitations produce higher response rates by establishing “a connection between the surveyor and the respondent that is necessary to invoke social exchange” (Dillman, Smyth and Christian, 2009).
Near the top of the message should be a short, clear call to take the survey, with the hyperlink. Don’t have too much text – the recipient is aware you’re asking them to take a survey and most know the drill by now; they will click the link while barely reading the text. For those of your recipients who are readers, you can then include more context about why are you doing this research and how their participation will benefit them, then repeat the link to the survey. If they have been randomly selected to take part, mentioning the exclusivity of the invite will improve response rates: “You are one of a small, select group of customers that we have invited to provide us feedback.”
Always end an invite with a clear link that recipients can use to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Clicking the link should allow them to unsubscribe from all mailings or particular mail channels. In the footer, include the physical address of your establishment for CAN-SPAM compliance.
What time should you send email invites? When in doubt, try for early morning mails on weekends (regardless of whether the survey is for business people or consumers). When you have been running surveys for a while, study the response data to see what time your audience has responded and use that to guide your invitation times. When surveying after a transaction (such as a purchase or a call to a contact center), the sooner the invite goes out the higher the response rate.
Your marketing department typically has experience in crafting email marketing campaigns, and they have many skills that can help you: the ability to write compelling copy that generates a Call To Action (in this case, starting the survey), graphics-design skills to improve the appearance of the invitation, and testing skills to run multiple invitations to see which perform best. All of that might be overkill for a one-time ad hoc survey, but it is time well spent for a transactional survey for which you will be sending out invites on a regular, automated basis.
Of course, great survey invitations alone are not all that affect response rates. Check out these other tips for improving survey response rates.
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