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The Silver Bullet to Survey Success

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So it turns out there really is no silver bullet or magic potion when it comes to creating highly successful surveys. I know, I wish there was. If so I would whip it up for you, I swear! But as we discussed in my recent Webinar, The Seven Steps to Successful Surveys, there ARE ways to make your surveys as successful as possible.

First you must have a definitive goal for what information you need and what you plan on doing with it. Don’t let every department chime in with questions, be specific about what you want to accomplish and stick to it. Then, make sure to survey the right group of people for your needs. Maybe it’s everyone in your database or maybe you just need a sample. Craft your invitation carefully. A well-crafted initiation is essential to jumping response hurdles. Next, order your questions logically using the inverted pyramid approach, drilling down from general questions to the more specific. Then, try to write your questions objectively. Poorly worded questions will lead to suspect results and erroneous conclusions.

Now that you are all done crafting your excellent survey, shorten it! The more questions you have, the more customers will abandon the survey. Be as concise as possible and remember the goal of your survey. Think about going back through your survey and removing any questions that don’t directly address your original goal. And last, close that feedback loop and share the findings and identify the actions you are taking as a result of the survey. You can even use this to stimulate additional participation and ongoing feedback.

So even if you are taking all steps toward make your surveys as successful as possible many of you still had excellent questions about things like incentives and doing reminder campaigns. For incentives my advice is for your first survey mail campaign to a target audience, avoid offering incentives. You need to establish a baseline response rate for this target group. If you are disappointed in the response rate for this survey, you will now have a response rate to compare incentive-based campaigns against. If you decide to use an incentive, a large number of small incentives will typically get a better response than a small number of large incentives (thanks to my colleague Brian Koma for his “First Law of Incentives”). For more info on incentives, see the best practices noted in this blog post, Survey Incentive Strategies.

On the question of whether to use reminder campaigns, my advice was that for relationship surveys reminder campaigns should absolutely be used, with at least two reminders and ideally three. Be forewarned that you’ll receive most of your responses immediately after the initial invitation, and see incremental increases after each reminder. For transaction surveys a reminder campaign also works, but with only one reminder sent within a few days of the initial invitation. In this case you want fresh insight into a specific transaction without it being corrupted by additional interactions or other transactions.

So even if there is no silver bullet or magic potion, (sorry!) following some of these tips will help you achieve that ultimate goal of surveys that are as successful and effective as possible. And you don’t need to get near a bullet or some scary concoction either!