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How to Improve Survey Response Rates survey response rate

How to Improve Survey Response Rates

Improve your survey response rates

Follow 4 step framework to improve response rates by more than 40%.

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Table of Contents

Today’s Research Landscape

Many research organizations — from market researchers, public opinion, polling, corporate researchers, and beyond — are facing a decline in survey response rates.

AAPOR, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, frames the situation well: “[…] Largely due to increasing refusals, response rates across all modes of survey administration have declined, in some cases precipitously.”

Whether we attribute this decline to shortening attention spans, shifting of social behaviours, bombardment marketing communications, or other factors, researchers need to place heavy emphasis on ensuring the quality of their survey results.

Response rates are critical for the integrity of the research results. Low response rates can decrease the statistical validity of the collected data and undermine the overall study.

Your surveys are just one of the many messages your respondents receives on a daily basis, so how can organizations cut through the clutter?

While this paints a bleak picture, it is absolutely possible to drive response rates upwards and maintain the quality of the survey data collected.

This guide has been formulated to provide advice for researchers across all industries that wish to increase their response rates and place a focus on the respondent experience.

Maximize Survey Response Rates

Web-Based Online Surveys (CAWI)

survey overviewSingle online

Researchers need to follow suit to build a respondent experience that feels personalized to the individual.

Of course, the emphasis there is on the word “feels”. It is simply not possible for researchers to build surveys for one respondent at a time. In the case of online surveys, heavy importance must be placed on advanced tactics like: sophisticated logic, advanced skip patterns, and engaging multimedia incorporation — made possible by professional survey software.

Design Surveys for Visual Impact

It may seem innately obvious, but many survey programmers often forget the importance of making your survey aesthetically pleasing. In short, the visual formatting of the survey heavily contributes to the respondent experience.

Sprucing up the aesthetics of your survey can be done in a few quick ways: changing colors and adding logos to match branding, embedding multimedia files like images and video, and using dynamic backgrounds to make the survey pop.

Employ Image Area Evaluation

Another more advanced visual tactic for engaging survey questions is using an image area evaluator. This can be used for various question types, but is most effective when evaluating concepts that are difficult to communicate in words — like choosing your seat on an airline flight.

This interactive question type isn’t incredibly common, so it’s likely that respondents will be pleasantly surprised and be more likely to respond if they see it.

In fact, you can even use image area evaluators for positive and negative selections, so one question can extract two types of data at the same time.

Apply Skip Logic

Engaging, personalized surveys allow dynamic same-page skipping or even same-table skipping that reacts instantly to respondents’ choices. As researchers, we must seek to eliminate question roadblocks in our survey, where respondents don’t see themselves in the questions that are appearing in front of them.

Manually skipping questions or re-answering that a question is non-applicable will frustrate respondents and increase drop-outs — sometimes dramatically.

Using robust skip logic in your surveys will enhance your dataset and drive completion/response rates.

survey skip online

Sophisticated Branching Logic

Branching is a useful method for moving respondents down specific, pre-planned paths built within the survey. The particular path they take depends on how the respondents answer previous question — like a “choose your own adventure” novel!

This tactic contributes to personalization in the way that it is responsive to the audiences’ actions.

It only presents questions relevant to the respondent and it can follow the natural flow of a conversation, which keeps them engaged.

Piping Tactics for Engagement

Piping is a survey logic tactic that is defined by taking past responses and then echoing them in future questions within the same survey. In turn, respondents feel heard and that their responses have some sort of impact, further fostering their engagement.

Good survey software allows the piping of text, number values, and even images. For example: displaying a respondents’ survey score as they complete the survey.

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Telephone Interview-Based Surveys (CATI)

Driving response rates for phone surveys hinges on two key different factors: the skills of the interviewers and the abilities of your phone survey software.

survey CATI online

The good news is that the right software features will help you work with your interviewers — features that we will define further below.

There are thousands of survey call centers that use antiquated and unintuitive phone survey software, which impacts the response rates and the quality of the data collected.

Quota Management For Your Data

Firstly, you will want to work with a software that allows you to manage and set virtually any number of strata to match the goals of your research, so your data is as refined as possible.

This features ensure that you are reaching the right people, which will increase your likelihood of a complete. In the event that getting all completes is difficult, the other weighting and balancing features can help keep the data clean.

It’s crucial that you have a software that allows you to do dynamic weighting and load balancing available to you in order to get the desired ratio.

Online Surveys

Quota Management For Your Interviewers

You can also use back-end quota management programming to serve interviewers with a particular kind of respondent to connect with. Examples of this may include: an interview needs to be done in a specific language, or the respondent has refused and you need to engage a high-converting interviewer.

As interview refusals increase, it’s become more important than ever to employ methods like these and rely on a strong team of interviewers and robust software to keep delivering results.

survey catiQuota online

Robust Callback Rules

Interviewers instinctively hop on to calls desperate to get the person on the other line to listen to them. That being said, interviewers need to truly listen to the potential respondent.

Are they busy? Do they need to call back later? These are the questions that your interviewer needs to be asking themselves. Perhaps they should be classified as a callback and be contacted again later.

Being able to sort and manage potential respondents within your database with robust callback rules is key to reaching engaged and willing respondents.

Advanced Logic

We often talk about employing advanced logic programming for online surveys, but programming the back-end of your phone surveys is also incredibly important. You can use above-mentioned methods (from the online survey section) like skipping, branching, etc. to make the interviewing process easier for your staff.

In essence, the more “automated” the line of questioning is, the more simple it is for the interviewer to engage the respondent with relevant questions and get the data you need to complete the study.

Explore all the survey question types possible on Voxco

Try a Sample Survey

Explore all the survey question types possible on Voxco

Try a Sample Survey

A Gap In The Market

According to a study conducted by Econsultancy in 2018, just 7% of organizations list personalization as a priority. This means that treating respondents with a personalized experience can set you apart from your competition — driving up completes/responses, and helping you deliver quality data faster.

While most researchers are well aware of the importance of employing robust logic programming into their survey flows, not everyone is onboard yet. Now is the perfect time to start taking your surveys to the next level as a differentiator in the industry.

Have a look at our Market Research Hub for more blogs and case studies on getting the most from your research efforts!

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