How to Improve Survey Response Rates?

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 questions — 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.

5. 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 respondent’s survey score as they complete the survey.