Increase survey feedback: These are the ultimate best tips for a better response rate!

More feedback, better decisions! Valuable and actionable tips to increase survey feedback and response rates

Are you dissatisfied with the survey response rate and with survey feedback in general? No wonder! Companies and survey initiators are faced with the challenge of a constantly growing number of online surveys circulating on the internet and urging for feedback. Feedback from surveys is of significant importance for companies, as they make important decisions for their own company based on the feedback they receive, for example regarding entry into new markets or the development of products. To gain more feedback through surveys, companies and market researchers use online panels to publish paid surveys. This is a very good step to increase survey response rates and getting more feedback from surveys. But even here there is now a lot of competition among surveys. Because whoever offers more money for the feedback on their survey will also get more attention from the survey participants. But there are other important factors that are crucial to increasing survey feedback.

Tip 1: Optimise your survey for mobile devices to increase feedback

It is now the case that most people do not surf the internet via their desktop PC or laptop, but use their smartphone. This is because the smartphone is always at hand and there is a network with good speed available in almost every place in the world. Therefore, it is very important that you design your survey in such a way that it is easy to answer on the smartphone. If you take this fact into account, you will definitely gain more survey feedback than survey initiators who do not. Simple layout, short questions, responsive content, few distracting elements and above all no images as placeholders that slow down the loading of the survey. Use videos and images only when absolutely necessary, not just for fun or as graphic elements.

Optimise your surveys for mobile devices to increase feedback

Tip 2: Explain to your respondents who you are and what the survey is about

Build trust and you will significantly increase your survey feedback! Explain at the beginning of the survey what exactly it is about. What is the research interest? Why are you asking respondents for survey feedback? It is very important that survey participants know who the initiator of a survey is and what the reason for conducting the survey is. If you briefly introduce yourself and your company, you create trust and identification. And if the topic of the survey is interesting for your potential survey participants, you will also receive more feedback, as survey participants have an interest in shedding light on a topic that particularly interests them. And that also brings us to our next tip.

Tip 3: Reach the right target group to increase survey feedback

Reaching the right target group is a crucial factor in gaining more feedback from your survey. After all, it makes little sense to place a survey for tuning cars in a forum or community dedicated to the topics of environmental protection and sustainability. This sounds very banal now, but spare yourself the trouble and tome of publishing surveys on certain topics where there will be no attention for them. The mypinio online panel, which was developed as a community, gives you the opportunity to address your target group precisely because our users provide socio-demographic data and also specify criteria such as hobbies and preferences when registering. Increase survey feedback by addressing the target group precisely!

On mypinio, paid surveys appear in the timeline of the relevant target group for your surveys and thus receive a high level of attention, which ensures more survey feedback and a high survey response rate.

Tip 4: Get more feedback on surveys by using language that is appropriate for the target group.

The most important thing is that the people you want to give you feedback on your surveys understand the questions you are asking them. Because if people don’t understand your questions because you use technical terminology or lots of foreign words, they will simply abandon your survey and you will lose very valuable feedback because of this simple mistake. If you want to gain more feedback in surveys, use simple, short and easy to understand sentences and use very simple language that everyone can understand. Of course, this is different for survey participants who take part in specialist surveys, such as doctors or lawyers. Here, of course, the specialist language of the respective genre should be used in order to appear credible as the initiator of surveys with specialist content. That will improve the response rate of your survey as well.

Tip 5: Improve survey feedback and response rate by creating well-structured surveys

As already mentioned, most people use the Internet via smartphone. Cumbersome questionnaires with many questions are counterproductive, especially if potential respondents have to scroll endlessly! It is best to ask one question per page. This means that when a question is answered, it automatically moves to the next page. And so on. Questions should be kept short and concise and have a large enough font to be easily read on a smartphone. If the usability of a survey is very good, it guarantees a higher survey response rate and more survey feedback in general.

Tip 6: Increase survey response rate by making your survey more discoverable

If your survey is a target group-independent survey in which anyone can participate, then you can use various tricks to make your survey faster and more discoverable and visible and thus gain more feedback…. For example, you can share your survey on social media and set hashtags on the topic of the survey. For example, if you are doing a survey on fashion, use the hashtag #fashion. This can work very well, especially if you mention in your post that there are rewards or incentives for feedback on the survey.

Tip 7: Show your respondents the progress of completing the survey

Some surveys are more extensive than others and require more feedback due to the complexity of the content and topic. Therefore, it is important to tell potential respondents from the outset how long it will take to complete the survey. You are probably familiar with these so-called progress bars that can be seen in many surveys. They do a very good job and have actually been proven to provide more feedback in surveys. If respondents know how many questions are still to come, they are more likely to complete the survey. So don’t let your respondents fill out the survey into the dark and you will improve the survey response rate significantly.

Tip 8: Collect survey feedback anonymously

Many people are sceptical about giving personal data or opinions on the internet. You never know what will happen to this data. So if you want to gain more feedback from surveys and increase the response rate, collect data anonymously and point this out to potential survey participants. Because if potential survey participants know that no conclusions can be drawn about their own person, then they are more willing to take part in a survey, which gives you, as the initiator of surveys, more feedback. And above all, more honest and sincere feedback! So make it clear at the very beginning of the survey that the data will be collected anonymously, for example without collecting the IP address or other metadata.

The response rate of a survey even drops by almost 80% when survey participants are confronted with very personal questions and are themselves not convinced that their answers will be treated with absolute anonymity and in accordance with all data protection rules.

Tip 9: Put very personal questions at the end of the survey

Take this tip to heart if you want to increase survey feedback and response rates! Think of it like this: If you meet someone on the street, don’t ask them very intimate and personal questions right at the beginning. Start your survey with a few simple warm-up questions, gain trust and make your respondents lose their shyness about the questions. When your respondents get to the end of the survey, they are more likely to answer personal questions sincerely and honestly. Especially if there is a reward or cash for completing the survey. Because to then cancel the survey and start a new one means a loss of time and money for the survey participant.

Tip 10: Incentives and rewards increase the response to surveys

Let’s be honest: In a monetised world, hardly anyone will do something for an unknown company if they don’t get money or a bonus for it. That’s just a fact. Unless you ask friends and acquaintances to fill out the survey. But if your survey is a professional collection of data, the feedback will not be enough for you to make important business decisions. Therefore, offer your survey respondents suitable rewards or cash amount to participate in your survey and thus gain more feedback. The best way to do this is to use the paid survey platform from mypinio. Here people have gathered who very much enjoy participating in paid surveys and have a high level of commitment, which will quickly bring you more feedback as the initiator of a survey! Incidentally, suitable rewards are high-quality vouchers from well-known online shops, which can be redeemed simply and easily. mypinio has developed a technologically sophisticated process for this, so that you as the initiator of a survey have no administrative effort.

By rewarding survey participants, you significantly increase survey feedback! If you want to know which rewards are particularly popular with survey participants, take a look at our blog post on this.

→ Popular rewards for survey participants

Tip 11: Start a Customer Insights Community

A Customer Insights Community is a virtual brand home for brand ambassadors and satisfied customers who are eager to help companies improve their favourite brand. That’s why members of a Customer Insights Community are happy to take part in surveys and provide sincere and honest feedback. mypinio offers you the opportunity to create and easily manage a Customer Insights Community on our technology platform. Invite your customers to participate in the Customer Insights Community or find suitable participants on mypinio. Gain more feedback and improve survey response rates through the power of the community!

→ Information about Customer Insights Community

Tip 12: Address your survey participants personally to get more feedback

If you want to increase the response rate to surveys and gain more feedback, address your survey participants personally by name. However, this should not be done as a generated placeholder in the online questionnaire, for example by passing on a variable from the invitation email. The mail itself should contain the name of your potential survey participants in the salutation. Because if someone is addressed personally, identification is greater and you create a commitment by addressing them personally. Personalised invitations to online surveys achieve about 8% more response than non-personalised survey requests. This significantly increases your feedback.

Tip 13: The survey should not be too long or take up too much time

It is also important that surveys should not contain many questions, considering the ever shorter attention span. The response rate and thus also the nominal feedback drops drastically by up to 17% if the survey contains more than 10 to 12 questions or lasts longer than 5 minutes. If the survey lasts even longer than 10 minutes, the response rate can drop by up to 40% on average. If you want to increase your response, you should keep the questionnaire of your survey short and concise or divide the questions into two surveys and send them to two different groups with the same characteristics of the sample.

Tip 14: More languages, more survey feedback!

If you want to increase survey feedback, make the questionnaire available in several languages and let your survey participants choose in which language they want to provide feedback for your surveys. A multilingual questionnaire makes sense in any case if it is immaterial for the result of the survey in which language the feedback is given. The world is getting smaller and especially in urban areas many languages are spoken. Therefore, it is important to think about whether a multilingual questionnaire could increase the survey feedback.

Tip 15: More survey participants, more survey feedback

It is also important to think about how to find more survey participants in general to increase survey feedback. Here are a variety of ways you can find more survey participants.

Find survey participants by e-mail

Probably the easiest way to get more survey feedback is to send the survey URL via email. So if you have an address list of people who are eligible to take part in the survey, use this channel. This can be particularly useful for customer surveys, as companies often have email addresses of their customers.

Find survey participants in social media networks

One way to find survey participants is to create a Facebook or LinkedIn group and invite members to participate in a survey. Another way is to run Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter ads targeting specific audiences to find survey participants.

Find survey participants via QR code

To get more survey feedback, it’s important to distribute your questionnaire through multiple channels. Besides sending it by email or sharing it on social media channels, think about whether it might make sense for your survey to use a QR code to make it accessible. This makes sense, for example, for patient surveys, guest surveys in a restaurant or participant surveys in a seminar. Here, for example, you could simply display the QR code on a monitor, which the participants can then photograph with their smartphone and call up the survey.

Find survey participants via crowdsourcing

You can also use a crowdsourcing community to find survey participants and thus increase survey feedback. Simply post the link to your survey on one of the many crowdsourcing platforms and make it a task for the members. Some well-known crowdsourcing platforms are Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, Freelancer, 99designs, Crowdflower, Tongal or Genius Crowds.

Find survey participants via online panel

Probably one of the most common methods to find survey participants is to use so-called online panels, also called online access panels. An online panel is a group of people who have volunteered to take part in surveys and studies at regular intervals. Usually, members of an online panel are paid for taking part in surveys, which at the same time means that you can expect more feedback for your survey.

Find survey participants in online forums

You can also register in online forums and find survey participants there. There are many different online forums on a wide range of topics, such as technology, photography, literature, gardening, fashion & lifestyle, beauty, cars and many more. Find a forum that represents the target group of your survey and publish your survey there. Since the members of a forum have a high affinity to the forum topic, you will certainly receive feedback on your survey here.

It is best to combine all these tips in a sensible way to significantly increase the feedback of your survey.

What is actually a really good response rate in online surveys?

The question of how much feedback you can expect when conducting a survey is very common, but cannot really be answered seriously at all. It depends on many different factors. Since the attention span decreases significantly due to information overload and survey fatigue due to oversaturation in the survey market, the average response rates for surveys have basically dropped sharply. A rule of thumb says that a response rate of about 2% to 10% is already a good result. However, you need to take the above tips into account accordingly. There are also benchmarks that say that B2C surveys can achieve a response rate of 13% to 16%. For B2B surveys, the response rate is relatively high and can be between 23% and 32%, depending on the content of the online surveys. For example, online surveys that focus on the personal relationship between companies have a much higher response rate than online surveys that focus exclusively on product or factual questions. The big difference in response rates between B2C and B2B surveys is mainly due to the fact that the sample size for B2B surveys is usually much smaller than for B2C surveys.

The amount of feedback and the level of response rate also depends on the type of survey conducted. Customer surveys can achieve a response rate of more than 30%, depending on how skilfully you approach these surveys. The response rate for internal company or organisation online surveys, such as member surveys or employee surveys, is still around 40% on average.

Use mypinio to get more survey feedback

mypinio is a hybrid combination of social media platform and market research community. This is where people come together who want to help companies improve their products, services and brand communication and earn money and vouchers in the process. mypinio has sophisticated algorithms and mechanisms that guarantee survey initiators a high level of data quality and also provide fast feedback through the intelligent distribution of surveys within the mypinio universe. Become a part of mypinio as a researching company and register for free.

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