Anyone who works with satisfaction surveys knows how hard it is to maintain and improve response rates, right?
Each question is carefully defined, the contact channel is chosen taking into account the customer's profile, and there are countless technical details that need attention.
That's why there's no more satisfying result for those who create satisfaction surveys than a high response rate . With each new survey, you want your response rate to grow more and more, right?
With that in mind, we've put together 7 tips that will definitely help your response rate continue to grow with each new survey you launch!
#1 A/B Testing: Experiment with different email subject lines
One of the most common channels for sending surveys is email. One of the reasons for its popularity is simple: when your customers are responding to emails, they're usually more likely to focus on something that might take longer.
This is one of the biggest differences between email and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, for example, where the conversation needs to be briefer and more superficial.
The problem with email is that, because it's a channel that typically receives the most attention, your customers often have inboxes overflowing with emails! This means that some emails received will likely be ignored.
The result is that the average email open rate is 20.81% . In other words, for every 5 emails you send, about 1 will be opened—meaning that, according to this statistic, there's a good chance that less than 1 in 5 people will respond to your survey. That's why you need to make your email stand out from the rest.
To do this, you need to master email subject lines! Start by testing different subject lines: questions, short subject lines, subject lines with dashes, subject lines with emojis...
Test different types and start analyzing the results in your open rates. Only then will you be able to optimize your emails for your audience and achieve better results!
#2 Personalize: Call respondents by name
Make your surveys more personal—after all, the more they feel like a conversation, the more respondents will stay engaged until the last question! To do this, include variables within your survey. You can start with the name variable, including the respondent's name at different points in the survey.
And the name is just the beginning! You can use other variables you already know about your customers. In fact, this type of personalization can also be applied to your email subject line. In this case, personalizing the internal part of the survey is even more important, as it maintains a personal language that aligns with the email subject line.
If you choose to include variables, remember to consider those customers whose data isn't fully defined. In this case, your survey should adapt so the field doesn't appear blank—which would have the opposite effect to the personalization you're aiming for.
#3 Brand Identity: Use the Right Language and Visuals
If there's one time when maintaining your brand's tone of voice is crucial, it's when you need to engage with current customers. After all, you don't want to come across as a dissonant brand, right? If you engage informally on social media or in advertising, it's important to use that same tone of voice in customer surveys.
Another important point is if you have clients from different parts of Brazil and around the world. You may need to customize your language or change some words to ensure communication with this audience is natural.
If your business is international, you need to understand each market even better and adapt to it, not the other way around.
If you've ever had to check your brand manual to ensure you're using the right tone of voice, now's the time to consider another important factor: design. For your survey to be fully aligned with your company, it's crucial that it adheres to your brand's visual identity. This means you can and should take advantage of all the survey customization features, such as colors, formats, and images.
#4 Adaptation: Customize your survey format
If there's one thing that can impact your response rate, it's your survey failing to adapt to the respondent's intended response time. It's possible that most of your respondents only open their emails on their personal computers and complete the survey in desktop .
However, some people will receive the email on their smartphones mobile -friendly as well.
If you're not sure if your search is device-friendly, you can test it here using this tool provided by Google.
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#5 Straight to the point: don't add extra questions
If there's one thing that prevents satisfaction surveys from being completed, it's the loss of respondent engagement. You yourself may have abandoned a survey halfway through.
Imagine you've answered four questions, the fifth was a bit tricky, and you still have two more to go. You close the question window and pretend nothing happened.
After all, who has time to answer so many questions? Your client feels the same way. She wants to help by providing feedback, but she doesn't have that much time and can quickly become impatient and abandon her research.
That's why, to maintain the survey's effectiveness, you need to resist the urge to add more questions. NPS is successful precisely because of its extremely concise format, so there's no point in complicating the process.
Respondents tend to give up on anything that seems time-consuming, so make it clear that the survey is quick and doesn't require much effort on their part.
#6 Human factor: send the survey via email to a real person on the team
There's a very common mistake when sending surveys via email: using a generic company email address as the sender. The reason is simple. The more generic and impersonal the sender's email, the more it resembles some kind of spam and the greater the chance of being ignored or simply sent to the trash.
To prevent this from happening, you can send the survey from a real sender. A good option is to send it from the email account of someone on your customer success .
This way, the customer realizes that the person contacting them is a real person from the company whose purpose within the company is to help the customer succeed. This automatically makes the email relevant!
#7 Segment: Avoid sending surveys too early
Timing needs is crucial to building a long-term relationship. This means you should not only be mindful of sending the right questions to your customers, but also segmenting them so that only those who are able to answer those questions receive them.
For example, it doesn't make sense to ask a customer who's just started their onboarding process to talk about their experience with your software. They've had little contact with the product itself and could probably only rate the service they've received so far between the sales team and the implementation team.
At the end of the process, it's a good time to ask these types of questions. Your feedback will be honest, and you'll have a clear understanding of the value your product offers to a customer right away. In other words, you need to understand how your customer is interacting with your company at the time you conduct the survey and segment them accordingly. Only then will you have relevant data to base your predictions and decisions.
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Conclusion
Now's your time to act! Pick a few tips to put into practice today and start testing how they impact your response rate .
If you and your team have any further questions on this topic, please feel free to let us know in the comments. After all, listening to customers is our specialty, and we love collaborating, sharing, learning, and teaching about this topic. Did you like our tips on response rates? Now that you know a little more about the topic, take advantage of our solutions !
