Anyone who works with customer 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 client's profile, and there are numerous technical details that require 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 are sure to help your response rate continue to grow with each new survey you launch!
#1 A/B Testing: Try 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 are usually more likely to pay attention to something that might take more time.
This is one of the biggest differences between email and instant messaging applications 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 generally receives more attention, it's common for your clients to have their inboxes overflowing with emails! This means that some emails received will likely simply 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 – which means that, according to this statistic, there's a high 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 become a master of email subject lines! Start by testing different subject line formats: questions, short subject lines, subject lines with dashes, subject lines with emojis…
Test different types of emails and start analyzing the results on 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 resemble a conversation, the more engaged respondents will remain until the very 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 done in the subject line of your email. In this case, personalizing the internal part of the survey is even more important, as it maintains a personal tone consistent with the email subject.
If you choose to include variables, remember that you need to consider those customers whose data is not fully defined. In this case, your survey should adapt so that the field does not appear blank – which would have the opposite effect to the personalization you want to achieve.
#3 Brand identity: use the right language and visuals
If there's one time when maintaining your brand's tone of voice is important, it's when you need to communicate with current customers. After all, you don't want to seem like a dissonant brand, right? If you interact informally on social media or in ads, it's important that this same tone of voice is used in research with your customers.
Another important point is what to do if you have clients from different locations in Brazil and around the world. You may need to customize the language or change some words so that communication with this audience is natural.
If your business is international, you need to know each market even better and adapt to it, not the other way around.
If you've ever needed to check your brand guidelines to ensure you were using the right tone of voice, now it's time to consider another important factor: design. For your research to be fully aligned with your company, it's crucial that it follows your brand's visual identity. This means you can and should take advantage of all the research customization options, such as colors, formats, and images.
#4 Adaptation: customize the format of your search
If there's one thing that can impact your response rate, it's your survey not being able to adapt to the moment when the respondent intends to answer it. It may be that most of your respondents only open their emails on their personal computer and answer the survey in desktop.
However, there is still a segment of the population that will receive the email on their smartphone and decide to send their response from there. Therefore, your survey needs to be able to adapt to the mobile as well.
If you're unsure whether your search is device-friendly, you can test it here using this tool provided by Google.
Watch the Customer Journey webinar now!!! 😀
#5 Straight to the point: don't add extra questions
If there's one thing that prevents satisfaction surveys from being answered, it's the loss of respondent engagement. You yourself may have abandoned a survey halfway through.
Imagine you answered four questions, the fifth one was kind of complicated, and you still had 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 even wants to help by sending feedback, but she doesn't have that much time and may quickly become impatient and abandon her survey.
That's why, to maintain the effectiveness of the research, 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 typically give up on anything that seems to take too long, 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 address, the more it resembles spam and the greater the chances of it 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.
Therefore, 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
Doing things at the right time, keeping timing , is essential for building a long-term relationship with them. This means you should not only send the right questions to your clients, but also segment them so that only those who are able to answer those questions end up receiving them.
For example, it doesn't make sense to ask a client who has 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 from the sales and implementation teams.
Towards the end of the process is a good time to ask these kinds of questions. Their feedback will be honest, and you'll have a clear view of the value your product offers a customer right from the start. In other words, you need to understand how your customer is interacting with your company at the moment you conduct the research and segment them accordingly. Only then will you have relevant data to base your predictions and decisions on.
Have you watched our webinar on the 4 fundamental metrics for measuring customer experience? Watch it now! 😃
Conclusion
Now is your time to act! Choose a few tips to put into practice today and start testing how much they impact the increase in your response rate.
If you and your team have any further questions on this topic, feel free to write to us in the comments below. After all, listening to the customer is our specialty , and we love collaborating, exchanging ideas, learning, and teaching about this subject. Did you like our tips on response rates? Now that you know a little more about the topic, check out our solutions!