For a feedback survey to be useful, a lot of things need to go right. You need to have the right respondents, the right questions, the right data, the right follow-up. And it all starts with the feedback survey template.
Pay attention to how you build and position your survey, because that can greatly affect its success. Of course, many parts of the survey design and process will vary depending on your audience and goals, but there are some statistics that can steer you in the right direction.
We mined the research from our partners at SurveyMonkey to see what we could learn about how to create the most effective survey templates.
READ MORE: How to Compose a Great Survey Invitation Email Template
More than 80% of customers say they’re likely to provide feedback after a good or bad experience with a business — but less than half (48%) say they do the same after a “normal” experience.
How to adjust your feedback survey template: Add incentives to get a more complete picture of your customers. By offering a digital gift card for respondents, you’ll encourage those in the middle of the satisfaction spectrum to offer their opinions as well.
The percentage of participants using mobile devices to answer surveys continues to increase, hitting 57% by the end of 2022 (vs. 40% on non-mobile devices). That’s compared with 52% mobile and 45% non-mobile in late 2020.
How to adjust your feedback survey template: Make sure you design your survey to be mobile-friendly. That means avoiding questions that require participants to type long answers, thinking about how many questions should be on each page, limiting use of rich media that will affect mobile load speed, and finding the right font size so it’s readable on all different kinds of smartphones and tablets. And of course, don’t forget to test your finished survey on all different devices.
When participants can’t skip a question, only 36% go back and provide the correct answer, while 27% say they’ll just quit the survey completely and, even worse, 25% say they’ll fill in a random answer so they can move on.
How to adjust your feedback survey template: Seriously consider whether it’s necessary to mark questions as required. Overdoing it can drastically hurt your completion rates and the quality and accuracy of your data.
Completion rates drop anywhere from 5% to 20% for surveys that take more than seven to eight minutes to finish.
How to adjust your feedback survey template: Less is more when it comes to survey questions. Review your list with a critical eye and cut anything that isn’t completely necessary. In cases where there’s no way to shorten it, consider splitting it into multiple surveys or offering an incentive with a value that’s appropriate for the time required to complete all the questions.
Surveys that begin with a multiple-choice question see higher completion rates than those that start with open-ended questions, other kinds of questions (such as matrix or dropdown formats), or introductory text or images.
How to adjust your feedback survey template: First impressions are important, even in survey design. Make the beginning of your survey inviting with an important but relatively simple question. You can even consider embedding it directly into the invitation email.
Now that you have the most effective survey design and, eventually, all that great data, what should you do with it? Here are 7 smart strategies to use after you collect customer feedback.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
