This is the latest in a series about how our team at BHN Rewards uses digital rewards and our own platform to boost our engagement among prospects and customers.
There are a lot of factors that affect your online survey response rates, from the demographics of your audience to the way you word your invitation email to the number of questions you’re asking. That’s why research, marketing, sales, customer experience, and many other teams are constantly looking to learn about the latest survey design best practices.
Different sources offer different advice, but they almost universally recommend that you should define a clear purpose or goal for your survey as a first step. A few other tips that seem like no-brainers to always follow:
But not all survey design best practices are that obvious. At BHN Rewards, we’re lucky enough to work with a number of top research platforms, whose teams know way more than us about the do’s and don’ts. We’ve rounded up one less-obvious tip each from eight of our partners to help you make the most of your surveys.
READ MORE: Things to Avoid While Writing the Finest Survey Questions
While you want to keep your survey as short as possible, Qualtrics emphasizes that you can’t combine multiple ideas into one question. Its advice recommends that you “take a closer look at questions in your survey that contain the word ‘and’ — it can be a red flag that your question has two parts.” That can confuse respondents and introduce inaccuracies into your data.
Rather than asking demographic questions like age at the beginning, SurveyMonkey suggests that you “treat your survey like a conversation.” Start with light, straightforward questions, just as you would start a conversation with small talk. Then you can move into the more personal topics.
READ MORE: How We Use SurveyMonkey Rewards for Customer Feedback
With cellphone use having grown exponentially — 97% of Americans have one now — Forsta’s advice is to build your survey with a mobile-first approach. But of course, that doesn’t mean you can ignore survey design best practices for laptop and desktop computers. Try to find ways to accommodate them all. For example, “thumb-friendly buttons are easier for touchscreen respondents but also work well on other screen sizes,” Forsta suggests.
Instead of asking yes/no or true/false questions, HubSpot recommends rewriting them with a response scale that shows the intensity of a respondent’s attitude on a subject. A 5- or 7-point scale is common, with ranges such as “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” or “never” to “very frequently.” The advantage, HubSpot says, is that you get “more specific feedback on your topic while maintaining a quantitative, closed-ended response.”
Additional advice on answer options from SurveySparrow reminds you to offer choices that cover all the possible responses but do not overlap. If answer options are too similar, they can confuse your respondents, and if the answer they want to give isn’t included in any option, they may skip the question or abandon the survey altogether. “You might want to give them the ‘other’ option that lets them give an answer in their own words if none of the answer options apply to them,” SurveySparrow says.
Displaying an indicator bar on the page to track progress is “one of the simplest methods to keep folks engaged,” according to Voxco’s survey design best practices. It allows respondents to see how far along they are in the survey and estimate how much more time it will take.
Putting the first survey question directly into the body of the email invitation, as Medallia recommends, makes it easy for recipients to get started and therefore boosts response rates. “The survey taker doesn’t have to find the survey link in the email body,” since they’re redirected straight to the full survey after answering the first question.
Once you’ve built your survey, Alchemer suggests sending it to a subset of your invitation list before distributing it immediately to hundreds or thousands of people. That way, you can get feedback on your questions, “unearth any ambiguous or unclear words or phrases,” and correct them.
Following all these survey design best practices will certainly help with the success of your program, but incentives are the ultimate tactic for increasing response rates. But incorporating them can be an administrative headache, full of spreadsheets and delayed deliveries and entry errors. None of that is an issue when you use a digital incentives management platform like BHN Rewards, which integrates directly with many popular survey tools (including all the partners quoted above!). Once integrated, BHN Rewards can automate the rewarding process so the incentive is sent immediately after a respondent completes the survey. You also have the option to review and approve each recipient before the reward is sent.
Ready to see how you can integrate BHN Rewards with your survey platform? Request a demo now!
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.
