Maximizing Response Rates: Get Respondents to Complete the Survey

Previously we discussed ways researchers can increase the likelihood of respondents opening an email survey invitation. Additionally, in a subsequent post we discussed how to get respondents to actually click on the survey link and participate in the survey.

This post is a discussion of ways to keep respondents motivated to complete the entire survey once they have entered it.

At its core, the key to completion rates is an easy to complete and credible survey that delivers on all promises offered in the invitation email.

Survey Length

From time to time various service providers of mine send me a survey invite, and I’m often surprised how many of them impose upon me, their customer, to complete a 30 or 40 minute survey.  First of all, they never disclose the survey length in advance, which communicates a complete lack of respect for my time.  In addition to just plain being an imposition, it is also a bad research practice.  Ten minutes into the survey I’m either pressed for time, frustrated, or just plain bored, and either exit the survey or frivolously complete the remaining questions without any real consideration of my opinions on the questions they are asking – completely undermining the reliability of my responses.  This is just simply a bad research practice, in addition to being inconsiderate of the end customer’s time.

We recommend keeping survey length short, no more than 10 to 12 minutes – in some cases such as a post-transaction survey – 5 minutes.

If research objectives require a long survey, rather than impose a ridiculously long survey on your customers producing frivolous results, break a 30 – 40 minute survey into two, or better yet, three parts fielding each part to a portion of your targeted sample frame.

Additionally, skip logic should be employed to avoid asking questions that are not applicable to a given respondent, thus decreasing the volume of questions you present to the end customer.

Finally, include a progress bar to keep respondents informed of how far along they are on the survey.

Ease of Completion

The last thing you want respondents feeling when they complete your survey is frustration.  First of all, if the sample frame is made up of your customers, the primary thing you are accomplishing is upsetting your customers and damaging your brand.  And also, creating bad research results because frustrated respondents are not in the proper mindset to give you well considered answers.

Frustration can come from awkward design, question wording, poor programming, and insufficient response choices.  Survey wording and vocabulary should be simple and jargon free, response choices should be comprehensive, and of course the survey programming should be thoroughly proofed and pretested.

Pretesting is a process where the survey is prefielded to a portion of the sample frame to test how they respond to the survey, significant portions of the questionnaire unanswered or a high volume of “other” or “none of the above” responses could signal trouble with survey design.

Convenience

Survey completion should be easy.  Survey entry should work across a variety platforms, browsers and devices.

Additionally, respondents should be allowed to take the survey on their own time, even leaving the survey while saving their answers to date and allowing reentry when it is more convenient for them.