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Your Top Customer Experience Management Question Answered

Improve Response Rates for Email Based Surveys

 

Conferences, certification courses, client meetings – wherever she goes, our Chief Customer Officer, Deb Eastman, gets a lot of questions about how to manage programs. But one question consistently tops the list: “How do I improve my survey response rates?”

 

Good news: She’s compiled her wisdom into a new guide for program managers. In this guide, you’ll learn the practical approaches that lead to both near-term and long-term improvements in your response rates.

 

What level of response rate should I be aiming for?

The guide kicks off with response rate benchmarks for four types of surveys, so you can see whether your approach just needs a few tweaks, or a major overhaul. It turns out that average response rates vary between B2C and B2B surveys, while the nature of the survey – relationship or transactional – affects response rate too.

 

Once you have that guidance for setting your goals, dive into how sampling can affect your response rate. The guide describes a four-step process for sampling in a B2B environment, including careful selection and review that ensures the sample is relevant and protects against gaming the results. You’ll learn about the need to involve everyone from executives to front-line staff in constructing a sample that serves the entire business.

 

No matter how well-constructed your sample, you won’t get responses if the survey doesn’t get delivered to, and opened by, the right people. The guide offers three checklists to help improve your survey deliverability. Get practical guidance on issues including:

 

  • Avoiding spam filters
  • The relevance of invitation text
  • The meaning of click-through rates when compared to completion rates, and
  • “Survey toxicity”

 

What is Survey Toxicity?

Survey toxicity, which results from over-surveying, can depress survey rates and harm the overall relationship. The guide calls for a minimum gap of 90 days that should be observed between surveys. But it also discusses some exceptions to this rule and lets you know how to keep the big picture in mind, even as you delve into the details of individual survey cadences.

 

Communication is the Key

As with most relationships, your best bet for improving response rates over time rests on good communication. The guide discusses five types of communication that can help build your customers’ trust in you and make them more likely to share their thoughts with you through a survey.

 

You’ll learn about how effective communications can help you convince customers that you’re truly interested in what they have to say. For example, do you let customers know about a survey before they receive it? Do your account teams get in on the act by encouraging responses? And are you using effective communications to help you walk the walk?

 

Download Deb Eastman’s guide now and start improving your response rates!

 

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