We’ve had LOTS of people ask us,  

How do I get people to respond to my survey? 

They’re asking that question with good reason, because this is one of  THE MOST IMPORTANT issues:  Simply put, if you don’t get good response to your surveys, you can’t use them to make more money. 

So how do you get the responses you need? 

Here are some tips:

  1. First and foremost, you get response by showing your customers “what’s in it for them” in taking your survey.  It needs to be ALL about them, so that they see why they should spend time and effort to give you information.
  2. You do that in many ways, but 2 of the key ways are to (a) offer incentives for taking the survey (such as, everyone who takes it gets a free report AND a chance to win something cool, like an iPod) and (b) designing the survey so that it reads as if it’s about THEM, not about YOU and how YOU can make more money.  If you do that, you WILL make more money, because you’ll get the information you need.
  3. Write a good survey!  If you learn how to write clear, effective questions, to make your survey a conversation, and to report results to your customers and show them how you’re using the data, they’ll learn over time that your surveys are worthwhile. That takes some skill, but you’ll be surprised how fast you can learn to do good surveys, particularly with the simple recipe we’ve put together.
  4. Send multiple invitations to do the survey.
  5. Show your customers how you put the information they give to work to give THEM more value.

There are other techniques that we’re teaching, but this should give you some information you can use to get responses to surveys.  To get our other techniques AND our complete system for using surveys to ramp up profits, go here

Try these tips to increase response to your survey.  And let us know how you’re doing!

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One Response to How do I Get Survey Response?

  1. Jeanne,

    Good post and has some interesting recommendations. I just have two pearls to add from my experience.

    1. I have found out early on, and am not sure how it plays now, that offering a reward (financial – money, ability to win a prize, etc) actually drives up the scores. People think that if they are "nice" in the survey they increase their chance of winning. Don’t get me wrong – I am fine with higher scores. Alas, I always wanted to see if the scores reflected reality. It is a major bias, we are not talking 15-20 points – more like single digits, but it could be considerable in some cases. As I said, I have been advocating against financial rewards to surveys for a while, so things may be different now.

    2. Your point #5, close the loop, is by far the largest promoter or higher response rates I have encountered. It is not the only one, but the first one i exercised and advocate for. Thanks for saying something that most people forget…

    I have written surveys to read as if they were done for the benefit of the user and tried probably everything else you describe. Alas, closing the loop is the one that convinced of where to put my efforts when surveying customers.

    Thanks for the nice post

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