Editor’s note: Holly Carter is a product marketing director with market research firm Confirmit, New York.
Respondents are the lifeblood of marketing research and knowing how to reach, engage and understand people is at the very core of impactful insights. But do you know how to go about successfully engaging with survey respondents?
If you’ve conducted a survey recently, you’re familiar with the struggle of declining response rates and low respondent engagement. Audiences are facing a flood of survey requests from almost every channel, including Web, e-mail and text, and have developed a predisposition to ignore such requests. Here are some dos and don’ts to keep in mind while designing your survey.
Do design your survey with the participant in mind.
It’s important to keep in mind that you’re asking your respondent for a favor so you must make the process enjoyable for them. Put yourself in the respondent’s shoes throughout the entire design process. Ask yourself: Does this keep my attention? Do I find the survey easy to navigate? Am I bored? You may still have some work to do and should get the creative juices flowing! People are busy, so you want your surveying methods to be simple and easy to understand.
The key thing to consider in survey design is the audience – particularly whether it’s for B2B or B2C. B2B surveys are typically conducted in a variety of ways with smaller sample sizes to ensure enough data is captured to reach a solid level of confidence in the data. On the other hand, B2C-focused surveys reach a larger group in more limited (and engaging) ways. Both audiences have their challenges and it’s important to ensure respondents understand why you are asking for feedback and what you plan to do with it. This is generally more engaging than offering incentives, particularly in B2B.
Keep the respondent in mind when thinking about how you are formatting questions. If a question looks difficult or time-consuming it’s likely to stop respondents. Consider multiple survey platforms. If something looks overwhelming on a mobile device try to simplify the formatting.
Don’t include irrelevant options.
All potential answers to the questions in your survey should have a reason for being included and relevant to the respondent. Filter the answers based on their answers to previous questions. For example, display items you know your respondent has interacted with instead of listing out all options. You can also include “Not applicable” as an option to prevent false responses.
Do keep questions short.
It’s been said that the human attention span decreases by a whopping 88 percent every year. Keep survey questions short and only include what is necessary. Having too many or overly long questions sets you up for a risk. Respondents may click out before they’ve finished. Each question should be clear, to the point and easy to understand. Use Twitter-style sentences as a rule of thumb and make questions 140 to 280 characters or less. You should also avoid using internal or industry jargon wherever possible – if a respondent doesn’t understand a term they won’t take the time to look it up, they’ll simply give up on the survey. Or worse, they’ll give a dishonest or uncontemplated response that will skew survey results and contaminate your data set.
Don’t ask what you already know.
When designing a survey, skip questions you can answer with data you already have. Although this may sound like an easy task, data silos often make it difficult to know what data lives under your company’s roof. By looping in people from a variety of divisions, and also having those people involved in the survey testing, you can identify questions that are repetitive or can be omitted.
In addition, nice-to-know questions do not belong in your survey as they provide few actionable insights and just make a survey longer. As a general rule, if you cannot identify an action that correlates with the response, table the question for the future.
Do test the survey.
Would you buy a house before you’ve seen it in person? No way! The same should go for surveys. You, along with colleagues, your CX champion network and even your stakeholders should test the survey. It’s important to examine if the questions and images are displayed properly, that the loading process is quick, that the flow of the survey makes sense and that it is easily viewed on all possible platforms. It’s a good idea to have someone who is not connected to or working on the project test the survey. The survey should also be tested in multiple browsers to ensure the design and functionality are consistent. Finally, it’s extremely helpful to also test the results of the survey to ensure you are getting the data you need and asking the questions in the right manner.
Don’t forget multimedia.
When possible, include audio or video to help survey respondents understand questions quickly. This is a no-brainer in today’s digital world. Multimedia can be used to replace open text answers, or even to read questions out loud. Opportunities for multimedia can be identified by replacing action words with video, instructions with graphics, quotes with audio, etc., so that the survey is more impactful and engaging. As the electronically inclined population grows, Gen Z infiltrates the consumer population and the professional world moves to digital, consumers are pushing for multimedia communication and feedback channels. It is wise to produce mobile-friendly surveys that allow users to engage in more ways than just checking a box or writing a response. In fact, a growing number of respondents are more open to rich media possibilities like photo and video interactions. Experiment with these engagement techniques. When you are testing your survey you’ll learn whether you’re garnering the desired engagement or not.
Engaging respondents
It’s no secret that surveys are distributed at a very high volume and researchers are fighting to keep respondents engaged long enough to complete them. Keeping these dos and don’ts in mind during the creation of a survey is imperative if impactful insights are the end goal. Know who your primary audience is and carefully consider how you can best grab and maintain their attention. It’s not an easy job but you’ll likely find that everyone wants to give feedback – they just want the process to be simple and quick.