How to Attract More Responses to a Business Survey

Creating a survey is a great way to collect data that could help you to make better business decisions. However, if you want that data to truly be reliable, you need to be able to attract as many responses as possible.

If you’ve published a business survey in the past, you’ll know that part is much easier said than done. The fact of the matter is that lots of surveys have abysmal response rates simply because people don’t really want to fill them up.

While there is no way to guarantee that you’ll get tons of responses to your survey, there are steps that you can take to actively attract more of them.

Keep the Survey As Short As You Can

Try to always keep your survey as short as humanly possible. It is best to keep the goal that you want to achieve firmly in mind, and do away with any questions that aren’t necessary to fulfill it.

The shorter your survey is, the more likely you are to be able to attract responses. On top of that research has shown that longer surveys result in less time being spent on each question, which can lead to less accurate responses.

Let People Know How Long It Will Take

It may surprise you to know this, but letting people know how long it takes to fill out your survey can actually help to encourage more responses. It doesn’t have to be an exact figure, and for example, you could just say that the average time it takes is 10 minutes.

If possible you should also try to provide a progress indicator so that people can see how much of the survey is left. That will help reduce the number of people that drop off midway through the survey.

Publicize the Survey

To get more responses to your survey it stands to reason that you need to make sure it lands in front of more people. Although you may publish your survey on your website, you should share it in as many places as possible – including social media, your email list, IM platforms, and more.

When you do share your survey, don’t just link to it without any explanation. Instead, let people know what your survey is about, and if possible give them a reason to fill it out.

Check that the Questions and Answers are Clear

Before you publish any business survey, you should carefully check both the questions and answers. It is important that their meaning is clear, and that they can be easily understood.

The goal should be for your questions to be simple and straightforward, without any ambiguity whatsoever. Similarly, your answers should not be confusing either, and you should be particularly careful that there aren’t any overlapping ranges or answers that are too similar to one another.

If your questions aren’t clear enough and make responders feel confused, they are less likely to want to fill out your survey.

Allow Anonymous Participation

Forcing people to give out personal details tends to reduce the response rate of business surveys. Unless it is necessary for some reason you should try to avoid that, and should provide responders with the option to remain anonymous.

If you feel that you do have to collect personal details, try to limit it as much as possible. For example, instead of a first name, last name, and email, you could just collect a name and email.

Conclusion

In addition to these steps, you should try to use your survey maker to design a form that looks clean and simple. That will help improve its response rate as well.

At the end of the day, if you are proactive about improving your business surveys, you should start to see results relatively quickly. Be sure to track the response rates for every survey that you publish, and analyze them to see how to make further improvements down the line.

Author bio:

Mahendra Bajiya enjoys to explore new approaches to guest blogging, marketing, content creation and other related fields. Due to his years of experience in those areas, he is able to provide numerous services via MIGuestpost.com and help his clients achieve their goals. If you’d like to contact him visit LinkedIn – Facebook – Twitter.