Online Surveys - Maximising your response rate

Online surveys are undoubtedly the most cost effective way to gather important data such as customer satisfaction and employee opinions. But how do you maximise your response rate? This is a problem incurred by most businesses undertaking online surveys and there is much literature available relating to the topic, all with varying facts and figures in relation to what response rate to expect, techniques for increasing responses, what length of survey should be used etc.

The simple truth is that there is no single guideline to follow when undertaking an online survey, as each survey has its own set of variables affecting its response rate. However, there are some common techniques used to enhance the likelihood that a potential survey respondent will complete your questionnaire.

Having undertaken hundreds of online surveys of customers, employees, businesses, membership groups and event guests, I began recording survey response rates and the types of key variables likely to affect them. The variables recorded were:

1. Whether survey invitations were personalised (i.e. Dear John Smith v Dear customer)
2. Length of survey (categorised into completion times of 1-4 minutes, 5-9 minutes & 10+ minutes)
3. If a reward/prize was offered
4. Whether or not the survey was sent to people with a known interest in the survey subject (i.e. job related, previous customer, linked to social interests etc.)

The figures shown below were derived from the data of 143 online surveys, which were completed by a total of 49,335 respondents. As a general process, potential respondents were contacted twice via email to encourage participation in the online surveys.

Please note that the majority of respondents had submitted their details to various databases or were customers of my clients; therefore, it is likely that they were aware of the brand/company prior to receiving the online survey invitation. People sending email invites to random sub-sets of contacts should not expect to achieve response rates as high as those listed below.

Taking into account the 4 variables and their options, there were 24 possible combinations - this will make sense when looking at the dot-points below. The combinations with the 5 highest and 5 lowest response rates have been listed.

5 highest response rates

1. Personalised email & 1-4 minutes to complete & reward offered & respondents had a known interest in the survey subject = 45.3% average response rate
2. Personalised email & 5-9 minutes to complete & reward offered & respondents had a known interest in the survey subject = 40.1% average response rate
3. Non-personalised email & 1-4 minutes to complete & reward offered & respondents had a known interest in the survey subject = 39.8% average response rate
4. Personalised email & 1-4 minutes to complete & no reward offered & respondents had a known interest in the survey subject = 39.2% average response rate
5. Personalised email & 5-9 minutes to complete & no reward offered & respondents had a known interest in the survey subject = 38.4% average response rate