Customer surveys are an important part of your business’s growth. The feedback you receive can help you make important adjustments to your business model so that you can better serve your customer’s needs—thereby earning a higher profit from your business. But you can’t make those adjustments with only a few responses from your customers. You need a decent sample size to ensure that the feedback you’re receiving is accurate throughout your consumer base, rather than specific to only a handful of customers.
So how can you get more responses to your surveys? Here are 5 tips.
Incentivize Their Responses
People are motivated by free stuff—and that’s something that will probably never change. So if you want to get a large number of responses to your customer survey, try to offer some kind of incentive for doing so. This could be a gift card with a few bucks to a coffee shop, or it could be a discount on one of your products or services. If you offer people some sort of reward for participating, they’ll be more likely to answer the questions on your survey.
Use Gamification Techniques
Ever seen somebody get so into a game that they play it day in and day out? That’s because the illusion of progress and achievements that games create can be highly addictive. And you can leverage that technique with your surveys as well. But utilizing gamification—the integration of game mechanics into your marketing—you can get people excited about participating.
With the right idea management software, you can give survey participants online badges for different achievements, like answering more survey questions or inviting friends to participate. They can earn points to use towards rewards, see their standing on a scoreboard, and work towards certain goals. All of these techniques turn your surveys into something fun, rather than a boring list of questions.
Make It Simpler
If you’re not getting a lot of responses to your surveys, take a look at the survey and ask yourself how difficult the questionnaire is to complete. Gauge things like the number of questions, how much thought needs to go into each question, and the average amount of time it might take to complete the survey. If your survey takes longer than 5 minutes, you probably need to simplify it.
Put It on Social Media
Don’t just solicit survey responses on customer service calls. Put your survey online and share it on social media. In fact, both Facebook and Twitter offer the option to create polls. Of course, these only allow you to ask a single question, but if you use this feature properly, you can get a lot of responses.
The ability to answer a question with a single click allows your followers to give their feedback in seconds, and many will do it without question as they scroll through their news feeds. If you post a different poll every few days, you can ask an entire survey’s worth of questions, but actually get responses.
Encourage Negative Feedback
Finally, don’t limit your surveys to the customers that are happy with you. You don’t learn much from people who aren’t asking you to change. So make sure you have an exit survey for customers who choose to leave your business. Ask them where you fell short and what you could do differently. Ask them what your competitors are offering that enticed them to move their business over.
People who are unhappy tend to be much more willing to share their opinions, because they want you to know exactly why they’re unhappy. Use this to your advantage, and learn all you can to improve your business.
These 5 tips can help you improve your surveys to get more responses, and more useful feedback from your customers.
