Online surveys eliminate the cost and time associated with reaching out to survey participants. Studies have found that nearly 10% of responses to online surveys are received within the first hour of deployment. However, like everything electronic, if a survey participant does not attend to your survey rightaway, she may never get to it. After all, given the high volume of email everyone receives, what is the likelihood someone will go back and revisit a survey invitation?
To improve your response rates, you can and must send reminders. In our experience when reminders are properly used, they can more than double the response rate relative to the initial email invite. What constitutes proper use of reminders may be debated but there is consensus that some ways are better than others. Foremost among the desirability of the reminder feature is the fact that reminders should only be sent to people who have yet to participate in the survey. This is why Zarca’s online platform gives you the ability to send up to five reminders and it can guarantee that only those who have not yet participated will be reminded. By restricting reminders only to non-participants, you have the ability to make the text of these reminder emails more emphatic. Best practices indicate that you remind the invitees what benefits they stand to gain from participating in the survey.
