Do you want to watch your response rate grow? Start talking!
People don’t like taking long & difficult surveys. But they do like sharing their opinions during an interesting conversation. So let’s start engaging them and make our surveys more conversational. With these easy-to-implement tips you can start talking right away:
Give something in return
It doesn’t always have to be a gift! Give back some relevant information to your respondent. In between the questions or at the end of the survey, or both. Just include a small ‘did you know’ text about the subject of your survey between the questions.Also try to provide some information, before asking your own question. This makes the ‘tone-of-voice’ of the survey more natural.
Only relevant questions lead to relevant answers
Use ‘Skip Logic’ to ensure the respondent only gets the questions that are relevant to him/her. It allows to skip to a specific question or to the end of the survey, based on the answer of a preceding question. Your respondent won’t have to go through the entire survey if the questions are not relevant. Learn more about ‘Skip Logic’.
There’s always room for remarks
If you use multiple choice questions, make sure to provide an (optional) open text answer for an explanation. If, in a normal conversation, someone is asking ‘What did you think of your hotel on your last holiday?’, the answer will never be limited only to ‘Excellent’, ‘Good’ or ‘Average’.Adding an optional open text answer will not only make your survey more conversational, it will also result in more, richer insights.
Good to know: Why not try to get in touch with people giving long answers to open ended answers in your survey? They make great candidate brand ambassadors.
Keep the survey short, but the conversation going
Try to challenge yourself and continue the conversation via e-mail or social media. (Only do so if you have the means to follow up, of course.) Just like leaving your business card to stay in touch, you can leave a call-to-action at the end of your survey.Ask respondents to keep in touch through e-mail (link to a subscription form), social media or even a ‘good old’ phone number can do the trick.
Let respondents know what they’re helping with
Start off by explaining what you will do with the data. After the survey, follow-up to return some qualitative or quantitative information on the aggregated responses, or on the result of what you did with the insights.
Turn that frown upside down
Get in touch personally (one-to-one) in the case of negative feedback. Because people expect this. Not in case of average feedback, but clearly negative. Use skip logic to ask contact information (mostly e-mail).
We’d like to start up a conversation too
A good survey should really feel like a nice chat: two-way communication and authentic interest from both sides are key ingredients. It makes your survey much more than a way to collect data: it can create solid, long lasting relationships.
Have you created any surveys recently? We’re curious to see what you’ve come up with and possibly help make it even more conversational. Feel free to send it to info@pointerpro.com
