Customer surveys are a great way to gain valuable insights about your audience. If done correctly, they can be a gold mine of customer data, helping you quickly identify what you are doing right and the existing gaps.
But in practice, not all surveys produce the same results. If you are someone who is sending out multiple surveys but not getting enough responses, your audience may be suffering from survey fatigue.
To help you out, we have explained what exactly “survey fatigue” is and how you can avoid it to get the most out of your customer survey campaigns.
What Is Survey Fatigue?
Survey fatigue refers to a situation when respondents become tired of completing surveys and show little enthusiasm to respond. This can happen due to multiple reasons that make your customers get bored or uninterested in your surveys, including:
- Sending multiple surveys in a short amount of time
- Survey length that is too long to retain your customer’s interest
- The survey takes too much effort to answer
- The questions are either irrelevant or inappropriate
Fatigue typically leads to poor-quality responses, hasty completion, or people leaving a survey altogether, which all affect the results of your survey campaign.
What Are The Types Of Survey Fatigue?
There are broadly two types of survey fatigue: survey-taking fatigue and survey response fatigue.
- Survey taking- Survey-taking fatigue occurs during the participation process and is concerned with how many surveys users respond to, the survey length, or the questions asked which may make them opt out.
- Survey response- Survey-response fatigue has to do with how many survey requests users receive from you. This begins even before users participate in the surveys and leads to a low response rate.
These two types of survey fatigue can be further divided into five subtypes based on their causes.
a. Repetitive Questioning
While it may feel tempting to ask for more information instead of less, repetitive questions can be irritating and may affect completion rates. It also reflects a lack of professionalism in preparing the questionnaire and will prevent your customers from participating in future surveys.
b. Over-Surveying
The easiest way to scare off your audience even before participation begins is by sending them too many survey requests. This leads to “survey response fatigue,” where your customers feel overwhelmed with the number of feedback requests and choose to opt out.
c. Long Surveys
If your survey length is too long, you may lose half your respondents to survey fatigue before they even finish completing the form. This results in survey-taking fatigue, which is a leading cause of people leaving mid-survey.
d. Wrong Target-Audience
Survey questions that are not aligned with the experiences of your customers defeat the whole purpose of the survey campaign. Even with the best survey creation approach, if the targeting is wrong, it will lead to incorrect information and growing disinterest among your respondents.
e. Incorrect Survey Design
Your survey design plays a crucial role in determining your response rate. If your surveys are hard to navigate, too complex, or simply unappealing, your customers will likely skip responding or answer poorly.
How Survey Fatigue Negatively Impacts Your Business
You are putting a lot of effort and resources into creating survey campaigns and yet not getting the best results. To avoid this and gain better insights into your customers, it’s important to consider how survey fatigue may affect your campaigns, and in turn, your business.
- Low Quality Of Data- Even though your main goal from your survey is gaining maximum customer data, asking too many questions or sending out multiple surveys can turn the quality of response data low. To ensure accurate responses, try limiting your survey time and frequency.
- Negative Brand Image- It’s important to remember that you are not the only one sending your customer survey requests. With too many requests each day, your audience tends to get irritated and may opt out of your surveys even before they begin.
This also creates a negative feeling in your customers if you keep bombarding them with surveys against their wishes.
- Wastage Of Resources- Rolling out multiple surveys takes time and money from your side. If you do not get the right responses, it’s simply a waste of resources for your business that you may otherwise use to develop other aspects.
How To Avoid Survey Fatigue?
Keeping in mind the concerns mentioned above, several best practices can be implemented to help increase your customer survey responses and completion rates, as well as minimize survey fatigue among the participants.
Here are six effective tips to avoid survey fatigue and maximize your survey response rate.
1. Use Short Surveys
According to research, surveys that take over 25 minutes lose more than three times as many respondents as ones that are under five minutes.
Keeping surveys at ten questions or fewer will not only increase response quality but will also minimize abandonment of surveys mid-way. Ideally, your surveys shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete, but the less time, the better.
Reviewfy.io has developed a unique 5-questionnaire strategy to get maximum participation from users while ensuring you still get enough information for a successful survey.
2. Consider The Frequency Of Your Customer Surveys
It is ideal to give your respondents a reasonable amount of time before you send them another survey request. For example, if your customer has already participated in a product survey, send them a new one only if an important change has occurred or a new feature has been rolled out.
To encourage participation and avoid fatigue, we recommend considering a lower survey frequency, especially if your surveys are long.
3. Be Mindful Of The Survey Questions
We earlier mentioned that you should ask fewer questions in your surveys. Another important aspect is the type of questions you ask your customers.
The best practice is to place all your questions around one topic that is relevant to your customers. For example, if you want feedback on your product, only ask about your customer’s experience with that specific product.
Also, consider if you want to include open-ended questions or quantitative questions to collect better information from your survey.
4. Pay Incentives
A great way to reward your respondents for their efforts is by paying them incentives, no matter how little they are. This not only makes them feel valued but also encourages them to participate in your future surveys. For example, you can give the customers loyalty points they can redeem for a discount coupon after a certain number of purchases.
With Reviewfy.io, you can create and send surveys, measure analytics, and also pay incentives of your choice, all from one place.
5. Choose The Right Sample Audience
As we discussed earlier, targeting the wrong audience makes the entire survey’s data inaccurate. A good idea is to segment your customers based on specific variables common to them. For instance, if you have rolled out a new premium feature, send out a survey only to your paying customers rather than sending it to all your users.
This gives you a chance to personalize your surveys while also avoiding survey response fatigue among the participants.
Conclusion
You can avoid all kinds of survey fatigue by limiting the number of survey requests you send, offering incentives for customers to respond to your surveys, and keeping questions clear, personalized, and well-designed. The best thing you can do to fight survey fatigue is to create surveys that are easy to navigate and fill out.
Use these tips to get better response rates from your customers and make the best use of your survey campaigns today.
