Wondering how to tap into your customer’s valuable feedback? The answer is in customer surveys. However, this is only the beginning—you must also be able to ask your customers to fill them out. Here’s the best way to get your customers to fill out surveys and help your business grow.
Your customer feedback is a gold mine of insights that can bring incredible value to your business. It enables you to understand them better and provide them with the right service. Result? increased customer satisfaction and revenue.
To achieve this, you need to have access to authentic customer feedback data. However, it can get challenging to collect quality responses from the surveys you send out. Your customers most likely have multiple unread marketing emails and texts per day, and if your surveys don’t stand out, they will become one of them as well.
So, what is the right way to ask your customers to answer your survey? To help you out, we have shared seven ways to encourage your customers to participate in your surveys and maximize the response rate.
What Is the Importance of Customer Feedback?
Feedback is an effective way to optimize every aspect of your business—whether you are developing a product or measuring customer satisfaction for existing ones. If you don’t understand the minds of your customers, you will never be able to fulfil their needs.
While customer feedback is a great way to determine their experience with your business, it also:
- helps you build a stronger relationship with your audience.
- when they feel heard, their loyalty toward your brand increases, and so does positive word-of-mouth.
Customer feedback also provides the necessary information you need to make data-driven decisions. This ensures you are not doing any guesswork and prevents costly mistakes.
But to get meaningful insights, you need to be able to ask your customers for their feedback. One popular way is to create customer surveys—a good survey needs to have the right questions asked in the right way. Now that you know why customer survey is important for your business, let’s dive into how to encourage your customers to participate in them.
How To Get People To Fill Out Customer Surveys?
Creating a survey that makes people want to fill it out can be more challenging than you think. Several aspects come into play when you are planning for a successful survey campaign. What is the recipe for a productive customer survey?
Here are the eight most effective ways to create meaningful surveys and encourage your customers to fill them out.
1. Keep the surveys short.
While the more traditional approach is to create long surveys, it has a setback. This process can take a lot of time for your customers, which may make them less likely to finish it.
A simple solution is to develop a short survey focused on a specific business aspect. This not only makes it easier for your customers to answer your survey, but it also helps keep the main focus of the survey campaign intact. For focused five-question surveys, you can use a tool like Reviewfy.io to capture your customers’ attention and gain the necessary insights.
2. Leverage Salience Theory
According to this theory, whether or not your customers will participate in the surveys is determined by three factors:
- How salient or well-noticed the survey design feature is
- How important the feature is to your customer
- Whether the feature drives them towards or away from survey participation
Takeaway? The likelihood of your customer responding to a survey is directly related to the importance of the topic to them. While this can vary across populations, it’s a good idea to stick to a specific segment of the survey topic that is closely related to the respondents.
3. Create easy-to-answer Surveys
Ask yourself: Would you rather opt for a survey that forces you to write paragraphs or a short and crisp survey that lets you answer in a few clicks? Probably the second, right?
And this is exactly what your customers also expect from you. While you should keep the responses insightful, make them as easy to answer as possible. This can mean combining questions with different response types, including one-liner feedback, numbers, or star ratings.
4. Deliver Through Your Customers’ Favourite Channels
While email is a potent way to reach your customers, they likely receive multiple marketing messages in a day, and most remain unread. If you don’t want your survey to end up the same, try to tailor customers’ experiences through their preferred channels.
This can be done through email or using different platforms like WhatsApp or Discord. The more visible and convenient your surveys are, the more likely they are to be completed.
5. Mind Your Survey Frequency
Even though your business needs maximum insights, it’s a good idea to keep your survey frequency in check. Take your time to build quality questionnaires that can bring more value than sending out multiple forms.
In case you are automating the survey rollouts, ensure you have all the right filters marked. Consider your customers’ behaviour patterns and utilize their data to determine when and how often to send them customer surveys.
6. Incentivize your customers
If you are finding it difficult to get valuable customer reviews, try to incentivize them for completing your surveys. Rewards are a great motivator to take action on something and can considerably solidify your relationship with your customers.
Ensure the selected incentives appeal to your target audience and can be of real value to them. This is a great way to encourage people to fill out surveys and gain the needed insights.
7. Follow Up
Creating the best survey forms or even providing incentives is not always enough. You need to follow up with your customers and remind them to take action on the survey. Your customers are busy and may overlook your survey; a simple reminder can encourage them to complete it.
Ensure that you don’t spam your users and exclude respondents who have already participated in the survey from future automated follow-ups.
8. Acknowledge
A simple way of appreciating the gesture of response from your customers is to send a “Thank you” note. This would go a long way in their active participation in your future surveys.
Final Thoughts
Customer feedback can transform your business for the better if collected and executed in the right way. Now that you know how to ask for customer feedback, use these tips to increase the survey response rate and gain meaningful insights.
