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- Increase respondent convenience by keeping the message as short
as possible. To increase the chance your email is read and your
survey is responded to, make your invites concise and straightforward.
If you already have information about respondents (e.g. name, age, gender,
organization, title, etc.), don’t make them enter this information again in
your surveys. Zarca’s Pre-population feature allows you to personalize your
invites and surveys with known personal or demographic information so your
respondents don’t have to.
- Craft effective email subject lines and start emails with an
engaging question. To gain the interest of the recipient, don’t use
a dull subject line. Feature a subject or example from the email content
that will draw them in. Avoid the word “free” as many unsolicited emails use
the word “free” in their subject line. To keep Spam filters at bay, use
original language but at the same time be cautious with your choice of
words.
For an employee satisfaction survey invite you could ask “How do you rate
the work-life balance offered by your employer? Or in a customer loyalty
survey invite you could pose the question “What is the one thing that makes
you a loyal customer to XYZ Company?”. The point is to connect with your
audience in a way that immediately communicates the high value you place on
their opinion.
- Maintain an informal tone. Bulk emails are very easy to
deploy. Take some time to personalize your emails in a friendly, welcoming
tone that doesn’t sound too much like you are trying to sell something.
- Email Branding and Personalization. Personalized emails
are very effective at relating to your stakeholders. Zarca’s software allows
users to quickly personalize an invite email with the receiver’s name,
company, city, gender, etc. Branding your message to the look-and-feel of
your organization’s website and logo increases the respondent’s trust in
your efforts. A personal touch goes a long way in having people respond.
- Effectively target message and offer meaningful
incentives. The content and tone of your email should be crafted
based on the varying audiences they are being sent to (e.g. first-time
respondents vs. past respondents, executives vs. employees, customers vs.
vendors, etc.) and should reflect their specific interests and needs.
Research increasingly shows that offering individuals short-term inducements
(e.g. coupons, free low-valued merchandise, etc.) to take a survey is not as
effective at increasing response rates or building long-term relationships
as offering them more significant reasons is, such as sharing the results
with them or communicating that their feedback will impact the direction of
the organization.
- Offer multiple methods of survey access. Zarca utilizes
direct links, redirect and copy/past URLs to allow participants with varying
Internet browser settings access surveys in ways most convenient to them.
For individuals who don’t have an email address, Zarca can send them unique
keys via fax, telephone, or postcard to login to surveys. For organizations
that administer paper-based or telephone surveys, Zarca allows their
responses to be seamlessly imported into the platform and aggregated with
any online responses.
- Reminders lower non-response bias. With the instant
nature of email communication, you can easily send intelligent reminders to
those who have not yet responded to your initial invite. You should not
however, send more than two reminders or send reminders to individuals who
have already responded by either taking the survey or declining
participation. Zarca’s Touch Rules Manager will help you to automate these
tasks by keeping track of how many invites/reminders each individual has
received, their response status, and how many surveys of yours they have
taken in a certain amount of time.
- Keep email address databases current. People change
their email addresses frequently for many reasons. To keep your list
accurate, you should keep tabs on emails that bounce back or are
undeliverable. You should also offer a way for survey participants to update
their contact information in the email or survey.
- Communicate privacy policy and that data is secure and
anonymous. A big factor in someone participating in your survey is
how much they trust your organization. Clearly communicate your policies on
safeguarding personal information and that you will not sell or share this
information with any third parties. A strong sense of trust can maintain a
healthy, long-term relationship with your survey participants.
Participants want to know that their responses are safe and won’t be linked
with identifying information (email, IP address, etc.). You should have a
line in the content of your email that describes the extent that you address
these issues. Zarca has an anonymity feature that blocks survey
administrators from seeing any personally identifiable information. This is
especially useful in surveys that touch on sensitive topics like management
evaluations or presidential polls. Zarca also uses 128-bit SSL encryption of
survey response data when it is being transmitted.
- Best time to send. Send emails when people are most
likely to receive it and have the time to respond to it. This takes some
getting-to-know your specific survey audiences and when their down times and
busy periods are. Usually, on Thursday and Friday, people are gearing up for
the weekend and on Monday they are recovering from the weekend. Likewise, if
you send invites/reminders early in the morning you run the risk of being
lumped with the substantial amount of Spam generated late at night. Studies
have shown the best time to send an email is mid-week on Tuesday and
Wednesday between 2-3 pm.
- Give the option for text-only email. Not every email
server allows HTML emails or emails with images/multimedia. Always include a
plain text alternative for individuals who can only receive text. Zarca
gives the option to send HTML or plain text invites/reminders, as well as
the option to embed the survey directly within the email.
- Do not deceive your audience. Another topic
regulated by the Can Spam Act (2003), it is important to be honest about the
contents and aim of your email. For example, using a subject line of “Free
Credit Score” will annoy individuals greatly when they realize your email
has nothing to do with a free credit score check.
- Enable respondents to partially save surveys and to opt-out of a
survey. To minimize participants giving up on completing a survey,
offer them a way to save their progress and return to it later. Analyzing
the stopping points is also a useful way to gauge the optimal length of your
survey. Zarca’s surveys have a setting that allows respondents to save their
progress and continue later.
Required now by the Can Spam Act (2003), including a clear and conspicuous
way for recipients to decline participation (opt-out) is critical from both
legal and etiquette perspectives. Zarca’s invites/reminders have
fully-customizable opt-out messages.
- Try different things. To discover better ways of
doing things, try using several different subject lines, body copy,
branding, etc. to see what is most effective. Whenever you try something
different, monitor the changes in response rates and compare it with
previous survey initiatives. Zarca’s Distribution Manager allows you to
instantly track response rates as survey responses come in.
- Always test emails before sending. Before
launching your email invitations, best practice tells us we should test and
preview all aspects of the survey experience to ensure everything appears
and functions exactly as we expect it to. Zarca’s Test Invites feature
consists of preliminary invitations that can be sent to you, coworkers,
supervisors, etc. If possible, you should also try to send test invites to
different email servers to identify any problems.
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