How much should I ask?
Just to reiterate the need for brevity, industry results indicate your survey should fall between five and ten questions. The more dedicated your audience, the more questions you could ask. We’ve even seen successful B2B surveys consist of 17 questions. But don’t make that an excuse to write a laundry list of questions.
Remember, you have to make practical use from the responses you get back. With each added question, you’re exponentially expanding the amount of conclusions that can be drawn from the resulting information. Keeping your survey short and focused will deliver the best information back to you.
You may even want to test some surveys on friendly customers or colleagues first. With online tools like the ReachMail Survey Builder, it’s relatively easy to create, edit, and refine surveys. So this is a worthwhile exercise. Even if it sets your survey back a couple of days, these improvements will mean a much higher rate of involvement.
How much response should I expect?
A 10% or greater response rate should be enough data to start answering the questions you posed. Less than 10% means you’re doing something wrong and need to look more closely at your overall communication strategy and why it’s failing here. That in itself can be some eye-opening intelligence.
In a typical B2B environment, you should see most of your response within the first few business days of your email. Previous experience dictates that email survey invitations sent on a Wednesday will see most traffic through Friday, with another slight bump on the following Monday morning. Using ReachMail’s Survey Builder will show you real-time data on your survey response rates, making the decision to start analyzing much easier.
After that, you can start looking at the returns without worrying that more responses will skew the results. While the few drips and drabs that come along later will be important for marketing purposes, they probably won’t make a difference to your decision-making process.
Now what?
So you’ve sent your survey and gotten 10% or better response rate. Great! Now’s the time to analyze your responses and use them right away to market your customers.
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