The level of trust and previous relationship have been shown to have a direct impact on response rates. Generally, the better your client knows their target market and can provide you with lists, the better your response rate. For example, the brilliant producer for this course is an avid Disney, NBA and Apple fan. And says, he is much more likely to fill out surveys he gets from those entities than to fill out a survey for say the NFL, Google or Six Flags theme parks. Simply put, stick with the audience that is engaged with your particular product. Respondents who know your client by name and are devoted purchasers, will be more likely to respond to your survey than respondents who are unfamiliar and not return customers. Thus, an important reason to enhance a loyalty component in your survey, in the first place. This is usually done in a cover letter, or in the first blurb before the introductions, in the survey instrument itself. There is no harm in thanking your respondents for getting back to you with their answers and to encourage open feedback. Make sure to request participation from respondents in advance when possible, and provide information about the purpose of the survey, how the results will be used and the terms of anonymity and confidentiality. Address them by name and thank them for responding. Articles in consumer research journals such as cyber psychology and behavior and social networking, have shown that the strength of both the reputation of the corporation and the survey provider positively correlate with a good response rate from the respondents. In social psychology literature, research says that trust is critical in facilitating exchange relationships. Whether it is with your client, your research staff or the public responding to your survey. Let me share an example of someone who was getting poor response to a survey and how they implemented a strategy to maximize response rates. One time I was hired by a vegetable seed company to interview farmers about what types of vegetable seeds they used and how they used them. It was a survey that was supposed to lead to 400 responses from a list of 2000 randomly selected farmers throughout the U.S. I had absolutely no knowledge of vegetable seeds or farmers, so it was quite the challenge for me. After solidifying the questionnaire, I was off to the races. I had promised my client a report in six weeks. As my usual optimistic self and after a successful pretest, I divided up the call list with my phone interviewers. We made calls from 9:00 am to 8:00 pm for about five days, which is the usual call time for telephone interviews. Our response rate was low. We hit tons of answering machines and no answers. So I was in a quandary. I took my loyal assistant aside and devised a plan based on talking to a few people. Farmers get up at the crack of dawn. We needed to reach them between the hours of 4:00 am and 6 am., their time. So for two weeks, I adjusted my office to a night shift office. We made calls from 1:00 am, East Coast Time, to 7:00 am, West Coast time. This intervention increased the response rate from 10% to almost 90%. We also adjusted who we let do the interview. We found out that farming is a family affair. Talking to the wife was just as good as talking to the husband and vice versa. We found out that being flexible with whom you interview and the time you interview is key to your survey success. Another time when survey responses were coming in slow for a large healthcare mail surveys sent to residents in a certain catchment region of an area hospital, we decided to send out a second round of postcard reminders two weeks after the first reminder postcard. The cost was not prohibitive and we sent it out to the one geographic region that had the least responses. This adjustment brought in several more completed questionnaires and increased our response rate by 10%. That concludes this set of lessons on maximizing response rates. I hope you are now able to identify methods, you can figure out how long your survey should be, and implement strategies to improve your response rates.
