Improve your web survey response rates dramatically. Here are several ways.
First, buy more email addresses. More potential respondents means more respondents. Pretty simple. A creative way to “buy” respondents that is seldom used is to use traditional media to drive potential respondents to your website. Why don’t all Super Bowl ads do this I ask you? Tell your IT department that has your survey backbone to get ready, especially, if you are running conjoint or something that takes processing power.
Also note that you can increase response rates by knowing what your default survey software settings are. Some survey software can’t handle this kind of volume and you can lose respondents. In fact, some people have their software that is able to handle this kind of volume set up to only allow 20 respondents at a time. This can be a huge mistake if you get media coverage and people get dumped (they likely won’t come back). The reason that some people set their number of respondents to a lower number at a time is so that they don’t get response bias from things like super bowl ads. However, if you are looking to increase the number of respondents, you should change these settings. You can always re-weight your data at another time to factor out the “super bowl ad effect.”
Another way to improve web survey response rates is to choose a different methodology. For example:
1) Use a mail survey instead or in addition to a web survey. A mailed survey may reach someone who has a down computer or changed their email address. We routinely have response rates that are 25 times better with mail surveys when compared to web surveys. This is another way to get at “cell phone only” households and “no computer households” too.
Also note that companies like Research 13 can use modern scanning technologies so that you do not have to pay for data entry of surveys too. Hit the following link to request more info. (http://www.research13.com/costestimatecontactus.html )
2) Clean that list. Your response rates may be low because your list is old. Or, because it has a survey link attached or because you are hitting several people at the same ISP or company, you are going into people’s junk mail. Send a separate alert that your survey is coming to avoid this.
3) After you use the cost effective mail and web methodologies, perhaps do some follow-up with phone surveys too. It is not uncommon to have web survey response rates at only 2%, mail survey response rates at 50% and telephone surveys by Research 13 can be as high as 80% of respondents contacted.