How to Increase Response Rates in Online B2B Surveys

Whether you’re finding out about purchasing behaviors, gathering views on new products, or understanding your customers’ experiences, online B2B surveys offer the opportunity to gain considerable insight across a vast and broad audience in a short period of time.

In short, sending out surveys to a predetermined database of customers is a cost-effective and flexible way of collecting large amounts of quantitative data. Sounds great, right? However, online surveys come with a limitation – response rates do not always meet the client’s expected return.

Although it is unreasonable to expect a response rate of 100%, realistically, we would expect to achieve a typical response rate of somewhere between 5-10% for most online B2B surveys using a current customer database. In best-case scenarios, companies can achieve a response rate of up to 35-40%, but this would be under optimum conditions.

Before further considering the obstructions and drivers to response rate, it is important to differentiate between response rate and completion rate.

Response rate is the number of people who complete the survey after being sent it (i.e., being a recipient), whereas completion rate is the number of people who complete the survey after starting it (i.e., those who click on ‘start survey’). Unfortunately, keeping a respondent’s attention during a survey can be a challenge, resulting in drop-out midway through the survey and failure to answer all questions.

 

 

What Are the Main Pitfalls When Conducting Online B2B Surveys?

The Customer Database

Maintaining customer databases presents a challenge and can result in missing, out-of-date, or incomplete contact details, invariably resulting in a lower response rate than expected. Ensuring that your customer database includes information such as local time zone and language preferences guarantees that your research team can tailor the survey proficiently.

Customer databases need to be thorough, clean, and up-to-date, and if required, should be representative of the market being surveyed. A sample that is not representative of the customer base will, in turn, result in skewed results.

Questionnaire Design

Surveys need to be appealing to the respondent. Due to the desire to maximize the work done by a single survey, the questionnaire often becomes too long and therefore tedious and uninteresting for the customer. Demanding a significant mental and time investment from customers will likely put them off completion.

At this point, it is important to consider completion rate vs. response rate. A low completion rate indicates a poor survey experience. This experience may include the survey being too long, too repetitive, or uninteresting.

Respondent Anonymity

When sent a customer survey, respondents’ initial thought will often be, ‘Will my answers be attributed to me?’ Not making it clear in respondent communications that individuals can choose to remain anonymous can significantly hinder response rate.

 

 

What Are the Success Factors for Optimizing Survey Response Rate?

Respondent Communication

In the same way most people don’t like to be cold-called, respondents can be put off by receiving a survey they were not expecting. Pre-survey communication letters sent by the research sponsor are best practice to build trust and credibility prior to fieldwork starting.

Linked with this point, if the internal capabilities exist, it might be worth considering sending the survey internally as this could result in an increased response rate. We recommend A/B testing during the pilot stage to see if the response rate differs.

When designing the visual aspects of a survey, it may be beneficial to consider adding company-specific branding. This helps respondents to associate the survey directly with the company in question rather than just the research firm.

Although email is often the best form of communication, in some markets other formats may be better suited, such as SMS, social media, QR code, or even in-app distribution. For example, younger demographics may respond better to surveys distributed via SMS or social media.

Some respondents may start the survey and not complete it due to distractions, and some may forget to complete the survey if the initial email catches them at the wrong time. Depending on the initial response rate, sending out gentle reminder emails is a great way to bring the survey back to the front of mind. It is important when sending out reminder emails to only send these to those who have not already completed the survey. Sending reminder emails to those who have already completed the survey is poor practice.

It is also worth considering changing the text in any reminder email. Including the closing date of the survey in reminder emails is good practice.

Respondent Requirements

Putting yourself in the respondents’ shoes, considering receipt of the survey and barriers to completing it, helps to prioritize when planning distribution.

Some respondents may prefer to remain anonymous when completing the survey, so where possible, add the option for respondents to remain anonymous, and make this clear in all communication related to the survey.

If you were to receive a survey that you could not complete in your native language, you might think twice about responding – even if you were able to understand some or all of the survey content. When planning your survey, think about your contact list and create a list of key languages that would be worthwhile translating into.

Tied to this, the days of B2B respondents only completing a survey on a desktop are gone – all online surveys must be fully optimized to work on all manner of digital devices, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Customer Database

Creating your contact list is a key stage in the survey planning process.

First, you must start by understanding who it is that you want to contact (is this a range of demographics, regions, customer types) and aim to make your sample representative of these demographics. Given decision-making units often include several departments in B2B decision-making, it usually makes sense to have more than one representative for each company contact.

Next, when going through your contact list, only include credible respondents that would realistically respond. Lastly, make the list as clean as possible (i.e., ensuring contact details are up-to-date and lapsed customers are removed from the list where appropriate) – this may take more work upfront but is worth the effort in the long run.

Questionnaire Design

Questionnaire design is a major factor in contributing to response rates.

In the process of questionnaire design, there will often be contributions and suggestions made by different people and departments. It is important to stay focused on the goal of the research and only include questions that contribute to achieving this overall goal.

Some main considerations in questionnaire design, to limit mental taxation for the respondent, are:

• Stay focused on the research goal
• Ensure survey flow is logical
• Start with an easy-to-answer question
• Include a range of question types
• Include open questions so that customers have the opportunity to voice their own opinions but do not make these compulsory
• Limit the number of questions – anything over 10-15 minutes will put respondents off
• Limit the use of industry jargon
• Word questions as simply and clearly as possible
• Lastly, but importantly, make it interesting!

Offer an Incentive

As an additional consideration, offering an incentive to respondents can inspire higher response rates. Incentives do not necessarily need to be monetary but could include:

• High-level overview of research findings
• Charity donations

In our experience, incentives per respondent are more impactful than entry to a prize draw.

 

 

Taking Your Research Further

Study Supplementation

If the achieved response rate still fails to meet expectations, further forms of research could be used to supplement the research, such as in-depth interviews or focus groups.

Using multiple data collection methods in combination supplements the survey research in multiple ways. You have the opportunity to reach out to those contacts who are harder to reach online, you can ask more open-ended questions, and additionally dig deeper into research findings from the online survey.

Customer Survey Feedback

If the long-term plan is to carry out similar surveys at regular intervals, whether this is bi-annually or annually, consider an appropriate exclusion period before a respondent is resent an online survey again. No more frequent than annually is good practice.

For these longitudinal studies, it might also be worthwhile to include one or two questions at the end of the survey to gather feedback on the survey experience and how it could be improved next time around.

Allowing respondents the opportunity to provide survey feedback makes refining and improving the survey in the future easier and may provide more clarity on what works well and what needs further work.

And if the research has a customer experience focus, give respondents the chance to opt into being contacted by the research sponsor to close the loop on any outstanding issues.

 

 

Summary

There is no silver bullet for increasing response rates, but by considering the above factors during the planning, design, and distribution of an online B2B survey, response rates can be maximized, so the full potential of the research can be achieved.

 

 

 

To discuss how our tailored insights programs can help solve your specific business challenges, get in touch and one of the team will be happy to help.