Event Marketers utilize post-event online surveys for a number of reasons:
They can follow-up with event marketing attendees to find out how they feel and have acted about your event months later
They can serve as a precursor to future field work, to give you perspective on what you should expect from consumers
They can act as stand-alone research or a recruiting effort for qualitative research
Much of the time, recruiting and response for these types of projects is handled by panel companies. Increasing response rate is not much of an issue, as the panel companies can handle that. However, when you are sending to your own email list, there are some steps you can take to ensure that you get the highest number of event marketing attendees to respond.
1. Send your emails at the right time
Timing for emails is critical, as it is easy for emails to get lost in the shuffle. Many event attendees consider survey invites to be non-essential emails (i.e., “junk mail”). While they may have the best intentions of completing the survey, it’s easy for them to simply forget, because it is not as high on their priority list as it is on yours.
Try to time the email so that it reaches people when they aren’t inundated with other emails. Having people see your email for the first time on a Monday morning when they already have an entire weekend of emails to respond to is a surefire way to get lost in the shuffle.
Alternatively, having your emails arrive on a Friday will have a similar effect. In our experience, it is best to have your emails arrive midweek, during the day. This helps to ensure that your email doesn’t arrive along with too many others and that it gets the attention it deserves.
2. Make sure your email subject is short and to the point
It’s easy to lose people at your subject line. The simplest rule is to make sure you keep it short enough that most people will be able to read the entire subject when previewing the email.
Don’t expect recipients to open the email to read the subject. They won’t. Your recipients will read roughly 50 characters of on a smartphone, so that can serve as your upper limit. Don’t forget to count spaces.)
3. Offer a sweepstakes entry
Event Marketing attendees can be enticed by a sweepstakes entry. Nothing too extravagant is necessary. Something as small as a sweepstakes entry to win $50 will convince some people to fill out a 15-question survey.
You’ll need to include a disclaimer if you do choose this method, but that’s fairly simple. You can use third-party companies to manage that, but they typically either have fairly harsh limitations or are inordinately expensive.
With these simple guidelines, it is easy to manage and maintain a 5% response rate or better. It is possible to spike as high as 15. As long as you only expect to reach 5% of your list and you follow these guidelines, you will not be disappointed.
Photo Source: “In 30 Minute Guides” in30minutes.com