Product Survey

It's pretty frustrating when it comes time begin your survey results analysis using either the survey reports built into your online survey software, excel or another survey analysis tool and you find your survey has a high partial response rate. You spent a lot of time writing survey questions then building the survey in your survey tool. You thought about your survey methodology (including your survey analysis methods) and determined sample sizes using a sample size calculator, because you wanted to ensure you had a representative sample. However, survey best practices tell you that you should not use partial responses in your survey analysis. It seems unfair after all your time working on the survey project that you should have to throw out partial responses and fall short of your estimated sample size.

This is one of the reasons you need to test your survey to a small segment of your email list prior to fully launching your survey. A small test would allow you to catch this problem early. I typically see survey abandonment stem from an online questionnaire being too long, the topic of the questions are too personal or the respondent knows little about the topic.

You know how frustrating it is for you to see a high abandonment rate? It's equally frustrating to an online survey respondent to begin to completing a customer survey, website market research or web usability survey and find out it's long. Particularly because most survey invitations promise a short survey.

Solution? Ask survey respondents the most important questions on the first page (keep it to just a few, I would try to stay under five. Think about a comment card at a restaurant, would your questions fit on a comment card?) Then ask if they have time to give additional feedback. I've seen this method used on a number of customer satisfaction marketing surveys, but the same customer satisfaction survey methodology could be applied to employee questionnaires, product feedback forms and website surveys as well. Each question in your survey should have a purpose and contribute towards meeting your survey project's goal, but some may rank higher on your "need to know" scale. Offering respondents an out will not eliminate survey abandonment but it should reduce it without forcing you to throw out that respondent.