3 Handy Tips to Increase your Survey Responses with Folded Postcards

How do you improve your customer’s experience? Stop theorizing among yourselves and get the answers you need directly from your customers. Coming up with a survey is easy. Simply use folded postcards to create an attractive survey form complete with a self-return postage.

Aside from getting the data you need, surveys are a good way of engaging your customers, and advertising your intent on doing good service.

Here are some ways to improve on your response rate:

1. Engage people.

Let people participate in the creation of the survey. It may seem tautological to engage people to get them to participate, but it also makes the most sense. Making people feel like they are part of the project makes them more likely to want to see its success.

a) Let them know about your survey.

Start calling people who you think can give you valuable information: your suppliers, distributors, clients from your database and inform them about your survey. Tell them what it’s for and how responding to them will be both beneficial for you and for them in the long run.

b) Ask for suggestions.

Being asked for their opinion makes people feel important and can be a very powerful tool. Run the idea by them and get insights on how to formulate your questions. More important, ask them what a good incentive would be for respondents to answer your question.

c) Ask for referrals.

The process of asking your respondent to recommend another person who may fit your sample is called snowballing. People tend to group with people who share the same interests so your respondent is likely to know other people who use or know about your product. Of course, you can come up with an incentive scheme for the person who gave the referral.

This may sound like hard work, but if you have any experience with direct-mail-marketing, you know how hard it is to get a response from customers. Surveys are important because you need a much higher response rate than your typical advertisement for it to be relevant. Laying down the ground work with phone calls makes them predisposed to answering your survey and will guarantee a higher response.

2. Make the experience fun.

• Use full colored postcards to make the survey cards more attractive, and use a perforated folded card your respondents can simply tear off. Print a self-postage stamp so that your respondent can simply cut the off answer them and send them with the rest of their mail.

• Work with a conversational and personal tone. Write a short personal message to your respondents regarding the survey and thank them for their time. Also note the incentive mechanism you have put in place.

• Make your questions interesting and give them space to voice out their opinions.

3. Publish results

People are generally fond of trivia, quizzes, and statistics. When you have completed your survey, send them another set of regular of folded postcards thanking them for participating in the activity. And to make their participation more important, include the results of the survey. In addition remember to send your incentive whether it is a small give away, or a gift check for a small amount.