5 Reasons People Don’t Finish Your Marketing Survey

You’ve sent out a marketing survey, and people are starting it, but not finishing it. Or, you can tell that people are straight-lining answers, or just clicking through the survey without answering (if someone took 30 seconds to finish your five-minute survey, sorry, the data is worthless).

What could be wrong with the survey? Here are some things to look for.

1. Your flow is wrong

Surveys should have tact and emotional intelligence. A basic framework to consider: start with general questions, get gradually more specific, and then end with profiling questions. When people are asked personal questions about income, age, etc. right up front, it can turn the survey experience sour.

Another component of tact: start with screener questions before you move on the main questionnaire. Do you want someone who doesn’t own a laptop to be answering your survey about laptops? No. Have a survey path that essentially kicks people out of the survey if they don’t fit some criteria. Save them the trouble, because you won’t be using their data anyway.

2. You're making people answer redundant questions

Granted, a lot of consumer research involves asking people pretty repetitive questions (think individual differences surveys or personality surveys, or in-depth interviews). But if that’s the kind of survey it is, your respondent should know that is what’s coming. Explicitly state that some questions may seem repetitive.

For typical product or innovation or customer service surveys, redundant questions can wreck a respondents motivation to continue with the survey.

3. Your survey isn’t smart

Let’s say you ask a respondent what brands they’ve heard of, and they check the box next to three names. The next question asks their opinion of the brands. They should only be able to respond to the brands they checked in the previous question. When people feel like your survey is broken, or malfunctioning, they are less likely to finish it.

For example, in Qualtrics, you need to use survey flow to organize the potential paths a respondent can take. Carry Forward Choices is a tool to use in cases like the above to provide a much better, smarter survey experience.

Related, you may ask something like “where do you drink soda” before asking the person if they drink soda at all. Some questions have prerequisites, and when you leave them out, people will get frustrated and leave the survey.

4. Your questions are leading

Respondents don’t want to feel controlled. Here’s a terrible question: “How excellent is our hard-working customer service team?” Related to this, if it’s a multiple response question, make sure you’ve been exhaustive in considering all the possible options. If a respondent doesn’t see his/her preference even as an option, that’s a potential catalyst for becoming unengaged with the survey.

5. Your survey requires too much thinking

What type of cognitive effort are you requiring of participants in your survey? Sometimes the topic may be complex, so questions may of necessity require more thought. But sometimes it’s just poor question design that makes people have to think too hard, and so they ditch your survey. For example, you may be asking multiple questions in a single question: “How would you rate your buying and using experience for this service?” That should probably be two questions.

In other cases, the survey simply has too many open-ended questions. Having to think and type responses is much more difficult than selecting an option. People like ranking things and selecting/expressing preferences, but they don’t like it to feel like work. Furthermore, open-ended responses are very hard to analyze for insights, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of respondents.

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