Timely Email Reminder Boosts Survey Participation

Along with the Preview Pane and Blocked Images survey EmailLabs conducted in September, we also tested using reminder emails to boost participation.

This was a tricky proposition. We wanted to get as many participants as possible, but we did not want to alienate those who did not reply to the survey invitations.

We mapped out a three-stage invitation strategy:

1. Day 1: Sent a general survey invitation to the mailing list of The Intevation Report. This was Day 1 of the survey period (many thanks to those who took our survey).
2. Day 8: Using our segmentation filters we created a list of all email addresses that had not opened the email or opened the email but did not click the survey link. We then sent out an HTML reminder email.
3. Day 16: Published a second reminder in an editor's note in the September 2005 issue of The Intevation Report.

Results

1. This chart shows the responses collected at key points of the 17-day period survey period:
   • Initial Invitation (Day 1-Day 7): 322 responses (65% of the final total)
   • Reminder (Day 8-Day 15):168 additional responses; 490 total responses (52% additional responses)
   • Newsletter Editors Note reminder (Day 16-Day 17): 9 additional responses (2% of total responses)
   • Survey response total: 499 total
   • By the end of the survey we had achieved roughly 8.4% response rate – a bit less than our target of 10 percent. But without the use of any incentives, we were pretty satisfied with the response.
   • The reminder email generated a 52% increase in responses. The reminder in the editor's note generated about 9 more responses, about what we expected.

Discussion

We considered sending two versions of the reminder email: one that recreated the original invitation but with the reminder text added on to it, for those who didn't open the email; and a text-only version of the original sent to those who opened the first invite but didn't click the survey link.

Because of time and creative concerns, though, we scrapped that idea and sent the same email to all the nonresponding email addresses. The immediate response -- 36 responses in the first hour after sending, and 113 within the first day -- told us a good portion of our recipients appreciated the nudge.

The next time we conduct a similar survey and reminder campaign, we may try splitting the creative along response lines and comparing the results. Additionally, we may test the effect of using an incentive.

Conclusion

Reminder emails, regardless of whether for surveys, ecommerce, seminars, etc., can lift your response rate by a significant amount. However, you must use them sparingly and send them only to those who did not respond in some way (either by not opening or by opening and not clicking) instead of sending to your entire list again.