Step 4: Improve Your Survey Completion Rate (Optional)

Goal: Maximize survey completion rate (% of guests who complete your survey)

If your first email sends your guests to a guest satusfaction survey (GSS), make sure that your survey is designed to lower the chances that they respondent would abandon the survey halfway.

This involves two steps: 1) Avoiding "survey fatigue" and 2) Optimizing the user flow

Here are some tips to help maximize your survey completion rate:

  • Keep it short and sweet. Respect the fact that your guests are busy. The ideal length of a satisfaction survey is 2-5 questions, and should only include items that are important to your customers.
  • Make sure each question will give you useful and actionable data. If you are just using your survey to measure satisfaction rather than improve satisfaction, there is no incentive for guests to invest time in responding. Make sure that you have people available to respond directly to customers, and that you take action on the feedback received.
  • Only ask relevant questions. Instead of bombarding guests with dozens of questions and areas, focus on just 1-2 key areas of service that you would like to improve. Once scores for those are consistently high, you can move on to other areas. If you need to ask questions on several topics, group questions on the same topic together.
  • Be aware of your survey invitation email- Keep your email invitation short and communicate the importance of this survey. Try to keep the survey short so you can note the low time commitment it would be to complete it.
  • Consider a progress bar- A progress bar can motivate a guest to complete the survey, with the caveat that the survey must be short. It’s disheartening for a guest to complete page 1 of your survey, only to see that he or she is only 5% through the survey. Consider changing the progress bar to a timeframe (e.g “1 minute to complete”) rather than a percentage.
  • Make sure that the GSS is mobile-optimized. Mobile email could account for up to 70% of email opens, depending on your market. Make sure that your survey is optimized for devices of all sizes.