Hi all! Over the last couple years, my team has noticed a decrease in response rates for surveys and it being harder to recruit customer research participants for topics. I'd be curious to know if others are seeing this trend? (For example 3 years ago we had a standard 5% customer response rate on surveys, this year it seems more like 2.5%, forcing us to send to larger samples) Edited for context: this is our own customers, B2B market
Hi Stephanie -- are you typically using paid respondent panels, or sending to your own customers?
Our own customers.
we sent two surveys to an owned list (B2C) 1 year apart. response rates tanked the 2nd survey. for context:
we utilized pretty much the same invite copy/design and same raffle
users did NOT have received the survey twice. we ensure there was no overlap
we didn't investigate this, but a good follow-up analysis would be to compare the sign-up sources for both cohorts. it's possible for the 2nd survey, we brought in more customers that were from low quality sources (e.g., sweepstakes)
if it put my consumer hat on, I'm getting WAY MORE request for survey / feedback year over year (airlines, food service, customer service, retail, etc.). I wonder if you're seeing survey fatigue at-large
Nathalie T. - Thanks for sharing your experience! I agree - that is a hypothesis of ours too (survey fatigue), along with just general attention fatigue and the state of the world. We also do random sampling to ensure no one is getting messaged too frequently, same messaging, same type of audience and tanked over a couple years. In other channels folks are sharing that they are seeing similar trends, so there is definitely something here.
So many surveys never lead anywhere. I wonder if we start sharing back what we learned and what we're doing with it, if we would get better response rates?