Best Practices for Creating Effective Survey Reminders
To be most effective, survey reminders need to be a part of your initial survey creation process because reminders are scheduled based on when the initial survey is sent. The survey type (broadcast or transactional) also plays a role.
- For broadcast surveys (with the exception of recurring broadcast surveys), you cannot add reminders after the broadcast survey is sent.
- For transactional surveys, reminders will apply only to the invitation messages sent after the reminder has been added. For example, if you have a transactional survey that has been triggered to send by an external event and then you decide to add reminders, the reminders will start sending only after your next survey is triggered.
For these reasons, we recommend implementing survey reminders into your strategy from the start.
Other best practices for using survey reminders include the following.
- Add reminders quickly—An efficient way to add more than one reminder is to simply copy your first reminder, and then open each new reminder to edit the Name, Reminder Days, and Subject fields, as well as any message text you may want to change.
- Plan message delivery timing—Since it takes at least one day before your first reminder can be sent, be sure to take this time factor into account when creating survey reminders.
- Protect your reputation—Even though you can add four survey reminders to each survey, be careful not to overwhelm your customers with too many reminders. For example, if you’ve sent a survey that expires in seven days, you probably don’t need to send four reminders. Seriously consider the appropriate number of reminders to send for your specific situation. Otherwise, you risk harming your reputation with your customers.
- Track reminder success—View the effectiveness of survey reminders using our standard reports.
See View Survey Results.
- Survey Reminder Statistics—This report lets you see the total number of email messages that were sent, viewed, and clicked (opened) for both the initial invitation message as well as for all of the reminders. Being able to see both the viewed and clicked statistics lets you evaluate which reminder prompted the customer to open the survey. In other words, which one was most effective. This report also returns the number of emails that bounced.
- Broadcast Response Timeline—This report lets you see trends by using a time line to show the peaks and valleys in your survey response numbers. Available only for broadcast survey reminders, responses received from the date the initial invitation message was sent through the date the survey was last submitted display on the report. It also shows both the number of survey invitations and the number of reminders sent. (This report is not available on the Results tab if the broadcast survey is a recurring survey or if it uses market testing.)