How do you increase response rates for mail surveys in the digital age?

To increase response rates for mail surveys in the digital age, personalize invitations and follow-ups to engage recipients, ensuring messages are clear and relevant. Offer incentives, such as discounts or entry into a prize draw, to motivate participation. Simplify the survey design for ease of completion and ensure it's mobile-friendly. Additionally, leveraging multiple touchpoints like social media reminders and email follow-ups can effectively boost response rates.

Choosing the study objective is step 1 Then you can define your target audience. The target audience needs to be accurate and not a broad and unlimited reach. You should secure approvals from those who will participate in advance otherwise participation will be very low.

Choosing a target audience requires a balance between needs for representativeness and requirements for response rate. Targeting the survey only to those who have 'a connection to your topic' may increase the response rate, but it may also introduce elements of bias. Further, variables used to limit the address-based sample accodingly can increase the cost of sample. For surveys with no need for representativeness, this may not be a problem, but for surveys attempting to draw conclusions about broader populations, this can create substantial error.

When sending multiple contacts, bear in mind that the return rate for subsequent contacts decreases exponentially for each round of contact. Response from initial contact will reflect the vast majority of response in most cases.

Another way to encourage people to take your survey is to tell them that you will give them a report about the survey results when it's done. This makes people more likely to join because they get something useful back. It also shows that you value their opinions and are open about what you learn from the survey. By seeing the final report, people can understand how their answers help and might be more willing to take part in surveys in the future.

A better idea is to send respondents a QR code or otherwise easily accessible web-based version of your survey. Address-based sampling is among the strongest representative sampling approaches in the US at present, but pen-and-paper modalities create data entry costs, barriers to participation for some respodents, and greatly reduce the likelihood of completed response due to the additional burden on participants.