How to get more responses to your in-app surveys: the 4 levers you can use today

Using in-app surveys can be one of the most efficient ways to understand your users and spot improvements opportunities for your product. Coupled with direct interviews, you can collect quantitative and qualitative to make better product decisions.

But, most of the time, people don't answer to them. A study we made on 100+ brands show that, in average, email surveys have only a 8% response rate while in-app surveys peak at 12%. It's obviously not enough to be sure that responses you'll collect are the views of the majority of your users and that you can make decisions based on them.

So your main challenge is to increase the number of responses to transform in-app surveys into one of the most powerful tools of your stack. Here are 4 levers you can use today to go from a 12% to a 60% or 70% response rate:

1️Segment your users

If you had your users in front of you, you would adapt your questions, your tone, the moment of your interaction with them to who they are. It's the natural way of interacting with people and tt seems obvious to say it like that, but most of the time it's something we don't do for in-app survey. We ask the same question to every user, without taking into account who they are and how they use our product.

So the first lever to get more answers is to segment your users and target the right questions, to the right users at the right moment.

You can use 3 types of conditions to segment them:

🗺 Their behaviour on your app (the page they are on, the time spent on it, etc) to ask question on a specific context of usage.
👤 User Properties, all the data you have about them for you to target key personas or exclude people from your research.
👣 User Events, more precise than general behaviour tracking. Here, you can decide to display a survey after a click on a button, or after x usage of a feature, etc.

If you already track that with Segment.io, you can use our Segment integration with Screeb in-app surveys and be ready in only a few minutes!

2️Customize the content of your questions

It's now a well known fact that customization is key in every digital experience. From a basic {{firstname}} in an email to tailored product recommandations on an ecommerce website, performances are tied to customization. And it's also true for in-app surveys.

Between a neutral and global survey—on the left—and a targeted and customized survey—on the right—using user property like their name, account information etc, the one on the right will get much much more responses.

3️Display who's asking the question

One key psychological factor explaining why people don't answer to online surveys is that they feel their answer won't matter. We receive tons of emails asking for a review, a vote, a rating, but most of the time it's sent from a no-reply address and you don't have any feedback on your response.

So people feel that answering is useless. To insist on the importance of their response for you, and so to incite them to respond, you must stop sending anonymous and neutral surveys. You must explain who, in your team, needs the answers. That will create empathy among your users that will want to help your team and will make your response rate go to the roof.

Display the name, the picture, the role of the person asking the question. It will make a real difference.

4️Iterate

Collecting feedback is not a one-time operation. This is something you should do over time, by iterating your survey strategy. Start with a global approach, to get a global view of what your users think about your product.

Then, iterate by segmenting more precisely your users, asking more precise questions and dig a bit deeper every time to collect more and more feedback.

That's by being more precise at every round of survey that you'll keep being relevant to your users and that they'll keep responding to your questions.