Response Rate For Your In-App Surveys - The Complete Guide

Response rate, If you have been in the online surveying business you have probably heard about it.

But What is it? How to measure it? What is a great response rate?... Let's find out!

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Response rate

The response rate is the percentage of people who complete a survey out of the total number of individuals who were asked to participate, providing a measure of the survey's engagement and effectiveness.

With a great response rate, In-app surveys are a powerful tool to reduce the drop-off rate of your funnels, identify who your true competitors are, or even to build your roadmap.

But all of that work only if your users agree to respond to your questions. That may seem obvious but it has a huge impact on the quality of your data. You may think that 60 or 80 responses is good, but if you have 8,000 users, it's nothing.

Our data show that, in average, in-app surveys have a 12% response rate. It means that 82% of your users who saw your survey chose not to respond. It also means that any conclusion and decision you'll make will be based on a fraction of your users and have a great risk of being wrong.

So how can you get a great response rate for your in-app surveys? Here's the definitive answer:

Survey response rate measure

Before learning how to increase its response rate, it's important to understand what is a response rate.

An in-app survey response rate is the percentage of persons who respond at least to one question of your survey, compared to the total number of persons who saw the survey.

For example, if 100 persons saw your in-app survey during their journey in your solution, and if 65 of them responded to at least one question, you'll get a 65% response rate.

In addition, we can also track the completion rate, which is the percentage of persons who answered to every question, compared to the number of persons who responded to at least one question.

What is the difference between a response rate and a completion rate?

Completion rates

In the context of online surveys, the completion rate is calculated by dividing the total number of fully completed and submitted surveys by the number of surveys that were initiated by participants. This means that the statistic only accounts for participants who began your survey, and only those who went through the entire survey and submitted it contribute to improving the completion rate.

Response rate

While they might seem similar to completion rates at first glance, response rates offer crucial information regarding the reliability of your gathered data. In essence, a response rate is the ratio of individuals who have completed your survey to the total number of people in your sample group. Below is an example illustrating how a response rate is calculated.

Now you know the difference between completion rates and response rates!

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What is a great response rate?

On average, our data show that in-app surveys have a 12% response rate. For email survey, it's even worse: only 8% of people who receive a survey by email respond to at least one question.

In both cases, it's not enough to make conclusions and be confident about the representativeness of the responses. So, if 8% or 12% is not enough, what is a great response rate?

The average response rate of companies using Screeb is around 55%. A lot of our customers even are above 65/70%. And our all-time champion have a response rate of 87%!

This is not luck. This is because they respect the 6 key principles of an engaging and performing in-app survey:

1️-Start simple, then iterate

The first principle is that you must not overthink your survey. Start small, simple. Don't try to ask every question or to get every response at once. Start with the most straightforward questions, in the context of your users, and iterate from there.

You detect a pattern in responses? Dig into that by asking more precise questions. You see a common frustration about a feature? Improve it and ask if it's better. You have a huge drop-off rate in one of your funnel? Ask your users what went wrong.

Start with simple surveys, and iterate often to keep your users engaged and get insightful responses.

2️-4 questions tops

Don't ask too many questions. Nobody wants to answer long surveys. When we arrive on a 10+ questions long survey, most of time we close it and don't bother to respond. So if you don't like long survey yourself, don't send long surveys to your users.

Prefer short surveys, micro-surveys, that are displayed more often in your app than rare, long and boring surveys.

Our recommendation is to respect a 4 questions max rule. This rule doesn't forbid you to be creative and to use logic jumps to ask relevant questions to those who respond. But a single person should not see more than 4 steps/questions in your survey. That's how you'll keep your users engaged and why they'll tend to answer more to future surveys.

3️-Use various question formats

Think about how you would ask questions to friends in real life. You would not basically read them a list of boring questions. You would add emotions, you would adapt questions to whom is in front of you, you would try to better understand an answer before going to the next question, etc.

Do the same thing in your in-app surveys. Use ratings, open texts, buttons, or texts to guide your user. Include links to share more content and collect data from your users. Engage them at every question to ensure your response rate and your completion rate will be as high as possible.

4️-Start with a question

Sometimes, we see some surveys starting by a welcome text or a welcome question. "Welcome to this survey. We'll need only 2 minutes of your time" or "Would you agree to answer to quick questions?", things like that. But, since it's often been associated with long surveys, when you start with a small text like that, your user will think twice before responding.

And since most of their survey experiences have been bad in the past, they won't do it.

Start directly with your first question. With Screeb formats, your users will answer naturally and you'll collect way more responses. On A/B tests we conducted, for the same survey displayed to the same audience, a survey starting with a welcome message got a 25% response rate, while without it it went up to 78%!

5️-Start with a rating

Even more precisely, we recommend that you start with a rating. Ask your users for a score, a NPS, a CES. Ask them to measure the quality of something. That's the easiest thing to do for them and so a guarantee that you'll get more responses.

Once they're hooked, you can ask more qualitative questions, like open text ones. But start with a rating to engage your users and encourage them to answer.

6️-Use styling and variables

You have a lot of data about your users. Use them to make your survey experience more personal and make your users feel that your questions are not generic, that they are for them.

First name, last name, account plan, company name… anything you know about your users can be added to your questions for them to feel more unique. And the impact on response rate is huge!

Conclusion

If you respect this 6 key principles, you'll see real uplift in your response rate, and so a real increasing in the quality of your data. That's how you'll be able to be more confident about your conclusion and to make decisions with less risk of being wrong!