The most common question we are asked by clients is how to increase the number of survey responses. We wrote about this before, and we cannot stress those steps enough. If you skip something as basic as offering an incentive to complete the survey, then the other tips will not help much. Only a small portion of your audience will be “musicologists” who want to help for the intrigue of the survey itself and even fewer will want to help just for the sake of helping “make the station better”. They see that as your job. So to get people to complete a survey, they need to see that there is at least the possibility of reward for them.
Songscore stations who give away a prize in each survey see as many as 800% more responses on average.
In this post however, we’re going to look a little bit at the technical side of how to make your emails more productive. Your most powerful tool is your mailing list and aside from mentioning your incentive in the first few sentences, there are quite a few other things you can check to make sure you are getting the most from these emails.
1. Check your subject line. If you look at your past email campaigns stats, and the open rate is very low, the first things to examine is your subject line. Subject lines like “there’s still time” and “it’s almost over” mean nothing to someone sifting through a hundred emails. There are lots of online posts and articles that address this, so do some research and look for subject lines that will get your email opened in the first place.
2. Show the difference they have made. Post the top 3-5 songs from the last survey, or highlight one song that is “rocketing” up the list based on the survey. Pull back the curtain and show the audience that a song they voted on is now being played more as a direct result. “You loved Happy Song so much, we are now playing it more than ever before!”. Let people know these surveys are having a direct impact on their station.
3. Use the custom tags! This is a feature often forgotten because it’s not right there in the forefront, but the email system has custom tags you can insert into your emails. You can remind each listener of their login email, their password and more. Use these tags to not only customize your letters with “Dear Actual Name” but to also remind them how easy it is to login by reminding them of their credentials. “Hi Lisa! When you take the survey at https://survey.songscore.com don’t forget your login is lisa@lisa.com and your password is “ilovemystation”. This will reduce the barrier of people forgetting their password or not having cache turned on where it’s saved in their browser etc. These custom tags are there to make it as easy as possible to get responses. On a side note, some clients have asked where there has to be a login at all and the simple answer is that we would not have demographic data with individual accounts, so a “wide open” system would have to ask all of those demographic questions every time, with no record of how many surveys were taken, who was new to your panel, etc.
4. Use the custom email templates for better looking emails. Many clients have taken advantage of this feature, but many have not. When you go to write a new letter, simply choose the default template we have supplied. This will give you a good start and you can customize it from there. Or, if you have a webmaster or marketing person, have them create a custom email HTML template and import it to your account. You can save it and use it over and over again. Treat it just like you would a Mailchimp or other email newsletter account and craft your emails for the best response.
5. As important as your database is, it’s also important to recruit new people to the list all the time, so be sure you are on the air and on your social media channels letting people know about your incentives and your surveys so that new people are being introduced to the opportunity.
If you need individual help with your responses, please do not hesitate to ask and we will provide a free analysis on your account.
