Distributing surveys
To get the maximum number of responses, you need to think about the return on investment for your survey respondents. How much effort will your respondents think it will take to respond to your survey (cost) and what is in it for them (benefit)? In other words, you need to minimize the perceived cost and to make the benefit clear upfront. Otherwise, your survey respondent will be less motivated to answer your survey and you will get fewer survey responses.
There are several ways to minimize the cost of taking a survey.
Keep the survey as short as possible
The most direct way to reduce the cost for your survey respondent is to reduce the number of survey questions. At the beginning of the chapter, I talked about only collecting data for specific purposes. Your survey should have a goal and you need to make sure you ask just enough questions to meet your goal. Every additional question you add to your survey will add more effort for respondents and will...