How to motivate survey participants from the start?

Posted: 22. July 2020 | Author: annaliska | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Every questionnaire is too long

It is a sad truth that every questionnaire is too long. But the reason why respondents drop-out are more related to the first minute of interaction than to the actual duration of your questionnaire. On average more than 50% of the people clicking on your survey link drop out on the INTRO Page. They run away as you are trying to say hello. So please take some extra care when designing this page.

INTRO Page is the most important page in a survey.

The INTRO-Page is by definition the most important page of your questionnaire. Here people are coming in after an e-mail invitation or a link on social media not exactly knowing what to expect from the survey (sometimes even not knowing that it happens to be a survey).

So please make sure, that these first seconds of the contact with an unknown third party are a pleasant experience. Try to integrate some interesting things and try to avoid boring necessities like legal texts (if your institution does allow you to link=hide that somewhere else)

Killers of Motivation

Standard text is not a motivator
The detailed descriptions of your problem is not helping others
Your internal issues are not motivating
Legal hints are not motivating
The need to scroll is a killer on a desktop and even worse on a smartphone resulting in drop-out rates. If one can’t see the start button chances are high to lose that person even before the start.
Big pictures need to be downloaded by the participants and will create drop-outs when they come in slow over slow internet connections.

Suggestions for motivating INTRO pages

try to be interesting

Move things

Do not use too much content in this phase

FOMO: Create the fear of missing out

Example of the questbox Intro

How to create a motivating INTRO Page in questfox?

Manipulating the Intro page is questfox is easy as the Intro page receives it design from the question page Q1. Whatever you design in Q1 becomes the design of the intro. Here is the trick if you want to use a specific design for the intro:

Add an empty question page and move it to the position as Q1