Webinar Wire

Explode Your Survey Responses

Posted by David Cleary June 23 2008 8:11 AM EDT

You've worked hard to create your webinar content, promote the event, and engage your audience during the presentation. A post-event survey is a powerful tool to get valuable feedback from your attendees. But how do you ensure getting as many responses as possible to get as much data as possible. First, don't overload your attendee with too many questions. How many is too many? Well, think about the last time you were asked to complete a survey. If it takes you a couple of minutes, you might be willing to complete it. But long surveys are a pain, and you probably won't get too many people willing to invest more of their time, considering they just invested time to attend your webinar in the first place!

The better your questions, the more useful the responses will be, and the more responses you get, the more valid those responses will be. The provider I use for webinars is CitrixOnline's GoToWebinar, and the service gives you two ways to conduct surveys. One is to include a link in the automatic event follow up email. The other way is to open the survey immediately following your event when the attendee leaves. I've tried both in two recent webinars. The difference in response rates was staggering.

In both cases, when closing my event, I made a request of the webinar attendees to please complete the brief, four question survey. In the first instance, I let them know the survey would be included in the follow up email that also included the event recording. The email went out one hour after the event, and 29% of the attendees responded to the survey. Not bad. However, in the next event, I chose to have the survey open when attendees left. Again, before closing the event, I requested the webinar attendees complete the survey and informed them it would open as soon as they left. In this case, 71% of the attendees completed the survey!

In both cases, I made a personal appeal to the webinar attendees, but one way gave them an immediate opportunity to act while the other made them wait. If you want to explode your survey responses, strike while the iron is hot and get that survey to your attendees as quick as you can!

David Cleary Group, LLC helps Power People Performance.  Feel free to contact us at www.davidcleary.net.