The Guide to Deciding on the Best Time to Send a Survey

The Guide to Deciding on the Best Time to Send a Survey

The best time to send a survey to your intended sampling pool may appear to be subjective, but it requires pre-planning to ensure profitable campaigns and outcomes. Businesses should therefore plan their survey deployment strategically.

While it is critical to correctly target your respondents, your company needs to also focus on determining the best time to send a survey so that you sustain an effective survey campaign. This is in part due to the fact that strong survey insights foster positive customer experiences.

A positive CX is a must, as 89% of consumers are more likely to make more than one purchase after a positive customer experience. As such, effective surveys reap critical insights that help brands foster a strong customer experience, among many other benefits. 

This article discusses how to decide on the best time to send a survey, so that you never miss the mark on your consumer insights or employee intelligence. 

When to Deploy Surveys

While your team can always use insights, you should only deploy surveys for campaigns that require the most immediate answers. 

Additionally, these campaigns should be thoroughly fleshed out, meaning that they have specific purposes, goals, KPIs, sub-campaigns and of course, the full-fledged surveys themselves. 

The surveys in these campaigns must have all the questions ready to go in the questionnaire and screening portions, along with the quotas set on respondent demographics, devices and all else that the survey platform allows you to define. This way, you can deploy the surveys without having to return to edit them.

While some of this may appear evident, some businesses rush through tasks to which they should have allotted more time. In fact, 20% of businesses are in a hurry to complete their tasks. The adage “haste is waste” can be applied to this scenario, as all business decisions are important and must be fully thought out before they become actionable. 

Understanding the Key Moments and Campaigns Best Suited For Survey Deployment

Once you’ve determined the preliminary purpose of your survey study, narrowed down a  sub-campaign or two and have prepared a few initial questions, you should pin down the key moments and other possible campaigns to deploy your survey. 

The following provides a high-level overview of a few major campaigns during which businesses should deploy surveys:

1. To obtain general consumer insights
   1. Their thoughts on your industry, niche, competitors or brand 
   2. Their habits, needs, wants and opinions
2. When you need to conduct market segmentation
   1. When you seek to segment your target market into different segments and customer personas
3. To get acquainted with your customer behavior 
   1. Forming a customer behavior analysis
   2. Understanding customer buying behavior
4. Prior to the launch of a marketing or other business campaign. This includes:
   1. Advertising campaigns
   2. Branding campaigns
   3. Brand tracking
   4. Customer development for product testing
5. For collecting employee feedback
   1. For all HR purposes
   2. To improve company culture
   3. To boost employee recognition
6. Understanding key external entities
   1. For better understanding partners and vendors
   2. This involves using B2B surveys
7. For conducting event marketing analysis 
   1. To prepare for coming events and gauging past events
   2. This involves using the event evaluation survey

The Best Time to Send a Survey for Customer Feedback

While there are so many purposes that surveys can be used for, there are none quite as important as those concerning consumer insights. It is the consumers, after all, who carry a business afloat and provide the source of its profits.  

Knowing when the best time to send a survey to your customers can result in the difference between a low-quality and insightful campaign. This is because, as important as customer insights may be, some periods in the year or in a week are more opportune to examine customer feedback than others.

The following explains the best time to send a survey to customers, so that you reap the most insights and keep unwanted, low-insight data at bay:

1. During a key milestone in the customer buying journey, for example, when your customer has signed up for a membership, a content subscription, such as a newsletter, or is approaching a patron anniversary with your business.
2. After a customer comes in contact with customer service, whether through an online chat, email, phone, or via in-person shopping.  
3. When customers interact with your business, but wind up making no conversions, such as during cart abandonment, or opting out of signing up after a free trial.
4. When customers cut their relationship with a business short during times of dropping out of their customer journey. For example, if a customer cancels a subscription or hasn’t purchased a product they typically would from a brand in a long time.
5. When you’re in the midst of innovating on a new product or product feature, service type or customer experience, be it digital, physical or phygital.  

You wouldn’t want to send out surveys before you understand the full scope of your project needs, especially when it comes to specific customer intelligence. You must first lay out the specific parameters of those customer intelligence needs. 

The Best Time to Send a Survey During the Day

Aside from the proper time to send a survey in relation to a campaign, customer intelligence needs and the readiness of questionnaires, there exists what is known as the best time to send a survey during particular days and hours. 

According to a study by CheckMarket, there are specific days of the week and times of the day that are most opportune for sending surveys to your target market. In fact, there are ideal times for sending two main kinds of surveys: B2C and B2B surveys. 

You ought to use these specific times as guidelines, as they represent the most appropriate times for respondents to take surveys, which, in turn, shortens the completion time of your survey study. 

The following outlines the best time to send B2C and B2B surveys in relation to the time of the week and day. 

Sending Surveys at all the Right Times

There is far more to ensure that your intended respondents take part in your survey campaign aside from finding your survey at the correct time. The most important aspect of the survey campaign is the online survey platform you use. 

This is because this platform allows you to create and deploy the surveys. As such, you should choose an online survey platform that offers superior capabilities, such as random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach your respondents in their natural digital environments, artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify poor-quality survey data and fraud, along with mobile-first design to optimize the mobile experience, given that mobile traffic is dominant, and much more.

Such a platform will ensure that you not only reach your target audience at the right time, but that a highly targeted group partakes in the survey and you receive only the highest quality responses. 

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