It’s All About Timing –When to Send your Survey Email Invites?

Hugo
Hugo
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Do you organize an event? When is it the right time to collect feedback from your visitors? You can create in the Hugo backoffice an email campaign with a survey. When you are ready to send out your survey, thinking about the right timing is crucial. Creating a timeline of sending it out is just as important as the content itself as you want to reach your fans and visitors at the right time. This is to maximize the chance of getting a lot of responses. We have created a timeline for you.

When it comes to email invitations, of course, different time zones make the whole process a bit more complex. For this, we wanted to share some guidelines with you to optimize response rates. The two essential questions you should ask yourself are:

1) When do my fans normally check their emails? When are they online?

You think this is obvious, but the answer is trickier than you think. You really have to dig deep into your audience’s behavior on the internet. Google Analytics might help to trace their activity times on your website. This most likely means that they open your email invitation when they are online already. The times might differ, depending on your audience’s time zone; device and schedule come into play here. First of all, when sending out the invitation, check the time zone your device is registered in. After that the fans that are in your time zone can easily be reached.

What is key is scheduling your invitation to the right time zone. A good idea is to create different fan groups for different time zones. This way, you can schedule each time zone for the time your fans are online. This might take some time but it is worth it in the end as you reduce the chance of unopened emails.

Besides the insights you can gather of our fans, we have some general advice for you:

When your respondents are employees, having work emails as the ‘send-to-address’ is key. When respondents verified their work e-mail address, they will receive your survey during work hours, which might get lost. Then it’s best to consider sending out your survey on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday during evening hours. Tuesday is better for short surveys, whereas Wednesday and Friday for longer ones. Fridays are proven to be very effective as it is the day that closes the week, thus the chance of having a few minutes to spare for your survey is higher.

The next question you should ask yourself is:

2) Are my fans going to have time to answer the survey?

Another time issue is that, although your fans are be online, they might not have time to answer the survey right away. This means, that they possibly forget to do it at all. Since this is something hard to regulate for you, sending email reminder is a good idea. The reminders can be separated into groups depending on whether the fans have answered the survey or not. Be careful to really only send reminder(s) to the ones that haven’t filled it out yet.

Hopefully this blog helped you to find the right survey distribution times. Check out our service regarding surveys and fanbase group creation. It might be the tool for you! https://hugo.events/en/pricing

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Hugo

Manage fans, create event based surveys and set up smart email campaigns

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