Improving Email Delivery Rates in Multimodal Surveys

With so many ways to reach respondents these days using multimodal surveys, it is important that your survey vendor works to maximize the number of survey invitation emails which actually get through to respondents. In what might be one of the most unsurprising pieces of information you’ll read today, due to its popularity and its unique ability to push information to users, email has been overrun with spammers. Depending on your definition, approximately 90% of all email is spam

Today’s Challenges

All of the major email carriers (Gmail, Verizon, etc.) are actively working to combat SPAM messages on their networks. Starting with an accurate email list can be a significant challenge. Even with up-to-date email lists, approximately 20% of the email addresses will change within a year. If you are using an email list which may contain older or inactive email addresses, ADRG’s “Reputation Score” as an email sender can be negatively affected.

A Reputation Score is sort of like a personal credit score. Obviously, a bad reputation will hurt you. However, not having a reputation will also hurt you. If carriers don’t know a sender (or more specifically their IP and domain) they will assume the worst and filter messages, at least initially. This will obviously greatly reduce response rates to the online survey.

How American Directions is Meeting the Challenge

For any multimodal survey project involving email invitations, ADRG implements a two-phase process to improve deliverability of survey invitations.

During the Pre-Validation phase, we can pinpoint high-risk disposable mailboxes and shared emails like “support@" or “info@" to keep your bounce rate and spam complaints low.

During the Reputation Risk Assessment phase, the risk parameter can take one of three values, described below. Risk helps senders understand how sending to an address may impact reputation or the potential impact of allowing a user onto a platform.

• “low” – An address that is likely legitimate and sending to that address has a low likelihood of damaging reputation if the address has been obtained legitimately. We’ll make this assumption based on well-known domains (hotmail.com, gmail.com, etc.)

• “medium” – The default or neutral state for risk calculation. An address that isn’t deemed a low or high risk will default to medium risk.

• “high” – An address that has a high risk of damaging sender reputation or when used for verification should be challenged for validity.

When ADRG implemented these steps to improve deliverability, our clients saw a 50% increase on average in survey completions from email invitations.

Sending at the Right Time

Choosing the perfect time to send an email can feel overwhelming, especially when you consider that the average person receives more than 120 email messages a day. No two businesses are the same, and neither are their email campaigns or subscribers.

For our multimodal campaigns, ADRG offers Send Time Optimization (STO), a technique that “holds” an email until a recipient is engaging with their inbox, putting survey invitations top of mind for better rates of return.

STO targets the best send time to reach individuals no matter the time of day or day of the week, using the engagement data gathered from massive amounts of emails we send each month.

Summary

As you can see, the seemingly simple act of sending an email with a survey invitation really isn’t so simple after all. Effectively engaging with multimodal survey respondents requires an ongoing effort to observe transactional data in an ever-changing email provider landscape and apply techniques which improve delivery and click rates to maximize respondent participation. Contact American Directions Research Group to learn more about the multimodal approaches that will work best for your next research project.