What is the Best Day and Time to Email a Survey?

You’ve put a lot of thought into your survey. First, you mulled over the questions you wanted to ask. Then, how many questions to ask and how you want to ask them. Next, you determined exactly who you want to email the survey to. Now, you’ll want to identify what is the best day to email the survey. After all, the last thing you want is for your survey to be ignored.

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Unfortunately, that’s going to happen sometimes. Response rates vary for different types of surveys. On the low end are customer satisfaction surveys and market research surveys, with a response rate of about 20%. On the high end is employee surveys, which enjoy response rates between 25-60%. To up those numbers, you need to make sure the survey reaches your audience at the right time. So, here’s the best day to email a survey and the best time of year to send a survey.

Why Is Survey Timing Important?

Sending a survey when someone doesn’t want to receive it will result in a negative response. Most will ignore it, or breeze through it in order to be done with it quickly. Either way, you wind up with inaccurate results. To be sure you’re sending your survey at the right time, you need to ask yourself “What is the goal of my survey?” This will help establish when to send out surveys. 

For example, you don’t want to email an employee a survey in the evening when they’re winding down for the day; while they’re likely to see it on their phone, they are just as likely to ignore it (and be irritated by it) because it’s coming to them outside of work hours. Save that type of survey for regular work hours.

When it comes to consumer surveys, you also don’t want to email someone a survey immediately following a purchase; asking someone, “how would you rate your new phone?” on a Likert scale before they’ve had much of a chance to use it isn’t likely to give you a fair representation of their opinion. If you wait a few weeks, however, customers will be able to respond positively or negatively about their purchase decisions and provide you with actionable results.

Once you do decide to send a survey, however, there are days and times that are viewed as most appropriate.

What is the Best Day to Send a Survey?

A lot of research has been done to determine what day and time to send a survey. It’s not an exact science, of course; you’ll need to take into consideration a potential respondent’s “mood bias.” For example, on Fridays, people are generally in a better mood as they look forward to the weekend ahead; on Sunday evenings, they may be feeling down because their weekend is coming to an end.

To get around this “mood bias,” you may want to let the survey run for a couple of days, and email recipients about it throughout this timeframe (just don’t overdo it). This will allow you to see how people respond to it during their different moods throughout the week. Allowing survey recipients to answer any day they want is also a good way to put them at ease; they won’t feel pressured to answer on the spot. While it may not solve the problem of bad timing, it will greatly reduce the amount of bias that will affect the data you receive; especially ones that are affected just because of the day of the week.

In general, however, it has been determined that sending surveys on the following days and at the following times is most likely to garner a response.

This study from CheckMarket is ideal, as it recognizes the difference between B2B and B2C audiences, as well as the length of the survey (short surveys being 15 minutes or less and long surveys being anything more than that). Now, is there a best time of year to send a survey? That’s to be determined by the survey-taker, however, you may want to stay away from holidays!

Conclusion

When is the best day to email a survey? While the chart above is a good guidepost, you’re not done yet. Sending out surveys on the right day at the right time requires some additional thought. 

For example, you may want to send a survey immediately following a purchase to ask about the customer service experience while it is fresh in your customer’s mind. However, you won’t want to send a survey asking about the product itself until they’ve had time to use it and form an opinion. And while you may want to survey employees immediately following a meeting, it may benefit you to wait a few days after they’ve had time to process everything that was discussed.

When you’re ready to send your survey, you can count on SurveyLegend. SurveyLegend offers both fun and professional survey templates you can use for any industry, and they’re responsive, so they’ll scale down to the size of a smartphone. 

Have you come to a different conclusion on the best day to send a survey? Have anything else to add? Let us know in the comments!

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