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Boost your post-show survey response rate

Everyone's abandoned a survey that asked too much. The fix is simple — make it short and send it at the right moment — and crowdEngage lets you do both by pre-filling the boring questions for the customer so they never see them.

Two things drive responses

Send it while the show's still fresh. A big chunk of your audience is on the train home right after curtain — that's the moment, on whatever device is in their hand. crowdEngage renders on any device, so don't wait until tomorrow.

Cut every question you already know the answer to. Most surveys open by asking which show they saw and when — a waste of the attention a customer's kindly given you, and every extra field loses people before the end. You already hold that data. Use it.

Pre-fill with hidden fields

Most form builders support hidden fields — questions that still land in your responses but the customer never fills in. You populate them by adding values to the survey link.

The examples below use dotdigital, but the same works — with small differences — in Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Formstack, Qualtrics, Wufoo and most others. Not sure about yours? Ask us at support@encorepro.com.

Say you've set up three hidden fields: customer ID, event name, and instance date/time. A normal survey link looks like:

https://r1.surveysandforms.com/0a8f5291-4s5d58k4

You can pass values into those fields by adding them to the link like this (using your own field names, and your survey link in place of [survey link]):

https://[survey link]?customer_id=I-HT22-3GF3&event_name=Hamlet&instance_datetime=2019-06-12T19:00:00.000

You don't want to build a link per customer by hand — so use crowdEngage merge tags to fill the right values automatically:

https://[survey link]?customer_id=&event_name=&instance_datetime=

The |urlencode on each tag matters: it keeps the link working even when a value contains a character that isn't URL-safe, like a space. And a privacy note — only ever pass the customer ID from your ticketing system, never other identifying details, in a survey link.

Two things worth knowing: this eats into your SMS character count, but crowdEngage automatically swaps every link for a shortened one, which saves space and lets you track click-through per URL.

Go further

Hidden fields do more than skip questions. Pass through where the customer sat or which ticket type they bought, and — in survey tools that support it — branch the survey on those values: different questions for different segments, or a different flow by show type. Once you've used it, you won't go back.