Why Mondays are the Best Day for Sending Your Survey

You created a great survey, you’re eager to hear what your customers or clients have to say about your product or business, but one question stops you dead in the tracks – you’re wondering what’s the best time for sending surveys? Timing can make or break many things – so finding the best day to send survey invitations is one of the most important factors in getting a high response rate. With no further ado, let’s dig into the fine details of a successful survey.

What’s the best day for sending surveys?

According to Checkmarket – long story short, the best day of the week for survey emails are:

Mondays (alternatively Thursdays) for B2B surveys
Mondays + any weekday except Thursday and Sunday for B2C surveys

However, you shouldn’t get too hasty with the response – there are many factors that contribute to high click-through rate and and higher response rates, so various studies come up with various results. In the end, it’s not just about a specific day of the week – it’s also about the specific time of the day. So let’s go into some details.

First, what’s the difference between B2B and B2C surveys?

B2B surveys are tailored for acquiring feedback from clients who are businesses themselves. For purposes of these article, we’ll also include internal workplace questionnaires such as employee surveys into this group. Some of the most popular B2B survey types include:

With B2B surveys, you’re looking to understand whether your clients are happy with your product and services.

B2C surveys are targeting regular clients and customers and they are a great way to understand your target audience, their customer journey, measure their customer experience and overall satisfaction with your product and services. Some of the most popular B2C types of surveys include:

Some of these surveys also work well for B2B businesses – using our pre-made templates you can easily adjust them to fit your needs.

What’s the best time for surveys?

When it comes to B2B surveys, think about it this way – survey emails for businesses should be treated just like any other work email. So when’s the time of the week and day when you’re most attentive?

We’ve already established that Mondays are the best time to send emails to business clients – that’s the time when employees go back to the office and catch up with all the emails they missed, getting ready for another week.

According to CheckMarket, the best time of the day to send B2B surveys is morning hours until noon, and afternoon hours between 3PM and 5PM. These are all times when workers are most likely to keep things slower and have a minute to read and respond to emails

Most studies show that Monday is the best day for sending surveys – including SurveyMonkey and Zendesk.

According to SurveyMonkey, employee surveys fared best on Mondays with about 13% higher response rate than average
According to Zendesk, the best time to schedule your survey email campaign is on Mondays at 4AM – so you make sure your email is right on top of incoming mail

Source: Zendesk

On the other hand, separate studies from GetResponse and MailChimp pinpoint Thursdays as a good day for both B2B and B2C surveys.

According to GetResponse 2012 study that analyzed over 21 million emails, Thursday was top performer both in terms of open rates and click-through rates
According to MailChimp, the highest response rate comes from surveys sent on Thursdays at 10 AM

Study conducted by Macorr shows that Tuesday between 10 AM and 11AM is slightly more popular than Monday.

Source: Macorr

When it comes to B2C surveys, things get a little bit more flexible. As you can see, different studies sometimes produce somewhat contradictory results – while CheckMarket pinpoints Thursday as a bad day for email campaigns, GetResponse and MailChimp recommend Thursday as prime time to send online survey invitations.

If we look at the most common result stemming from studies that do not separate B2B and B2C surveys, overall engagement and the number of responses tend to be the highest at the beginning of the week and decrease after Monday. As a GetResponse study suggests, with any email campaign the aim should be working hours – between 8AM and 5PM.

Source: SurveyMonkey

Bonus tips

Learn your clients’ habits

Of course, sometimes there are special circumstances. Maybe your clients and customers are in a different time-zone or there are differences in working hours, days, holidays and lifestyle habits. All of these factors play into CTR and response rate.

Specific surveys

For certain types of surveys, such as event feedback surveys or customer satisfaction surveys, the best time to send invitation is – as soon as possible. They should be sent within 24 hours after the event, purchase or service, while the respondents’ first impressions are still fresh.

Trial and error

Don’t be afraid to experiment a little – you can run A/B split testing with a single survey to follow and determine which survey timing works best for your business and target audience.

What else skyrockets your response rate?

Survey timing won’t help you much if your survey isn’t well made – so how do you ensure high survey completion rates? Here are a few tips:

Catchy subject line

Catchy, straightforward and clear subject line comes from another imperative – your survey should have a single clear goal. Avoid cramming too many topics into one survey. Apart from making surveys long (which can easily translate to boring), questionnaires that attempt to cover too much ground produce data that’s difficult to analyze and turn into actionable feedback.

Still not sure about the right survey for your business? Check out this guide on survey topics and ideas.

Ask the right questions

Your survey questions should be short, easy to follow and easy to answer. Nobody wants to be stuck for half an hour writing endless essays about your product or business. Even if you have dedicated respondents, it’s also a headache for you – it’s nearly impossible to analyze dozens or even hundreds of these essays.

So stick to at least 80% of close-ended questions, and opt for open-ended questions only if they are absolutely necessary. Don’t be afraid to experiment with their form – you can shake up things using images and videos.

If you’re wondering what’s the right fit for your survey, here you can find a guide on survey question types along with illustrations, templates and examples.

Keep your survey short

It’s a given – short surveys have better response rates compared to long surveys. By short, we mean between 8 and 10 questions.

Of course, some surveys need to be longer – especially B2B surveys in specific lines of business. In those cases, one of solutions is to segment them or display a tracker that informs respondents how far into the survey they are. It may be a small detail, but it does wonders for more complicated surveys.

Conclusion

Based on various studies, our takeaway is that early bird catches the worm – both B2B and B2C surveys have the highest response rates if they are sent on Mondays in the early morning hours.

Now that you’re all set with tips and advice, it’s time to find the right tool that enables you to seamlessly create surveys from scratch, send them to your clients and easily access and analyze survey data.

You can do all that and more with LeadQuizzes – which also doubles as powerful lead generation tool that so far collected more than 109 million responses and 9.5 million leads for more than 20,000 satisfied customers. Click here for a free 14-day trial!