High Response Rate Downsides

As you develop your survey, choose your incentive, and write up your invitation emails, you need to make sure that you're doing everything you can to boost your response rate. Response rate is an underrated part of survey analysis. When your response rate is low, you increase the likelihood that those that don't fill out the survey have something in common, thereby reducing the value of your sample.

Overall, there are not really any potential downsides of getting a high response rate. However, in the interests of intellectual exploration, a few potential downsides are below: Reaching Quota Too Quickly Most surveys have a quota, since businesses rarely want to pay out incentives to too many people and companies are even less likely to care once they've reached the amount they need for their analysis. One rare but potentially problematic issue is the idea of reaching your survey quota too quickly.

While it may not sound like a problem, if too many people fill out your survey right away and you fill your quota, there is the chance (albeit small) that there is a characteristic about the people that fill out the survey quickly, and that you are missing out on that in your analysis. Also, when a survey fills up too quickly it can cause frustration with those that tried to fill out the survey, and they may become less likely to fill out another survey in the future. Overall that can be fairly problematic for your research.

Doling Out Incentives Also, if you don't have a survey quota in place, you may need to hand out more incentives than you planned. Ideally you should already have a budget for this, but for some companies that may not have expected a high enough response rate, it can come as a surprise, and potentially an extra cost. Luckily, the larger your sample the more reliable the analysis, so there is upside here as well, but companies unprepared for a large response may not be fully equipped to handle it.

Neither of these are important enough to overlook survey response rates. If you can get a great response rate to your surveys it is always worthwhile. But even the best performing research is not without its potential consequences, and there are a few negative things that could occur if your response rate is too much better than you expected.