Extremely low case count

Question

My survey has been online for about 8 hours now and have "only" received 554 clicks and 5 valid cases, 2 of which were completed, even though I sent out the email to 500 addresses. The cases stop after 8:30, around 1 hour after the survey started, which leads me to believe that I did something wrong in the settings.

Ichanged my email address to a generic sosci mail in the mailing but I noticed later, that I still had my university address set under Project Setting > Authorise , which I changed now (Hinweis: Falls Sie mit Double-Opt-In Fragen (Opt-In für E-Mail-Verteiler) oder mit dem Fragetyp E-Mail an persönlichen Kontakt arbeiten oder den Befragten anbieten, dass sie den Fragebogen unterbrechen und einen Link zum Fortsetzen erhalten können, dann passen Sie die Absenderadresse auch in den Projekt-Einstellungen → Karteireiter Freigabe bei der Einstellung Absender für autom. E-Mails an. https://www.soscisurvey.de/help/doku.php/de:survey:mailing-spf. )

When I pretested it, the emails did not land in my spam folder.

My question is therefore where the problem lies, or if people just have no interest in filling out my survey, or if this is response rate is "normal".

Answer 1

When sending out emails, it depends a lot on whom you address, how you address them, and what the topic is.

If you wrote "I need your help" and sent the emails to companies, than 0,5% return rate would be a typical rate.

If you addresses personal friends, asked them about some viral Instagram posts, then I would expect 50% or more. It's really ambitious to exceed 60%.

Given non-professional email addresses, a polite email and an interesting topic, I would expect somewhat 5% to 25% return rate.

have "only" received 554 clicks

A "click" is not very concise. That could be an actual click, but also the social media platform loading a preview of the page. However, having a lot of clicks and no dataset could also mean that your welcome page was ... suboptimal. Take a look at the manual Tips for the Survey Design

Also try and send the email to a few friends (Gmail ans GMX addresses, for example) and ask them if it has arrived. This sould be a good test to see, if spam filters were over-active regarding your email.