Increasing response rates to email surveys in MOOCs

Email is an important and widely used communication medium. However, email is increasingly unreliable as people become unlikely to respond to the growing influx of information they receive. Low response rate to email becomes a problem in situations where closing the feedback loop is critical, such as in education, marketing or research. To investigate ways of increasing email response rate, we designed experiments that manipulated the textual elements of the emails. We conducted experiments in a MOOC setting, with email surveys sent out to over 3,000 learners. The emails were sent to elicit responses as to why learners were not engaging with the course. We found that response rates were significantly increased by varying how closely emails were framed as pertaining to a learner's personal situation, such as by changing introductory message, and the format in which links to a survey were presented. Our results yield useful implications to educational and marketing context.