Calculate and plan your response rate
How many of the people you invited actually answered — and how many invitations do you need to reach your target?
Invitations and answers
Invitations
Answers
Response rate
Calculate response rate
Undeliverable invitations are taken out of the calculation.
Invitations that never arrived.
Optional: how many answers you need.
Response rate
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Response rate = answers / delivered invitations. An invitation that never arrived is not a refusal.
More answers from the same invitation list
empirio.ai sends invitations and reminders for you, shows responses arriving in real time, and reminds only the people who have not answered yet.
- Automatic reminders
- Live view of incoming answers
- Answering takes minutes on any device
What is the response rate?
The response rate is the share of invited people who actually completed the survey. It is one of the clearest warning signs about a survey's quality: the lower it falls, the greater the risk that the people who answered think systematically differently from the ones who did not.
How is the response rate calculated?
Answers divided by delivered invitations, times one hundred. The denominator is what matters: invitations that never arrived — wrong addresses, full mailboxes, spam filters — do not belong in it. Counting them makes your rate look systematically worse than it is. Only complete, usable answers count in the numerator; abandoned responses do not.
What counts as a good response rate?
It depends heavily on context. Internal employee surveys often reach 50 to 80 %, customer surveys after a purchase 10 to 30 %, cold email surveys with no prior relationship frequently under 5 %. Three things reliably help: a short survey, a recognisable sender, and at least one reminder — which typically brings in another half of the original response volume.
Typical response rates
| Type of survey | Usual rate |
|---|---|
| Employee survey, announced internally | 50–80 % |
| Customer survey after a purchase or support case | 10–30 % |
| Newsletter survey to existing customers | 5–15 % |
| Cold email survey | under 5 % |
Common questions
Do abandoned responses count as answers?
No. Only complete, usable answers belong in the response rate. Abandonment is a signal of its own — it usually means the survey is too long or a question puts people off.
How many reminders make sense?
One or two. The first reminder typically brings in about half the original response volume again; the second considerably less. From the third onwards the irritation outweighs the gain.
How do I raise the response rate?
Ask less, say why in the first sentence, state the time it takes honestly, send from a recognisable address, and remind at least once. Incentives help but skew who answers.
What should I do about a low rate?
Check whether the people who answered differ systematically from the whole group — by age, department or purchase history. If they do, report the result with that caveat rather than as representative.