One major way to improve the response rate to your survey is to offer a prize or reward with it. No matter what reward you deem appropriate, it is important that it also suits your respondent. If it is an impractical gift or prize that cannot be used at his location, he will not be wasting time in taking your surveys anymore.
There are several types of surveys; targeting specific needs of the surveyor. Two of the most common are customer feedback and customer satisfaction surveys. Many of the survey makers get confused between the two, and therefore, lose a good opportunity to collect relevant input from customers.
There are three basic types of incentives. You, first, need to decide which one you can afford to offer.
Every survey that gets completed earns your respondent a reward of monetary value. This means that all those who attempt your survey get something in return. The gifts don’t have to be expensive. They could be anything from a $5 Starbucks card to a donation to their favored charity. However, don’t go overboard with redeem cards and only promise what you can fulfill without going bankrupt.
Although this is a low cost option for your survey, you must keep in mind the dedicated resources to create (write and design) the summary so that it can be presented in a professional manner.
Since your respondents only get a ‘chance to win’ reward, the monetary value or usability is preferably kept higher. You could offer a chance to win PlayStation 4, or better yet, a chance to win free products from your own range. This is a surefire way to arouse interest to your survey. The winner should be selected randomly from the respondents
Once you have selected the type of incentive, it is imperative to keep in mind the following advice:
When you allow your respondents to opt into your offer, they are sure to provide contact info. Give them a detailed contact form so that you are well aware where to send them their gifts.
Once the respondents complete the survey, it’s time for you to fulfill your promise. Where items like gift cards and summary of results can be granted immediately, other material or low cost gifts like free products of your brand will need to be shipped to your winner’s specific location. That sort of prize may not cost your company anything in purchase but it may cost a lot on shipment charges, especially, if you have a global clientele or a variety of respondents from different cultures. Be prepared for these hidden costs.
You need to make sure that what you offer to the respondent can actually be used by him. Don’t send Starbucks gift cards to a respondent living in South Africa. Your respondent’s contact form should provide enough information for you to decide how you can encourage him to complete the survey and be ready for more.
Hope these tips will be helpful in multiplying the number of your respondents. If you have any suggestions, do leave them in the comments below.
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My firm has conducted many surveys in healthcare (www.docpies.com) and not unlike many businesses always had a limited budget for incentives. We thought for a long time about what our ideal survey incentive characteristics were and we came up with the following.
1. Virtual. We didn't want to mail anything (which would add postage and labor costs), that is, no logo coffee mugs, pens or keychains for us..
2. Appeal. Survey incentive had to have broad appeal, as everyone should enjoy it if possible.
3. Value. It should be perceived as valuable as possible by our target respondents.
And last but not least:
4. Cost effective. It had to cost LESS than two dollars total including delivery.
You’d probably agree that this is a tough shopping list. After a lot of trial and error we came up with using Redbox Movie Rental Codes as the best inexpensive ($1.99 delivered) survey incentive we could find.
Movie Rental Codes allow for choice and can provide over 2 hours of entertainment. More importantly Redbox has over 34,500 rental locations nationwide so it would be easy for our respondents to redeem the codes.
Many times, to stay within budget, we structured our surveys such that only certain respondents received the incentive.
Movie Rental Codes worked so well that we thought we'd share it with other survey creators. So we built a website/service called txtMovies.com that allows survey creators to easily send Movie Rental Codes as survey incentives.