Survey Responses: To Incentivize Or Not To Incentivize?

Deciding whether or not to offer incentives to your survey respondents can pose a challenge for a lot of survey makers out there. An incentive may increase your survey’s response rate, but also has the potential to skew responses. So what should you do? When weighing the pros and cons of offering incentives, you want to take the following factors into consideration:

• The target population — Are you are trying to obtain responses from a hard-to-reach population (e.g., males age 18 to 24 who play video games)? If so, incentives may make it more likely that you receive the quantity and quality of responses you’re looking for.
• Your relationship with the survey respondents — Are the potential respondents customers or employees? It will likely be easier to persuade your employees to take your survey seriously than your customers.
• The survey invitation — Can you personalize the email invitation to include the potential respondents’ names? How much can you divulge about the nature of the research? The more you make your respondents feel like you’re speaking directly to them, and that their opinion really matters to you, the more inclined they will be to answer your survey.
• The survey topic — Will your potential respondents have an inherent interest in the topic (e.g., improving employee benefits), or is it a topic in which they don’t have much of a stake?
• The survey length — Will your survey take 5 minutes of respondents’ time or 15 minutes?
• The complexity of the survey questions — Will you be asking respondents to simply answer straight-forward questions, or will you ask them to visit a Web site and then provide their impressions?
• Reminder emails — Will you be able to send a reminder to respondents who haven’t completed the survey?

Depending on the above factors (as well as your budget) you may want to offer an incentive to those who complete your survey. A gift certificate or small token, such as a cap or mug, can increase your response rates. The key is to choose an incentive that is likely to be equally appealing to all your target respondents. We understand that you may not have the time to hand select incentives and develop a mechanism to distribute it, which is why we can do it for you. Choose an Amazon gift card or create your own gift certificate right in SurveyMonkey, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Depending on your audience and the nature of your survey, the survey results may be just as inticing (if not more) than a tangible prize. If the survey data is of value to your respondents, share the results with them for a fast, easy, and free incentive.

Don’t have access to the population you want to respond to your survey? Use SurveyMonkey Audience, and get connected with your target respondents quickly and easily.