Even if you have the perfect survey, the success of your survey ultimately lies in the hands of your potential respondents.
But don’t worry; you aren’t completely reliant on their will. There’s something you can do to encourage respondents to complete your survey:
First of all, what is an incentive? An incentive is money, or possibly a gift, that you provide to the respondent in exchange for completing your survey. Incentives come in many different forms and are a great way to increase response rates and thank respondents for their time.
Although this may sound like a win-win situation, you’ve got to take care not to capture the wrong population or group of respondents because of the incentive you’re offering.
In this post, we’ll go over survey incentive best practices, including incentivising pros and cons, the types of survey incentives you can offer and when you would (and wouldn’t) use a survey incentive.
Ready to add an incentive to your survey?
From cash prizes to coupons, there are loads of options available to improve your response rate.
Types of survey incentives
Incentives typically fall into two main categories: monetary and non-monetary. Monetary incentives include cash, cheques, money orders, gift cards and coupons. Non-monetary incentives are typically thank you gifts, such as a free pen or notebook, but can also be things like a brochure, or even a charity donation, which is the incentive that we use for our SurveyMonkey Contribute panellists.
When it comes to increasing response rates, previous research has shown that cash is king and boosts survey response rates the most. And non-monetary incentives, such as a thank you gift, aren’t as effective as monetary incentives when it comes to increasing response rates.
As you might expect, the more money or the nicer the thank you gift you offer, the higher the response rate. But there’s a point at which increasing the incentive value doesn’t really help very much with response rates.
If you decide to go with a non-monetary incentive, make sure that the incentive has universal appeal to your target population. For example, if you’re a convenience shop owner, don’t offer free nappies for a customer feedback survey; otherwise, it’s likely that only new parents will respond. Instead, you might want to think about giving out coupons for 20% off the next purchase, since most respondents could have a use for them.
What is the best survey incentive value?
Unfortunately, there’s no perfect amount or value for a survey incentive. But there are three things that you can bear in mind in order to help you determine what type (and the value) of any survey incentive you plan to offer:
- Your budget: If your budget for your survey project is capped at £150, for instance, you’ll be limited to offering a rather small incentive to each respondent or possibly using a prize draw option (more on this below).
- The target population for your survey: Let’s suppose that, for a healthcare survey, you’ve decided to opt for a monetary cash incentive and your target population is doctors. You’ll need to go with a high-value incentive since doctors are often very busy, so the amount has to be high enough to make it worth their time to respond. It isn’t unheard of to offer £75 in cash to a doctor as an incentive to complete the survey, but you probably don’t want to offer that same amount to a student.
- How you will provide the incentive: Once you’ve determined which kind of incentive to provide, you’ll have to decide whether you want to provide it to your target population before they even complete the survey (prepaid) or only provide it to your respondents after they’ve completed the survey (promised).
Prepaid incentives are the most effective incentives for increasing response rates, but this method is generally difficult to execute for online surveys. They also tend to be more costly as you provide the incentive to everyone, regardless of whether or not they respond. Promised incentives are much easier to execute because you can email someone a gift certificate afterwards or post them a small thank you gift.
If you decide to go with a promised incentive, you’ll have to make two more decisions: whether to do a prize draw, raffle or lottery; and whether you’re awarding the incentive to a small group of people or to everyone who responds.
When it comes to online surveys, individual promised incentives have been shown to increase survey response rates since everyone who completes the survey is rewarded for their time. However, the jury is still out on the impact of prize draws.
With promised incentives, you may need to collect personal information such as email or postal addresses. Make sure you take the proper precautions to protect your respondents’ information, and also let them know that their responses won’t be linked back to their personal information. If you fail to do this, you may not get them to respond to questions of a sensitive nature that they don’t want tracked back to them.
When to use survey incentives
Although it’s been demonstrated that incentives can help improve response rates, it’s important to bear in mind the fact that a high response rate doesn’t necessarily mean that a survey is free of bias. You may end up with a group of respondents who look nothing like your target population; or because a biasing incentive type was offered, those who were surveyed may look vastly different from those who did not respond.
Respondents may be more likely to give positive feedback if offered a prepaid incentive, or they may only be providing feedback to receive the incentive. In situations like these, you may want to think about skipping survey incentives and using those funds for a survey instead.
A situation where you might want to use an incentive is when you are trying to target a rare population or trying to survey a group of people who are less likely to respond (also called non-responders).
When it comes to non-responders, if you’ve already sent out your survey but need more responses (for example, in a marketing survey), you could think about contacting the non-responders again and offering an extra incentive to those who haven’t responded so you don’t bias your sample.
No idea where to start? Think about testing different incentive structures with a small group of respondents before you launch your survey to everyone. This may give you an idea about whether your incentive is effective and also whether your incentive is providing you with the best-possible unbiased sample of respondents.
However you decide to use survey incentives, our help centre article can get you started!
