Survey Completion Incentives: Should you do it?

Response I recently posted to a question about survey incentives on LinkedIn:

I’ve fielded dozens of online surveys — some with incentives, some without incentives. There is a huge difference in the results that you get — even if your incentive is a sweepstakes-type and the prize isn’t really that significant.

It is important to think about the incentive that you are offering in the context of what it is you are trying to get from the research. For example, offering chocolate chip cookies as an incentive for a survey about how much you like chocolate chip cookies is only going to get you people who want chocolate chip cookies — which is going to obviously skew your results.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t a situation where you couldn’t offer chocolate chip cookies as an incentive for a survey about chocolate chip cookies — if you don’t care whether the respondents are chocolate chip cookie lovers or not — for example, if you had a new kind of chocolate chip cookie and you wanted to compare it to another kind of chocolate chip cookie and all you had available was a panel of chocolate chip cookie lovers…well, chances are you’ll be OK.

I once did a survey once about what *kind* of sweepstakes. For example, would people prefer one big prize or a lot of little prizes (so that the odds of winning would be better). The result was that they actually preferred a middle option — offer a couple of big prizes and a lot of little ones.

The best incentive I’ve ever offered? The chance to win back the value of your order (this was a satisfaction survey for an online store). The response rate was huge. And based on the average transaction value of what we were selling, the risks were minimal.

With all that said, you do need to be careful if you are going to do a sweepstakes type of thing. There are rules. In fact, your sweepstakes has to have rules — type "sweepstakes rules" into Google and you’ll find numerous templates to work with. You’ll note that if you offer anything substantial as a prize you’ll probably want to consult with a lawyer to ensure that you’re not opening yourself up for a massive class action law suit by accidentally breaking one of the rules (it doesn’t happen frequently, but it happen).

Another especially popular incentive that isn’t as frightening and might even drive some more business to your door is to offer some kind of coupon to everyone that completes the survey. A coupon for one of your products — perhaps even a product you’re trying to get rid of. Perhaps they even have to come into your store to claim their reward. That way, everyone is happy.

One final note: know that you don’t always have to offer an incentive. It depends on your subject matter and how much your pool of potential respondents care about you, your business, and potential impact that the results of the survey could have on their lives. If the topic is interesting and/or people feel that the results will have a positive impact on their lives then you probably don’t have to offer an incentive. If the results are mostly going to benefit you and everyone knows it then an incentive is probably in order.