Five ways to incentivize your respondents and increase response rates

Providing respondents with incentives thanking them for their time is a positive reinforcement that can considerably increase response rates. And while cash and/or prizes are some of the most commonly used and effective incentives offered in the survey world, there are many other approaches you can leverage to motivate respondents to complete your surveys:

1) Cash payment or gift cards
Although we said above that there are other incentive options available, these are still the most tried and true in helping bump up the motivation of respondents and turn in higher response rates. Offering a cash reward or a gift card to everyone who completes your survey will make respondents much more willing to take the time out of their busy schedules to provide their feedback.

2) Prize drawings
Conducting a prize drawing and picking one respondent as the winner at the end of your survey process will enable you to get panelists more interested in your surveys, and at a much lower price than rewarding each person who completes your survey. This approach isn’t quite as effective as option #1, but it will still result in a decent increase in your response rates.

3) Rewards or points related to your survey/business
Rewarding respondents with points, coupons or small gifts relating to your business and your survey will help increase your response rates dramatically. First off, respondents receive the survey from you, likely because they are involved in your business or your product(s) in some fashion. As a result, they have already expressed some interest in your business and the offerings associated with it, which means that the prize you offer would typically appeal to them. Secondly, a prize relating to your survey content will attract the right type of respondents for your survey.

4) Survey data and findings
When a survey topic is of particular interest to respondents, simply offering to show them the data or send them a report can be a great response motivator. InstantSurvey makes it really easy to re-direct respondents to a real-time view of research results, or you can send them a report summary at the end of your research project.

5) Genuine influence
If your respondents are genuinely involved in a survey topic, letting them know the influence they can have on final decisions is often motivation enough. This is particularly true for employee surveys: letting staff know that decisions will be made based on the results of their direct feedback is tremendous motivation for them to want to make their voice heard.

While it seems to be getting harder and harder to sustain high response rates, offering any or a combination of the above incentives can help improve your response rates. A little motivation goes a long way in getting the feedback you need from your survey projects.

InstantSurvey makes it very easy for its users to offer incentives to respondents. By simply providing single-line text response options at the end of the survey to collect your respondents’ contact information, you can reward them once your survey is closed by either emailing or mailing them their prizes.

Let us know if you have any questions about offering incentives to your respondents while using InstantSurvey.