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When Survey Incentives Run Amuck

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Sometimes you have to offer incentives to guarantee a sufficient response rate to your survey.  Good times to use incentives include when you are surveying a group that your organization does not have a direct relationship with, when the survey is long, when it is on a dull subject or when similar past surveys have had a low response rate.

On such occasions, you will get the highest response rate if you offer each respondent a small gift, rather than offering them the chance at a larger prize.

Here are some best practices for when you offer an incentive for each completed survey:

• Make sure that you state this incentive is only good for the original recipient.
• Set the survey to be closed or private, so that each potential respondent receives a unique link by email.
• Do not let respondents save the survey to return to it later (sometimes called "save and resume").  By setting up one-time use, subsequent clicks on the link will show a page indicating that the survey has already been completed.  Otherwise, if the recipient distributes the link, people clicking on it will see and overwrite the last respondent's answers.
• Set a quota, thereby capping the number of incentives that you must provide.  Make sure to refer to the limit in the email invitation ("the first 300 respondents will receive...").

What happens if you don't follow these guidelines?  Well, one Vovici customer, Plow & Hearth, recently offered a $25 gift certificate to each respondent.  Recognizing that this was a larger than average incentive, a recipient published the survey invitation to FreeStuffTimes.com, one of many web sites that link to special offers and freebies.  The result was a sudden avalanche of responses.  Plow & Hearth quickly realized the situation and shut down the survey.

The company generously and graciously handled the situation, by sending all uninvited respondents the following email:

Thank you for your participation in our recent Lifestyle survey.

Unfortunately, the survey you responded to was only intended for a very limited, pre-selected audience of our customers whom we contacted via e-mail. Without our knowledge or consent, the survey was subsequently posted on several coupon sites by one of the original recipients. Once we became aware of the issue on Monday morning, the survey was disabled immediately.

We do however value your feedback and appreciate the time you spent completing the survey. To thank you for your unsolicited participation, we would like to offer you a $10 appreciation reward for use with your next Plow & Hearth purchase. Please reference the reward code below to redeem this offer....

So, when offering incentives, make sure to follow the guidelines above.  If you forget, and do have a deluge of responses, you can usually find the date the link was made public.  Contrast the results before that time with the later results, to see if the freebie seekers differ significantly from the original respondents.  If they do differ, discard all of the late results.

And, finally, to forestall any negative publicity, make sure to offer later respondents some reward, as Plow & Hearth so gracefully did.