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Survey Incentive Strategies

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For your first survey mail campaign to a target audience, avoid offering incentives. You need to establish a baseline response rate for this target group. If you are like many organizations, you will not need to offer incentives to boost your response rate. If you are disappointed in the response rate for this survey, at least you will now have a response rate to compare incentive-based campaigns against, to determine their effectiveness.

Also, offering incentives can have a corrosive effect on the integrity of the responses (see Encouraging Honesty from Survey Respondents and Community Members).

When crafting an offer, use a combination of incentives and deadlines to gain rapid response: "The first 100 people to submit a completed survey by April 2 will receive..." The deadline creates a sense of urgency, while the limit on the number of incentives bounds your financial liability.

Koma's First Law of Incentives: A large number of small incentives typically gets better response than a small number of large incentives. Besides getting a higher response, another benefit to following Koma's First Law is that it is easier than the alternative: that "small number of large incentives" has to be awarded through a sweepstakes-and sweepstakes administration is complex.  The laws around sweepstakes vary not only by state, but even by municipality, in some cases.  

When offering incentives to each early respondent, make certain to prompt them for an electronic or physical address to deliver the incentive to. Electronic incentives are easier to administer, but not all are created equal:  in one study, receiving a $5 credit on the credit card of a respondent's choice provided a 30% higher return than crediting frequent flier miles.

Incentives, like subject titles and the body of survey invitations, requires a bit of creativity.  Whoever first offered an iPod as an incentive was a genius; whoever offered it second was clever, and whoever offered it last week was disappointed by the response it generated.  Relevant incentives motivate invitees.

What's your favorite example of a good survey incentive?