I was inspired to blog this quick post after a friend forwarded me a promotional email they had received which offered expert insights into how to improve your survey’s response rates by one hundred and something percent.
Is Surveylab missing anything I wondered? So I downloaded the PDF and was pleased to see the answer was no (according to this particular list of insights), but then there was one tip that I strongly disagree with.
Adding a prize draw to your survey does not necessarily mean a higher response rate. An opportunity for the customer to give feedback to improve the service/product/experience, or an employee being able to make their voice heard anonymously will be many respondents’ motivation, and sharing results and findings is enough incentive.
If you do use a prize draw, watch out for “professional” survey takers or users clicking through from competitions websites (especially if your survey is promoted on a public website) because these respondents could skew results wildly. Tip: find out if you can track the referring URL in your survey software or get your webmaster to check the website logs to monitor how respondents arrive at your survey, and also monitor the daily click-thru rate to the survey – a significant and unexplained spike in responses might mean your survey link has been posted on a forum.
Incentives can work, but their impact might not be in the intended way. If you are planning a customer or employee survey in the new year, our default suggestion would be “no incentive”. If the survey length is getting out of hand such that you have decided to offer a prize draw to win an iPod then rethink the prize and more importantly review the questionnaire – it’s probably too long.
Have a great 2010!
Dan Wardle
Kudos on the length of surveys remark. As a casual survey taker, I have taken quite a few surveys that are just ridiculously long – for a whopping $2.
Absolutely agree about incentives for employee research – they may seem an easy way out but are ineffective. Research I carried out among non respondents (f2f) showed that the prime reason was the perception that action would not follow – in short their organsiation did not really want to listen to them or act on their feedback.