Survey Superhero Articles

Should I offer my respondents an incentive for taking my survey?

An incentive may increase your survey's response rate, but also has the potential to skew responses. The following factors are vital to take into consideration:

• The target population -- Are you are trying to obtain responses from a hard-to-reach population (e.g., males age 18 to 24 who play video games)?
• Your relationship with the survey respondents -- Are the potential respondents customers or employees?
• Your relationship with the survey respondents -- Are the potential respondents customers or employees?
• The survey invitation -- Can you personalize the email invitation to include the potential respondents' names? How much can you divulge about the nature of the research? (For information about how to create a survey invitation in Zoomerang, click here)
• The survey topic -- Will your potential respondents have a vested interest in the topic (e.g., improving employee benefits)?
• The survey length -- Will your survey take 5 minutes of respondents' time or 15 minutes?
• The complexity of the survey questions -- Will you be asking respondents to simply answer straight-forward questions or will you ask them to visit a Web site and then provide their impressions?
• Reminder emails -- Will you be able to send a reminder to respondents who haven't completed the survey? (For information about how to send a reminder email, click here.)

Depending on the above factors and your budget and time constraints, you may want to offer an incentive to those who complete your survey. A gift certificate or small token, such as a cap or mug, can increase your response rates. The key is to create an incentive that is likely to be equally appealing to everyone in your population of interest. This is why generic incentives such as money or points are often used. An ipod can be a great incentive in that it is widely appealing, and many people understand the value of the product. But, it could also skew your results if the population of interest included large groups that are uninterested in music and/or technology products.

You might also consider whether the survey data is of value to your respondents and share the results with them. (For information on how to share survey results with respondents, click here.)

If you don't have access to the target audience for your survey objectives, Zoomerang has a survey respondent service called Zoomerang Sample. Zoomerang Sample representative can help you specify and access your target audience, compose your survey invitation, and administer the survey incentive. For more information, click here.