Offering an incentive is a way of showing your survey participants that you value their opinion and time.
These promotional goods motivate respondents to give honest feedback to a company. Survey incentives significantly increase response rates.
When you value your audience’s opinion, it also makes sense to value the incentives you give to them.
What is a survey incentive?
Most of the people who are responding to surveys want to be helpful, are interested in the topic, or want to give their opinion about something to be heard. These people also want to receive an incentive for their responses.
A survey incentive is a type of reward provided by a company (it can be a research company or not) for the completion of a survey.
In exchange for finishing the survey, respondents are incentivized with a prize. This can be a monetary or a non-monetary reward.
In essence, implementing survey incentives in different forms is a great way to either increase response rates or thank respondents for their opinion.
To help you know everything about survey incentives, we’ll guide you through some survey incentive ideas you can implement today to succeed in your research and build a strong relationship with your respondents.
Do survey incentives increase response rates?
Survey incentives, either prepaid, monetary, or promised incentives, have been utilized as effective methods to boost response rates. According to a BMC Medical Research Methodology report, using a monetary incentive in mailed questionnaires doubled the odds of returning a completed or partially completed questionnaire.
Undoubtedly, offering incentives increase the likelihood of responding to surveys. The BMC study also proves that the responses increased by 50% thanks to providing incentives, and no reminders were needed to answer the survey.
This effect suggests that providing incentives and rewards could be an effective refusal conversion strategy to increase response rates, especially when the data collection period is finishing.
Online survey incentives can benefit any business in different ways. Here are some examples:
- Increase Response Rates. This is definitely the greatest benefit of including incentives in your surveys or research. When you properly thank your respondents with a reward, they will be more likely to finish the survey.
- Target Hard-to-Reach Areas. Some regions, countries, or even niche audiences are especially hard to target, which makes it very difficult for them to respond to a survey. Incentives can help to capture the attention and encourage the participation of these hard-to-reach targets.
- Build Brand Recognition and Awareness. Recent researches suggest that the type of incentive for a survey is directly related to the respondent’s awareness of a brand. If you give something for free in exchange for an answered survey, respondents will take your brand into consideration, come back to you and participate in future research.
5 Ideas of Survey Incentives to Boost Response Rates
1. Monetary rewards
Monetary rewards as survey incentives are within the reach of any kind of business. It is not necessary to spend a ton of money to reward your respondents with this type of incentive.
When it comes to boosting response rates, previous research has shown that cash is one of the best incentives.
In fact, Health Services Research found out that although offering $5 as an incentive resulted in a higher response rate than offering $2, the $2 results were actually quite close to the $5 ones – but you’re spending less than half the same amount.
2. Airtime Top-ups
Market research companies know just how hard it can be to incentivize respondents to answer surveys.
Now, imagine trying to collect that data from people in remote areas. Then add the fact that many of this target market won’t have any internet access.
By providing mobile airtime rewards as an incentive, you will be encouraging people to answer paid surveys — even if they don’t have access to the internet.
3. Giveaways
A giveaway or a sweepstake is a highly effective way to incentivize survey responses, especially when the prize at the end is impressive enough, like a trip or a brand-new laptop.
It is important to have in mind that the value of the prize should match the value this survey will give to the business. It does not make sense to put a lot of resources into a survey that is not really significant.
By choosing this method, every respondent taking part in the survey should have an equal chance of winning.
4. Data Bundles Packages
Today, a good internet connection is more important than ever. Offering data bundles packages as incentives will ensure your survey participants will respond to your online research.
Additionally, this is an incentive strategy that will attract potential participants in emerging regions where prepaid plans dominate.
5. Digital Gift Cards
Incentivizing the survey respondents with digital gift cards will help you to reach your target market by offering them the gift cards that match the most with their tastes.
Digital gift cards are extremely easy to send and redeem, and if you offer vouchers from popular retailers such as Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, or Nintendo, it will be easy to send them worldwide.
The value of the gift card you send to the survey participants will depend on the time the respondents have to spend on your survey. For example, $10 for a survey taking 15-20 minutes.
Using Reloadly APIs to Incentivize Survey Respondents
At Reloadly, we build payment APIs for incentives and rewards such as Airtime, Digital Gift Cards, and Data Bundles.
Easily integrate digital rewards into your surveys, qualitative research, and feedback questionnaires. Virtual incentives allow you to quickly, easily and with little effort send rewards to your survey participants.
By simply integrating Reloadly’s contract-free airtime and data top-up API into your mobile or web application, your organization will be able to send bulk top-ups to remote communities across the world in order to incentivize them for survey responses.
Reloadly’s cloud platform offers a simple solution to complex coding, allowing you to set up an API or widget to broaden your remittance solutions.
By using our SDK, you’ll be able to completely customize a remittance and payment gateway that best fits your business.
Our platform is built by developers for developers and includes the world’s first dedicated coding toolkit for sending mobile phone top-ups as remittances.
Implement today your survey incentives solution in 3 simple steps:
1. Sign up for free. No contracts needed
2. Get your API keys from the Reloadly portal
3. Integrate our API and add balance to your wallet to go live
In Conclusion
Using survey incentives can not only help you increase your response rate, but it can grow your customer loyalty rates because your clients will feel involved in the brand’s evolution.
Now that you have everything it takes to boost response rates using survey incentives, go ahead and create a memorable survey experience!
