What are some good techniques, methods or incentives for boosting customer and user participation in surveys?

Contrary to what most people think, I believe that survey incentives are a bad idea.

In fact, we wrote a whole post about why they don’t work.

While they may certainly increase your overall survey response rate, what many people don’t consider is that the cost goes well beyond the expense of the incentive being offered.

Imagine I gave you a $10 Amazon gift card for either recommending OR commenting on this post (you only need to do one).

I’m guessing that most of you would choose the quick heart, collect your 10 bucks and hightail it.

I wouldn’t blame you either, because that’s what I would do as well.

Set aside for a moment the insincerity of paying for recommends/comments, as soon as we introduced an incentive, the motivation changed from providing value to “which of those two actions will get me the $10 the quickest and easiest”.

The fact is, when we incentivize people to perform an action, we instantly change their motivation.

This is especially true when you incentivize your customers to complete your survey.

Two things happen:

1. Consideration shifts from providing accurate/meaningful feedback to providing quick answers.
2. Customers provide more favorable answers due to the perception of a quid pro quo. Guilt bias prevents accurate results.

Rather than offer an incentive, offer a better survey. Traditional surveys have historically bad response rates (1–4%). An Net Promoter Survey (NPS) on the other hand will get you 25–40%.

In general however, there are a few things you can do to improve/ensure higher survey participation:

1. Send your survey from a human, not a company or department. i.e. mike@survey.com, not support@survey.com.
2. Set expectations in your subject line, “Two Quick Questions” or “Have 60 seconds? We’d love your feedback”.
3. Make your call-to-action very clear. Don’t offer additional links to anything other than your survey. (With an NPS survey, the first question is right in the email!)
4. Ask no more than 2 questions. This is important. Each question beyond 2 will reduce your response rate by 50%.
5. Send a survey reminder to anyone who didn’t respond the first time.
6. Follow up personally with each and every customer who provided feedback. This will let them know they’ve been heard, ensuring they’ll respond again in the future.
7. Be consistent. Send your survey on a quarterly or bi-annual basis.

All of what’s mentioned above are part of a best-practice approach to NPS. These are built-in benefits with some NPS tools (such as ours). This is why, without incentive, Net Promoter (done right) is your best bet to maximize survey participation and general engagement with your customers.