Survey incentives

Survey incentives definition:

Survey incentives are actually not much different from any other kind of incentive. They are reasons, monetary or non-monetary, physical or emotional that drive or motivate people to fill in your survey. In other words, they would boost survey response rate.

The effect of incentives has been subject to a lot of research, most would agree that incentives have a positive effect. The average increase in response rates when offering incentives was 19.1 percent for monetary and 7.9 percent for non-monetary rewards. Incentives don’t have to be expensive to increase response rates.

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Basically, the participant is more likely to participate if the rewards of participation outweigh the cost of time and effort he has to put in. Have a grand prize often works, but note that larger monetary incentives tend:

  • to produce comments that were more favorable toward the survey sponsor. Especially the second result is interesting because giving a too big incentive will return more positive answers, which may cause a biased result.

Make sure everybody gets something. If it's not the grand prize, be sure there's a cheaper alternative, so they don't go home empty-handed.

Use gamified elements such as a scratch card or slot machine to increase interactivity.

Response rate scratch card gif