Using Pre-Survey Incentives to Increase Survey Response Rates
So let’s say that you need to get 500 survey responses. Which is going to be more efficient: sending a list of potential respondents a $5 gift cards along with a request to take a survey or them the promise of a $10 gift certificate if they take your survey? In 2002 Alhoscha Kaplan and Glenn White of Ernst & Young published a paper in which they did such a test and their results were a little surprising.
What they found was this: 22% of those who received just the promise of the $10 completed the survey while 59% of those who got the $5 coupon in the mail took the survey. Of course, that means that 41% of the people who received the gift card but didn’t take the survey got a free $5 prize.
I won’t keep you in suspense. It actually turns out that it is more efficient and less expensive to send out the $5 gift cards to the appropriate number of potential respondents in advance than it is to send prizes only to people who complete the survey.
Consider the efficiency first: In order to get 500 responses with a 22% response rate, you need to send out 2,273 surveys — while with a 59% response rate you only need to send out 847 surveys. Assuming that your list is of limited size (and this is especially true of B2B surveys), you may want or need to maximize the return rate on your potential response base if you expect to meet your 500 response goal.
Now lets consider the cost. We know if we go the $10 per complete route we’re going to have to pay out 500 x $10 = $5000 in incentives. But how much are we going to have to pay out if we send every potential respondent a survey? As indicated above, it will take 847 invitees in order to get 500 responses rates so if we’re going to send all of them $5, it will cost of 847 x $5 = $4,235 — a savings of $765.
So not only were we more efficient with our list, but we saved a significant amount of money!
Of course, your results may vary, and you may want to do a few test groups before you go all out sending pre-survey incentives to all of your potential respondents. But if you have a limited response base, pre-survey responses may be the way to go.
Incidentally, Kaplan & White note that pre-paid survey incentives of $1 or $2 “is nearly as effective in generating response rates above 50 percent as a $5 incentive.” If this were true, it would mean that the total cost of collecting our 500 response sample above would drop from $4,235 to $850.
The Kaplan & White article is worth reading. In addition to what I’ve described below, they talk about the possible impact of pre-incentives on the data quality (i.e., whether or not there is any response bias) and provide a list of useful references.
Related Categories & Tags
learning Tags: gift cards, incentives, mail survey, pre-survey incentives, respondents, response rate, response-rates
