How long should your online survey be? I’ve seen and participated in a number of discussions on this topics over the last several years. After all, you want to collect as much information as possible from your respondents but at the same time you don’t want to annoy them to the point where they quit the survey half-way through. I’ve compiled a list of four factors/questions which determine how long your online survey can reasonably be to avoid dropouts. (more…)

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. (more…)

Lake Superior College recently collected data for its 4th Priorities Survey for Online Learners, a standardized-ish survey from Noel-Levitz that helps schools measure the satisfaction of their online programs.  What’s neat (from my perspective) is that this year they offered their survey pool of over 2000 potential respondents the chance to win one of 40 2 GB USB drives for participating in their PSOL survey and got a responses rate of 23%. When they last did the survey in 2006 without offering an incentive they only got a 17% response rate. That’s a 23% increase in the response rate. (more…)

Conducting an online survey yourself is fairly easy, but it does require a few ingredients (other than the survey itself). If you can come up with these three things you can probably execute your own customer survey online:

1. You need to select some a survey system. This part is fairly easy to come by as there are all sorts of options out there to choose from. If you don’t expect to do a lot of surveying then you are probably OK to use a fairly low cost option. If you’re doing it for a real life professional business I would be careful not to do it on a free system that doesn’t let you remove their branding (there is nothing more tacky then having your survey end on the surveymonkey signup page – your survey should end on your home page or something similar). If you’re going to show images, make sure that you choose a system that makes it easy for you to upload and insert images – don’t choose a system that makes you upload the images to your own web server since that will make things too complicated (especially if you don’t have a web site).

2. You need respondents. This is often the most tough part of conducting a survey online – you need to find people, preferably customers, to take your survey. If you have a web site you can definitely solicit your web site visitors to take your survey, keeping in mind that you don’t want to do anything that will stop them from making purchases. One option is to invite past customers to take your survey – hopefully you have plenty of e-mail address from past customers, and a carefully worded, friendly e-mail to them may get enough of them to take your survey – especially if you make it clear to them that you’ll be using their feedback in the development of your new products. If you don’t have any e-mail addresses and you want to get your feedback from a group of non-customers, then what you may want to do is rent an outside survey panel. You’ll pay upwards of $5 or more per response, but if the feedback is important enough, it may be worth it to you.

3. You need to offer an incentive. There are probably many people who will take your survey for free. Maybe they like you, maybe they like your product, or maybe they just like to take surveys. In most cases, there won’t be a enough people like this to give you a fleshed out sample. By introducing a simple incentive – the chance to win a drawing or even some kind of an exclusive discount – you can greatly increase the number of people who will take your survey without significantly increasing your costs. For example, one of my favorite incentives is to offer a chance to win a $200 gift certificate to giftcertificates.com. You’ll double or even triple your response rate which means that the quality of your responses will be significantly higher without spending significantly more money overall.

Julie Lemaster, an MBA student at the University of California- Riverside, has written an interesting paper (which is posted to the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing web site) entitled "Online Panel Management and Strategies: An Introduction for Managers." It is an introductory guide to managers who have been asked or have decided it is time to start looking into online market research for their companies.

Lemaster contrasts full-service providers, such as M/A/R/C and SSI against complex and potentially expensive "self-serve" packages from Confirmit, Globalpark, GMI, and SurveyZ to low cost providers such as QuestionPro, Survey.com, SurveyMoney, and Zoomerang.

The abstract of the paper summarizes it as providing…

"…an introductory guide to managers who have been asked or have decided it is time to start looking into online market research for their company.  The size of the company you work for does not matter, as we will discuss several methods that can be used for any size company or investment level.  This paper is for managers who want to quickly learn the basic issues of online market research panels.  It will also be useful to managers who need to become familiar with some of the major providers of online panel management."

In addition to reviewing the providers and the various strategies for organizing your panel, Lemaster discusses a variety incentives that can be used to motivate and retain participants, such as lotteries, bonus points, and raffles.

• Online Panel Management and Strategies: An Introduction for Manager

Response I recently posted to a question about survey incentives on LinkedIn:

I’ve fielded dozens of online surveys — some with incentives, some without incentives. There is a huge difference in the results that you get — even if your incentive is a sweepstakes-type and the prize isn’t really that significant.

It is important to think about the incentive that you are offering in the context of what it is you are trying to get from the research. For example, offering chocolate chip cookies as an incentive for a survey about how much you like chocolate chip cookies is only going to get you people who want chocolate chip cookies — which is going to obviously skew your results.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t a situation where you couldn’t offer chocolate chip cookies as an incentive for a survey about chocolate chip cookies — if you don’t care whether the respondents are chocolate chip cookie lovers or not — for example, if you had a new kind of chocolate chip cookie and you wanted to compare it to another kind of chocolate chip cookie and all you had available was a panel of chocolate chip cookie lovers…well, chances are you’ll be OK.

I once did a survey once about what *kind* of sweepstakes. For example, would people prefer one big prize or a lot of little prizes (so that the odds of winning would be better). The result was that they actually preferred a middle option — offer a couple of big prizes and a lot of little ones.

The best incentive I’ve ever offered? The chance to win back the value of your order (this was a satisfaction survey for an online store). The response rate was huge. And based on the average transaction value of what we were selling, the risks were minimal.

With all that said, you do need to be careful if you are going to do a sweepstakes type of thing. There are rules. In fact, your sweepstakes has to have rules — type "sweepstakes rules" into Google and you’ll find numerous templates to work with. You’ll note that if you offer anything substantial as a prize you’ll probably want to consult with a lawyer to ensure that you’re not opening yourself up for a massive class action law suit by accidentally breaking one of the rules (it doesn’t happen frequently, but it happen).

Another especially popular incentive that isn’t as frightening and might even drive some more business to your door is to offer some kind of coupon to everyone that completes the survey. A coupon for one of your products — perhaps even a product you’re trying to get rid of. Perhaps they even have to come into your store to claim their reward. That way, everyone is happy.

One final note: know that you don’t always have to offer an incentive. It depends on your subject matter and how much your pool of potential respondents care about you, your business, and potential impact that the results of the survey could have on their lives. If the topic is interesting and/or people feel that the results will have a positive impact on their lives then you probably don’t have to offer an incentive. If the results are mostly going to benefit you and everyone knows it then an incentive is probably in order.

Is it bad to offer incentives to people who complete your surveys? On more than one occasion I’ve had to answer this question for clients and others who were concerned that by offering a potential respondent some kind of perk for participating, you might somehow corrupt the data: either as a result of skewing the response base or by somehow influencing the respondent (perhaps to give you a better score, because they like you so much for giving them a free cup of coffee or an entry in a drawing to win a free Ipod).

My personal opinion is that there is nothing wrong with incentives — in fact, that they can be quite beneficial — as long as you are thoughtful about what you are offering and to who. For example, if I want to find out how interested people are in visiting a particular theme park, I probably should offer as my prize two tickets to the park in question — the only people who will take my survey are those who want the theme park tickets, and those will only be people who like theme parks — and so my results will, in fact, be pretty skewed. On the other hand, if I offer something more neutral — such as cash — then I should get a pretty broad based response since, as far as I can tell, liking cash has no bearing on whether or not you like theme parks.

If you need a more credible source than my personal opinion, a variety of studies have been conducted on the subject of incentives and the impact they have on research. I recently came across a literature review by Eleanor Simmons and Amanda Wilmont ("Incentive payments on social surveys: a literature review") in which they looked at incentives from many different angles, including the impact on response rates; monetary v. non-monetary incentives; value of incentives; differential incentives (which is when you only offer to pay incentives to people after they refuse to take your survey); the effect of incentives on interviewers; incentives and data quality; effects of incentives on sample composition; and the effects of incentives on long-term expectation effect.

Read "Incentive Payments and Social Surveys" here.

In my experience, the use of incentives, whether it is the opportunity to win a prize in a drawing/sweepstakes or points towards some kind of special reward, can make a big difference in the response rate to an online survey. But what to offer? In what context? Perseus is offering a free webcast on Wednesday, October 25 or October 31 at 1pm entitled "Learn the Secrets of Affordable Incentive Strategies" to help answer these questions.

The hour long presentation, led by Larry Nichter (EVP of Restaurant.com) and Brian Koma (VP of Services for Websurveyor) will include:

• Incentive best practices
• When to use incentives
• What types of incentives are most effective for increasing response rates, maximizing completion and improving data quality
• How to put incentive strategies in place that don’t blow the budget

Sign up for the October 25 webcast
Sign up for the October 31 webcast
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