Quality feedback from customers is crucial for any business. Customer feedback provides valuable insight into the customer experience and how you can improve your products and services. Asking customers for their feedback also relays to them that you value their opinion and care about their experience.
Since customer feedback is essential to growth and improvement as a business, it’s important to find avenues to gather this data. Surveys are one of the best ways to collect high-quality data from your customers. The trick, however, is convincing respondents to actually complete these surveys.
Incentives offer customers something valuable in exchange for taking the time to complete your survey. An incentive is typically monetary in nature or a gift of some sort. Regardless of its form, incentives are an effective way to boost survey response rates and show appreciation for customers.
“A survey incentive essentially rewards respondents for their helpful feedback,” explains Leonard Glaser, a marketing manager at Eliteassignmentservice and State of writing. “It creates a win-win situation for the business and the customer.”
The good news for businesses is there are several ways to incentivize customers to provide their feedback through surveys, and not all of them involve spending money. Here are a few affordable survey incentive ideas to increase response rates.
Not all incentives need to be monetary. However, surveys with monetary incentives are a tried and true way to boost customer response rates. If your business can afford it, offering a monetary reward in the form of a gift card is a great way to collect high-quality customer data.
In the email above, the live streaming service, Twitch offered each customer a $10 Visa e-Gift Card for completing their survey. This strategy can be extremely effective if you want to collect specific and in-depth data from your customers. Respondents are incentivized to finish the survey even if it takes them a couple of minutes longer than expected in order to receive their reward.
Research shows that businesses don’t need to offer a large sum of money as a reward to convince customers to take a survey either. An amount as little as $1 is more cost-efficient, but could produce almost identical response rates as the $10 incentive.
While larger companies might be able to afford giving a monetary reward to every single customer who completes their survey, this might not be feasible for smaller businesses. If you don’t want to spend an exorbitant amount on gift cards but still want to offer some sort of monetary incentive, consider holding a gift card giveaway instead.
Offering a giveaway of a monetary reward enables you to offer a larger amount to the winner. It also allows you to set an exact budget for how much you’re willing to spend to collect quality customer feedback. Since every customer who completes the survey has an equal chance of receiving the gift card, respondents are incentivized to respond to the survey for a chance to win.
The company in the example above, Signature Hardware, held a gift card giveaway for their own store. This means they didn’t have to spend any money to provide this incentive. Moreover, the winner has to purchase something from their store in order to use the reward. Therefore, this incentive also encourages the winner to become a return customer.
Another way to persuade customers to respond to surveys is to offer a discount off of your product or service. This doesn’t require your business to spend any money, but it can be as equally effective as a monetary reward.
In the example above, the airline company, Aero, rewarded their customers with 10% off their next flight for taking a survey. While 10% may not seem like much, this discount can be quite valuable for a customer booking an expensive flight.
Similar to a gift card for your company, using a discount as a reward also creates a return customer. Since they have a discount for their next purchase, they are more likely to choose you again over a competitor.
Everybody loves free things. A physical reward could be equally as successful as a gift card in increasing response rates. As long as the item is valuable in some way, customers are likely to desire it for simply being free.
In this example, the WordPress hosting agency, Flywheel is trying to incentivize their clients to take a survey using free swag. “While the delivery may not be as flashy as a t-shirt cannon, receiving a free t-shirt will likely have the same happy effect over its recipients,” explains Judy Cuevas, a business writer at OX EssaysM and Revieweal. “As long as the free item is something they can derive some sort of use or joy from, consumers are always going to want it.”
In addition to survey incentives, it’s important to demonstrate to your customers that you value their feedback and time. Consider including the following elements to your survey request to maximize your chances of receiving a response from recipients.
As a customer, there’s nothing more annoying than starting a survey that claims to only take a few minutes only to realize that it’s going to take significantly longer. In most cases, respondents will exit the survey without completing it.
Your customer’s time is extremely valuable. To show that your company understands this, include an estimate of how long the survey will take to complete in your request. This helps respondents decide whether or not they have not the time to take the survey before opening it.
Sometimes, a customer just needs to feel appreciated in order to be motivated to complete a survey. Never underestimate the effect of making your customers feel valued.
As businesses, it can be challenging to receive a sufficient survey response rate from customers. Survey incentives urge respondents to complete surveys and provide businesses with important feedback. Regardless of whether your business chooses a monetary or non-monetary reward, an incentive is sure to make customers feel more valued and appreciated.
Christina Lee is a marketing manager at Paper Fellows and Big Assignments. She writes about marketing strategies and tips for such services, as Study demic, and others.
