Be sure to add a comment below about your own experience with incentives, and be entered to win some fresh Kona coffee!

In my last post (Increasing Response Rates: Part I), I talked about increasing your survey response rates. I suggested that you:

  1. Tell your respondents you will share the results with them.
  2. Identify allies who will urge potential respondents to participate.
  3. Use reminder notices.
  4. Offer charitable gifts for each response.
  5. Offer thank-you gifts as incentives.

Which incentives are most effective is a question I get a lot – and I think I admitted in that last post that, in 30 years, I still haven’t figured that out. If there’s a science to it, it’s a science that I’ve never learned.

Is this something we can help each other figure out? I’ve had some interesting things happen regarding incentives that I’ll tell you about below. When you’ve read through them, maybe you can add some stories of your own. I’d like to know what incentives you’ve tried with what kinds of audiences and how they worked. Maybe we can figure this science out together!

  • Back in the old paper-and-pencil days – after receiving a survey with a dollar bill attached to it — I attached two crisp one-dollar bills to 150 surveys being sent to people in state departments of education. I sent out 150 surveys – and got 3 back. In retrospect, I think the $2 was presumptive and insulting. The survey required more than $2 worth of the respondents’ time. A brief cover letter describing the purpose of the study and offering to share the results would have been more effective.


  • A client of mine once offered $25 gas cards to all those who responded to a particular lead-generation survey. Shortly after we fielded the survey, the average price for a gallon of gas went over $3 and we had a lot of responses. I don’t remember the response rate, but I do remember my client was pretty excited.

    Of course, $25 is a steep incentive – but the leads were worth the cost. There was a lesson in this though – when we started going through the file, we found a few duplicates – people who thought they could game the system for two or three gas cards. So, if your incentive is really exciting – Super Bowl tickets anyone? – make sure you’ve got the quality control in place to protect yourself from respondents you don’t want and from false data.


  • Once, a client offered a little desk puzzle that had the client’s company logo on the side. When I held the puzzle in my hand, I wanted one. It was a clever puzzle and looked nice on my desk – but it didn’t generate many responses.

    In fact, some respondents added comments saying don’t send me that puzzle with your logo on it. (Although mine still looks good on my desk and is a conundrum for anyone entering my office!) Any incentive that seems self-serving in the least, however, may not be effective.


  • Here’s the experience that mystifies me the most…

    This story is from another lead-generation survey. I had a client who said to me, “I can use either of two incentives – a $10-coffee-shop-card or a USB drive. Which would you recommend?” I said that it was hard to say for sure but that, given that all of his respondents were in the technology industry, I suspected they had all of the USB drives they wanted and that the $10-coffee-card would be more effective.

    He wasn’t so sure, so we copied his survey (making two of them), split the list of e-mail invites in half randomly and sent the survey link out offering the $10-coffee-card to half the invitees and the USB drive to the other half. Responses from the USB group outnumbered respondents from the coffee group about 6-to-1!

    One week later, we sent our reminder out to both of the e-mail lists offering only the USB drive. The response rate from what had originally been the coffee group increased significantly – and this was all from people who had to have USB drives lying around like paper clips.


I think the message in these stories is that in order to work, a tangible incentive does not have to have a lot of monetary worth. But it has to show that you know and respect your respondents and that you are at least trying to say “thanks for your time.”

Please add your own stories about your experiences with incentives in the comments below!

I’ll let the staff at SurveyGizmo select the best story. The Winner receives 4-ounces of Greenwell Estate Private Reserve 100% Kona coffee from my private stash. (Let’s see how this incentive works.)

So, good luck with your response rates. And remember:

  1. SHARE THE RESULTS
  2. ENLIST THE SUPPORT OF ALLIES (with whom you will SHARE THE RESULTS)
  3. TAKE TIME TO SEND REMINDERS (but no more than your purpose requires)
  4. USE CHARITABLE GIFTS AS INCENTIVES
  5. USE INCENTIVES – wisely, respectfully and in ways that demonstrate you know your respondents

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