Enhancing Survey Participation Through Digital Gift Card Incentives
As businesses look to scale, they must be able to access relevant insights about their staff, the markets they’re entering, and their potential customers. However, for many organizations, accessing relevant data insights requires several initiatives that can be both costly and time-consuming.
Using surveys in situations can be a great way to gather useful information for the business. However, the challenge is that it can often be challenging to get the right level of participation that makes surveys useful.Â
Thankfully, there are some helpful strategies that organizations can apply to get better engagement from participants, including using gift card incentives.
Table of Contents
Why Surveys Are So Useful in Business Settings
Surveys can be used for many purposes and can play an important role in helping businesses shape many of their processes. Below are some reasons why surveys can be useful in professional settings:
Understanding Customer Preferences and Satisfaction Levels
Surveys allow businesses to hear directly from their customers. This can help them better understand their needs and expectations regarding the level of service they want and the types of products or services that interest them.
By asking the right questions, companies can gather invaluable information that helps them tailor their offerings and build better relationships.
Identifying Areas for Improvement in Products or Services
All products or services that businesses offer can benefit from feedback. But sometimes it can be hard to know exactly how customers feel about a product if they don’t leave a review.Â
Soliciting feedback through surveys is a great way of collecting this important information while avoiding the negative press that bad online reviews can bring.
Measuring Brand Awareness and Perception
How a brand is perceived will often dictate whether or not someone will purchase a product or service from them. Surveys are a great way to discover how exactly a brand is being viewed in the market and can help to find areas to improve.
Data-driven approaches for regular brand improvements are much more effective than guessing how the market responds to new shifts in company direction and can help organizations realign themselves if needed.
Conducting Market Research to Identify Opportunities
Businesses should stay in tune with the market’s evolution to stay ahead of their competition. Surveys are often the first tool used when conducting market research and can be a great way to unlock new opportunities.
How Digital Gift Cards Help to Improve Survey Participation
Although surveys can be great tools for companies, getting enough participation can be challenging. Many people live busy lives, and the last thing they want to do is spend 20-30 minutes taking a survey.
However, by including incentives in your survey procedures, like digital gift cards, you can increase attention and interest in them. Below are reasons why gift cards are a great way to improve survey participation:
Convenient Spending
One of the biggest advantages of using gift cards is their immediacy when rewarding survey participants. Customers can see immediate benefits from their participation and have a convenient way to spend their rewards.
Unlike physical gift cards that take time to mail to participants and can be more costly, digital gift cards can be redeemed immediately. This is much more appealing to a wider audience and can grow interest in taking your surveyÂ
Flexible Rewards
The great thing about digital gift cards is that companies have choices to consider offering their survey participants. Businesses often don’t need to decide at all, since many gift cards can be formatted so they’re multipurpose and customers can choose the rewards that most appeal to them.
Easy Distribution
Depending on the size of an organization, managing the distribution of various physical gift cards can be time-consuming and expensive. However, the process can be much more streamlined.
Many gift card providers offer unified platforms that can be used to purchase, distribute, and track digital gift cards. This makes it simple for even larger organizations to add digital gift cards to their survey processes.
Effective Strategies for Implementing Digital Gift Card Incentives into Surveys
There are many effective strategies when adding gift cards to their survey protocols. Below are some important things to consider:
1. Choosing the Right Gift Card Providers and Platforms
Businesses should take the time to research potential gift card providers. There are many different platforms available to choose from; however, it’s important to find a reputable provider that offers competitive pricing and a wide variety of gift card options.
This will ensure that participants can find a reward that interests them and makes their participation worthwhile.
2. Setting Reward Values
Deciding on an appropriate value for a survey incentive will vary from business to business as well as the length and complexity of the survey itself. Find a value representing the time a participant has to set aside to complete.Â
It’s important not to undervalue the helpful information that can be extracted from completed surveys, so businesses should carefully evaluate what’s right for them.
3. Determining Distribution Methods
The next step will be to decide on the most effective way to distribute the incentives. While gift cards can be sent directly to a mailing address, businesses should consider the additional costs associated with this method and the potential delays it could cause for participants.Â
Asking for email addresses upon survey completion and using these for quick and efficient distribution could be the better option.
4. Communicating the Incentive
Once you’ve decided on the right type of incentive, it’s important to communicate to participants how the program works. It’s important to be clear about the reward value being offered and any specific instructions that need to be followed to be eligible to receive it.Â
Helpful Tips for Optimizing a Survey Design to Maximize Participation
While incentives are a great way to get more participation, it’s also important to ensure your surveys the likelihood of people abandoning the survey process. Below are some helpful tips you can follow:
- Keep surveys short and engaging – Avoid lengthy surveys that make participants fatigued. Focus on asking only important questions and use clear, concise language. Use visual aids like images or charts to help break up text and keep interest wherever possible.
- Personalize certain questions – Personalize survey questions to make them more relevant to individual participants. This can be done using demographic data or customizing questions based on previous responses. This helps to improve overall engagement and encourages more thoughtful responses.
- Make your surveys mobile-friendly – With more people now using their mobile devices to navigate online, it’s crucial to ensure that your surveys are mobile-friendly. Optimize the layout for smaller screens, use larger fonts, and avoid complex formatting that may not display correctly on various devices.
Get More Participation from Your Surveys
Surveys are a great way to give your business helpful data insights to improve products or services and strengthen customer relationships. However, it’s vital to create a survey format that gets maximum participation from users.Â
By following the steps discussed and using digital gift cards to incentivize participation, you can ensure that you’re getting the most value out of your survey results while helping your business scale.
