Need Higher-Quality Research Data? Incentivize Research Participants

Sprinkled throughout this issue of the GRIT Insights Practice Report are references to brand-side researchers emphasizing the need for “quality” from their agency suppliers. The frequency of this term appearing across the report makes it more than just a trend or a buzzword. It is an imperative.

Need higher-quality research data? From our experience there is one simple step researchers can take to get to that important “quality” metric: Implement the best practices for incentivizing research participants!

Parsing through qualitative survey responses and culling lackluster answers is a stressful and unnecessary part of market research. So is worrying about whether you have enough data to yield statistically significant results.

One data-backed way to avoid these arduous and low-value research functions is to incentivize research participants for responding to surveys and engaging in studies.

Financial incentives are associated with higher-quality data, more committed research participants, and a greater number of respondents.

We conducted a thorough review of existing studies on the topic of elevating quality in research results and discovered that incentives play a huge role in boosting research participation and quality.

Specifically, tangible monetary incentives increase the likelihood of a person responding to a study by 19 percent, compared to surveys that offer no financial incentive.

There are several ways to structure incentives for research participants. Market researchers can offer prepaid incentives or lotteries, or they can pay people once they complete the survey.
A prepaid incentive can take many forms. For market research firms, it probably looks like a digital incentive sent to potential respondents via email.

Respondents open the email, see the incentive, and read about the survey. Then, they decide whether they want to respond.

Social exchange theory suggests pairing a survey invitation with an incentive helps to draw attention to the request, establish trust with the participant, and trigger a sense of reciprocity. This doubles survey response rates when compared with surveys that offer no incentive.

While it may seem counterintuitive to offer an incentive before the potential respondent has actually done anything helpful, prepaid incentives are the most effective at boosting survey response rates.

And don’t overlook lotteries – they’re proven to increase survey response rates by 18%. This could look like a chance to win $500 or $1,000 dollars.

Any and all of these incentive structures boost engagement and encourage research participants that do respond to be more thorough and exacting in their answers.

Once you know how you want to structure your incentive scheme, sending participants their rewards is easy. Use an incentives payment platform like Tremendous and automate the process.

Excel spreadsheets are a pain. Use the Tremendous API to send rewards automatically and instantly to survey participants, without any manual effort on your part. Then you can focus on mining survey results for meaningful insights and delivering business value and that elusive and desirable attribute of “quality” to your clients.