Comments on: Designing and communicating incentives – Reader participation invited!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 12:12:13 +0000

I don’t think the reward is as important as presenting the information in a no nonsense manner. Would you prefer:
“Recieve $15 for taking our 30 minute survey!”
or
“Take our survey and win cash for your participation!”
Option #2 is automatically passed up by any person familiar with common advertisements on line, where as option #1 would probably get many more hits. I think it’s sad that I see concise advertisements so sporadically that I refer to them as “refreshing.” Curiosity used to kill the cat, but now all the coolest cats know better.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 04:36:36 +0000

Rajesh, I have to tell you that I usually don’t click on surveys but I saw one where they said: “Fill out this survey for a cash reward!” and I clicked on it only because of your post on incentives. I think it is the same survey you are talking about. They write ‘cash reward’ to get you to click but they don’t clarify how much. They then pre-qualify you for the survey with a bunch of questions without telling you how many questions or how much in $. Only on qualifying was I told that I would get $15 for the rest of the survey which would take 15 minutes. If I hadn’t qualified, I wonder if my answers were in vain! I will supposedly get $15 in another 6-8 weeks. Like your friends, I did it cos I wanted to know what they wanted to know!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:02:23 +0000

Since the participants are people that own websites or blogs, I am sure traffic is very important to them. My incentive would be a link to one lucky winner’s website/blog from a specific well known website/blog for a specific period of time.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:31:05 +0000

“Take our survey and you could win a year’s worth of free hosting at SomeFamousHost at your own domain” – to attract bloggers who would like to move from free hosted solutions to their own domain name.
Or offer the first n respondents a signed copy of “Beyond Code”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:53:09 +0000

Hi Rajesh,
Nice excersize,
As mentioned in your post, the target audience is people who are maintaining their own websites/blogs. And the company is conducting a study about websites.
So I am assuming that user might be answering the questions based on his or her own experiences regarding their own website. The survey might be asking on varied range of topics such that website development, content of website, website traffic generation, usability, user satisfaction, website navigation, revenue generation and much more.
So that survey company will take all this detail information from different users and will do some data analysis/mining and then will compile it in one generalised form. Now the biggest incentive to that user can be knowing some improvements or modifications as a feedback for his/her website based on the collected information by that survey company.
For example, after collecting all information, the advisers from company may analyse individuals’ website, and based on their collected studies, they may suggest some improvements in traffic generation, revenue generation methods or better usabilty aspects of users’ website. So that user is getting benefited by making more business and generating more revenue if its a commercial website or generating more traffic if its a personal blog.
I think getting personalised feedback to improve our own website, can be the biggest incentive for the website owner.
Thanks,
-Aditya

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:13:32 +0000

Dear Rajesh,
Many of us surf the web to gain data, information and knowledge to use in our studies, work or private life.
For myself as a student I am always trying to learn as much as possible from others on the web (that’s why I read marketing blogs).
Therefore my best incentive would be: knowledge.
If I help them, I want something in return (ROI).
I can buy stuff myself but knowledge is harder to come by. This is why I would like insight in what it is they do with the data I provide them with.
How do they gather it (data mining)? How do they analyze it (turning data into information)? What do they do with this information in the organization (turning information into knowledge for the corporate strategy)?
This would help me a great deal in getting insight in how others do it, hence I would have learned something. They would have given me something invaluable. Not only I could get this but every participant who is interested, no lotteries, no taglines to finish and also no price giving ceremonies.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:32:18 +0000

I would reword the request like this:
We need you! We are conducting a study about how you maintain your websites/blogs and would like your opinion. It will take about 30 minutes and you’ll get a iPod nano in appreciation of your time. Thank you!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:57:31 +0000

I would like to disagree with Prashant – not sure if everyone has a web-site…
In my humble opinion – there are 2 options:
1. Offer small merchandize to all survery participants (mugs, mousepads etc.) or some form of download materials – which are consistent with the site theme
2. Do not offer prize to everyone – but make a lottery and give prizes to 2-3% of respondents. The prize shall be significant enough to attract people – this might be a service or product sold on the site that is worth $200-$300 or more.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:02:17 +0000

Hi Rajesh,
I think the best incentive for the website can be a book/information material that will help the users to increase the traffic to their website, since all the users have their own webpages on the Internet.