Providing incentives

Incentivizing users to take a survey is generally a good way to increase the number of responses. However, there are a couple of caveats.

Offering the wrong incentives could deter some users. For example, if a user isn't happy with your product, offering a free month may not incentivize them to take the survey. Another concern is introducing bias into your survey — responders might feel the need to answer positively due to the assured incentive.

Here are some best practices for providing incentives:

• Separate cohorts of users into tiers. You may have a tier for general users, where you're just looking for demographic or behavior information. Then more specific tiers for users with specialized knowledge in a specific area.
• Provide financial incentives for each tier. Perhaps it's more valuable for you to dig deeper into a specific cohort of users and provide a greater financial incentive to them. Many companies will offer much higher incentives to secure specific user participants.
• Offer compensation in a variety of ways. Direct payments via Paypal or gift cards at places like Amazon are generally popular.