Go ahead, incent me!

Yesterday, I stopped into my bank. My bank is a local, small entity that thankfully hasn't been goggled up by a lot of the larger bank mergers that seem to be happening. The past fews months they've put some effort into doing some small things to show appreciation for us customers. It hasn't gone unnoticed. In the fall, they had a basket full of apples at every branch as well as a drawing to win a free MacBook. Yesterday, they had a plate of cookies, hot cocoa and bundles of mulling spices that customers could take. Small touches that cost them pennies per customer but wow, what a big impact. The place was buzzing with appreciative sounds from customers.

This was smart of my bank. However, this sort of thing is easy for them to do as they have frequent in-person contact with their customers. Many of us businesses and organizations do not. So what can we do instead? Try surveys.

Which leads me to one of my favorite kind of surveys: the Incentive Survey. An Incentive Survey is short and sweet with less than ten questions, and offers a gift/coupon at the completion of the survey. Some examples that I've seen this past year:

• An offer to be entered into a sweepstakes
• A downloadable coupon (works great for retail establishments) or coupon code (for online shopping)
• A $5 Amazon.com gift certificate
• A few soon-to-be published book for the first 200 people who took the survey
• A downloadable research study that is relevant to my industry

None of these items are costly (even the book since it would only be sent to the first 200 people was not a big cost) yet their power in encouraging people to take and complete a survey is significant!