November 2012 |
Do It Yourself Webinar |
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One of our great Research LifeLine ™ resources is our DIY Online Research Webinar. From sampling, to question design, it's full of great information for anyone who wants to DIY marketing research!
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Upcoming Events |
January 15-16, 2013
San Francisco, CA
This two-day marketing ROI workshop will walk you through basic and more advanced techniques for measuring marketing impact on sales, revenue and ROI. Through interactive presentation and discussion, you will learn how to use measurements, analytics and financial discipline to guide the development of more profitable strategies and tactical marketing campaigns.
January 29-30, 2013
Chicago, IL
The creative process is, by definition, often free-flowing and loosely defined, but to be successful in marketing, you need to balance creatively with structure. This workshop is designed to give you a solid framework to develop and provide strong creative direction, to guide and steward the creative process, to evaluate whether tactical directions are strong and to present creative ideas to your management.
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By Erin Chun, Data Analyst, Polaris Marketing Research
With the holidays right around the corner, have you thought about what you’re thankful for this year? While you’re at it, make sure that you don’t forget to thank your loyal customers!
While a customer satisfaction research study is important to see what your customers love or hate about your business, it’s equally important to actually get people to take your survey. The best way to have increased response rates is by using incentives. But what sort of incentive should you use?
- Pre-paid vs. Promised Incentives
Pre-paid incentives, such as giving respondents $1 to take the survey, are more effective than promised incentives, where respondents are paid for their time after completing the survey. Don’t underestimate the sense of obligation that people have to receiving a pre-paid incentive. Some people have even been known to give back the pre-paid incentive because they didn’t want to take the survey!
- Cash vs. Prize Incentives
Cash is king! Finding a universally appealing gift is much harder and can get quite expensive if you’re looking for trendy and up-to-date gifts like iPads. Everyone likes cash, and everyone sure could use more of it with the holidays coming up!
- Lotteries/Sweepstakes vs. Individual Incentives
While having a chance to win at something is better than no incentive at all, the effectiveness of lotteries/sweepstakes is debatable since respondents may not be as compelled to participate in a survey where they think they have a slim to no chance of winning a prize. However, it becomes much more effective when respondents are all offered an incentive for taking a survey and given a chance to win a bigger prize.
You can thank your respondents in other smaller ways, too! No one enjoys taking long, drawn out surveys so make sure to keep it simple and to the point. Try to stay away from long and complicated matrix questions so respondents don’t get bored. Don’t put in ambiguous or leading questions—they may become frustrating to answer. Simplest of all, just let all your respondents know how much you appreciate their time and feedback and how you plan on using the information they gave you.
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Erin Chun is a Data Analyst in the analytics department at Polaris Marketing Research Inc., where she handles a variety of data manipulation tasks involved in survey research. She holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the Georgia State University.
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