Survey marketing

We have all been asked at some point in our life to take a survey for a company and the majority of the time I feel like most people decline. When we watch youtube surveys come to pop up, we often get called by telemarketers to take surveys, and companies send them in the mail. Personally, I never really consider filling out these surveys because I see them as a waste of time because they're distracting me from whatever task I was doing.

I think the reason we don't fill out these surveys is that we don't see any utility coming out of completing one, which companies have tried to overcome. One of the most common ways they do this is by saying that if you complete the survey you are entered into some sort of contest to win a gift card or some other small prize. However, has anyone actually gotten the reward after completing these surveys, obviously, most people don't because it's a lottery so eventually people stop seeing that as a reward and thus don't do the survey.

I was introduced to a new marketing strategy over break related to surveys because my brother was opening spam mail and a $1 bill fell out, we were both intrigued and it turned out it was a survey to take and if you filled out the survey, you got another $5. To me, this was a no brainer, I filled out the survey because it took me 20 seconds and I can now go buy a coffee or two. However, my brother, who's 27, thought I was being dumb and didn't see how the $6 was worth it as I clearly fell for their marketing strategy.

Although this is a new strategy that I'm sure will get the company more people who fill out their survey, they still lose $1 for every person who doesn't do the survey and more importantly, there are many people, like myself who just fill out the survey not actually reading the questions, to earn those $6.

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 21, 2019 at 12:06 AM

    Nice post Lisa, I agree with you that being paid before completing a survey is much more intriguing than not being paid or being paid later. Whether or not companies decide to use this strategy depends on the return on investment; they have to decide if the quality and quantity of information they collect from the public is valuable enough to pay people for it.

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