Before we can say how to motivate participants, we must first identify what motivates them and why they are participating in the survey.
Only if we know the participants and customize the survey for them, let’s start with the question, “Why do people participate in surveys?”
1. Bonding with the author
Engaging with authors is one of the main reasons for participating in surveys. When I asked for feedback from news portals where I regularly read news, I had a strong connection and therefore a strong motive to provide feedback and to improve upon, perhaps even to my own benefit.
2. Knowledge transfer
The opposite of self-sufficiency is knowledge transfer. This is when participants are interested in contributing their knowledge and want to make a valuable contribution.
3. Giveaways, discounts, or rewards
Giveaways, discounts, and gifts are common ways to increase participation. You could argue that they “buy” involvement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
4. Spontaneous feedback
“I’ll give you feedback today!” This is also known as spontaneous feedback. We all know this from our experience. In fact, we always have something to do or have fun within our free time. And then we come across a survey that spurs us into action and makes us say, “Give feedback today!”
5. The remaining individuals were classified as “reluctant.”
In a survey of employees, this category may already be a majority, despite very high loyalty to the employer. But that’s not a bad thing, and rightly so. The important thing is that people don’t say it.
We must always remember that the attention span is very short, only two or three seconds.
If the surveys are not interesting in the first time constraints, the potential participants will not participate. You may have noticed that there are always more visitors than participants during the survey. However, you do not have an equal result.
What does this tell us?
The number of visitors is the number of people who participate. These people are first convinced to participate in the acquisition phase.
The number of participants is the number of people we convince to participate in the survey on the welcome page or on the first question page. Customers who do not participate are our loss.
Always put yourself in the position of the participants when optimizing your survey. How do they perceive invitations, presentations, and surveys? Do they respond to the survey themselves? Or will they be burdened anyway?
Here are some of the templates where you can start: Survey templates.