The answer to the question “should I offer an incentive” is almost always yes. The difference between the number of interviews you’ll book with and without a gift card is big. Like 4-5x big. Yes, there are some people out there who are generally interested in feedback because they like being helpful, but trust me, there’s fewer of those people out there than you might expect. We always go out with a gift card incentive unless our client has a really (really) good reason not to, which they usually don’t.
There’s a sweet spot when it comes to the incentive amount. Offer too little and people won’t respond. Offer too much and you’ll be throwing money away. On average, we recommend somewhere between $50 and $150. You should never really go below $50, it’s just too small of a number in today’s world. And rarely have seen a good reason to go above $150. Yes, you can offer bigger numbers like $200 or $300, but unless you have a very specialized audience (like surgeons), the difference between $150 vs $250 makes almost no difference to the total number of interviews you’ll get booked. So keep it limited to $150 and save yourself the money.
On the question of whether it should be $50, $100 or $150, you’ll need to use your best Judgment on whether or not a $50 incentive is appealing to your audience. For a lot of audiences $50 is plenty, and it does the trick. And for some audiences it’s not really enough. You and your colleagues are well situated to understand your audience, and which number makes the most sense. Oh and one more thing on this topic, an interesting trend we’ve observed is that generally speaking, most companies see nice lift in recruiting numbers when you shift the incentive from $50 to $100, and another lift when you go from $100 to $150, but the lift when you shift from $100 to $150 is smaller than the lift of shifting from $50 to $100. Some food for thought.
The gold standard is an Amazon Gift Card. We interview people from all over the world and I’m continually surprised at how effective it is almost everywhere. There are some countries where it’s not perfect. We’ve run into small issues here and there, but our clients are usually B2B companies, so participants tend to be in industrialized countries where Amazon has a presence.
That said, using only an Amazon Gift Card for recruiting can be limiting. And you may have your own opinions about what you’d prefer to offer people as an incentive. A best practice is to lead with an Amazon Gift Card, but also offer additional options. Some additional options include:
There are a number of vendors out there that can make the process pretty easy for you. We usually use a company called Tremendous. From a single interface you can choose whether the $100 goes to an Amazon Gift Card, a Visa Card, a charity, etc. It tends to simplify the process quite a bit. To be honest, if you’re going to offer more than an Amazon Gift Card, you’ll definitely want to use a service like Tremendous (there are plenty of others out there as well). The number of small details you need to keep track of as your program grows (like who you owe gift cards to, and what type) tends to get pretty overwhelming. Anything you can do to make your Win/Loss program simpler is almost always a good idea. This is one of those things.
There are certain audiences out there that can’t actually receive incentives because it’s viewed as a possible violation of their workplace protocol. For example, certain government workers can’t receive anything deemed to be a ‘gift’, and a ‘gift-card’ is sometimes interpreted as a gift. Whether a gift card for providing feedback is actually a ‘gift’ the way ‘gift’ is meant to be defined is a judgment call for the participant to make. Some people feel like it is, some people feel like it’s not. My own opinion is that it’s definitely not the type of ‘gift’ people make rules against receiving. Those types of gifts are usually things like bribes, expensive goods, under-the-table transactions which are given with the expectation that a government official will use their position to do something (slightly unlawful) in return - these types of transactions sit deep within ethically dubious territory by definition. In our case we’re asking someone for product feedback, and paying them for their time. You’re not exactly a mob-boss asking a politician for a favor. But I digress. The decision as to whether someone is able to receive your gift card is strictly up to them. So if you happen to be working with an audience where this may be the case, you can either charge in with the gift card and offer it knowing that some people will accept it and some people won’t. Or, you can offer them the equivalent of a gift card to the charity of their choice. Offering someone the option to donate their gift card is a pretty good hook, and far better than not offering anything at all.
At the end of our interview we tell all of our participants the following: “Thank you so much for participating, that was really great feedback. As a final step I have an exit survey I’m going to send you. As soon as we receive that back we’ve got an Amazon Gift Card for you, just as a thank you for the time and the feedback. And that’s it. Thanks again for participating, it was very nice speaking with you”.
We’ve got an entire post on what an exit survey is, and how to use them to enrich your interview data here [link]. By tying the gift card to the exit survey it basically guarantees an extra level of of richness to your data. 90% of participants fill out the exit survey right away, most of the remainder fill it out within the next few days, and 1 out of every 10 or 15 people will need a little nudge from you.
If you send the survey right after the call, and then send the gift card right after the participant fills out the survey, it creates a very positive experience for the participant. A lot of these people are potential customers you’d like to get back, and many of them left the sales experience with less than ideal opinions about your company. The human brain tends to over-index and remember first and last experiences with other people (and companies). Since this is the last experience loss-interviews will have had with your company, it’s an opportunity to leave them with a powerfully positive experience. So when the sales team reaches out to them again in a year or two they’ll be far more open to taking another demo. Keep that in mind.
