Knowing and understanding what people need is at the centre of every successful business, whether it sells directly to individuals or other businesses.

Understanding behaviours, opinions, thoughts, and experiences is integral to making better products and services.

There are many ways for this research to happen, like providing avenues for people to reach out, using analytics, and using resources like census data. Another is to simply ask!

Why businesses need surveys

Surveys allow businesses across all industries to efficiently collect honest feedback, opinions and responses from their desired population, and use that information to improve anything from operations to product development. They can have confirmation on the effectiveness of their offering and make informed decisions about the future. Considerable time, money, and effort go into designing surveys and identifying the right target group to take them.

Then there is the matter of reaching the desired target group.

Once they know what they want to ask and who they want to hear from, businesses need to find a way to reach people. Where traditional methods like mail-in surveys, hard paper surveys, phone surveys, and in-person interviews can be tedious and often inconvenient for the respondent, online surveys can be taken at any time and from anywhere. Online surveys can reach people across the globe while offering respondents flexibility and convenience.

Advantages of online surveys:

• Better, more global reach: companies can reach people all over the world.‍
• Faster results: deploying a survey online is much faster than traditional methods that require physical materials and more man-hours per survey to execute.
• More convenience for respondents: respondents can take surveys when they have the time to do so. Accessibility across devices means that surveys can be taken from home or on the go.
• Better respondent experience: platforms can create easy, comfortable experiences for their respondents, and answer any questions they may have. It’s also easier for respondents to keep track of their earnings and easily find more surveys to take.

Why people respond to surveys:

It’s not enough simply to reach people though - they also have to start and finish the survey. People have different motivations for responding to surveys:

• they want to voice their opinion: surveys are a chance to have your opinion reach a decision maker. People take the time to share their experiences or register their opinion on a subject they are familiar with, like a field of work or a hobby.
• they want to be helpful and make an impact: the answers people give today lead to insights that inform the world of tomorrow, driving development and improvement across industries.
• they are given an incentive to take it: taking a survey takes time, and time is precious. An incentive is a way for businesses to thank respondents for theirs.

Thus, a win-win system is set up, where businesses have deeper insights into people, and people receive rewards and payouts for their contributions.

Advantages of incentivized online surveys:

Why would a business opt for an incentivized survey over an unpaid one? It’s true that not all surveys are incentivized. In some situations, offering an incentive could skew the results - not everyone in the target population might respond to an incentive equally. There are several advantages to incentivizing surveys that make them a trusted tool for businesses and researchers:

• Increased Response Rate: more people are likely to take a survey if they are offered something for their effort. This can range from a monetary payout, points that can be redeemed for rewards, entries into raffles exclusive to respondents, or charitable donations for a cause they support.
• Completion of longer surveys: surveys can be long. Sometimes people start surveys to be helpful, but abandon them if they are long. More people complete surveys when there is a promise of an incentive.
• More engaged and consistent respondents: most often, surveys are not one-and-done. Businesses consistently need feedback and responses from people. When people can trust a survey platform to provide legitimate surveys and complete payouts, they are more likely to consistently want to take part in surveys.
• Reaching rare or niche populations: sometimes companies need to hear people who meet very specific requirements, thus narrowing down the number of people they can ask to take a survey. Offering an incentive means a better response rate for these populations as well.

Disadvantages of online surveys

There are two sides to every coin. As with most things, there are disadvantages to online surveys and offering incentives to respondents for taking surveys. Respondents are faced with navigating hard-to-use platforms and differentiating between credible surveys and scams run online. For information on the disadvantages to respondents, please check out our Resource on Surveys: Before You Begin.

In this Resource we discuss the disadvantages faced by companies.

Survey Fraud

This is the biggest challenge. Just as respondents are targetted by fraudulent companies, companies that offer incentivized surveys often have to deal with disingenuous responses. This can be from legitimate respondents clicking through answers at random in order to finish faster and take more surveys. There also exist survey farms that set up multiple accounts for individuals to take the same survey over and over again for a repeated payout, or use bots to complete surveys.

Easy to miss

People are notified of new and available surveys via email or text. With the exponential increase of emails and SMSs over the past few years, it’s easy for people to overlook an invitation to take a specific survey, incentivized or not. A business’s online survey might end up being completely missed by a large number of potential respondents.

Limited Sampling and Respondent Availability

Certain populations are less likely to have internet access and to respond to online questionnaires. Drawing samples is harder based on email addresses or website visitations.

Incentivized online surveys work, but they are not without their pitfalls. So how can both companies and respondents avoid them?

That’s where companies like FlashField come in.

We are market research experts. The latest addition to the various verticals in our wheelhouse is Panel Recruitment and Management, through which fulfill our founding mission of making sure that the result of incentivized surveys - getting legitimate and accurate data that can be used to gain valuable insights - is met. We help real companies get their surveys to real respondents by taking care of the vetting process on both sides. In order to consistently and quickly set up healthy panels, we invest heavily in providing respondents on our platform with a safe, comfortable, and positive experience. Operating with transparency and efficiency, we help all members of the incentivized survey ecosystem carry out their roles as optimally as possible.