We are often asked what the best practice is when gathering survey feedback. This article focuses on why we are big advocates of incentivising survey feedback and our top tips for the effective use of vouchers.
Volume
Hearing from a significant number of people from your audience is crucial for making informed, data-driven decisions. One effective method to increase the amount of feedback you receive is to provide an incentive for those who participate. We suggest offering a small token of appreciation, such as a discount or a free item to be redeemed on their next visit. This approach will motivate individuals who might not usually take the time to complete a survey. Everyone appreciates a freebie! Additionally, this initiative doesn’t have to be a financial burden; in fact, it should help generate revenue for your business.
Balance
As you receive more feedback data, you achieve a better balance of positive, negative, and neutral feedback. Offering a small incentive encourages those who typically provide neutral feedback (scoring a ‘passive’ 7 or 8 on NPS) to participate. This approach also helps to increase the amount of positive feedback, as there’s something in it for customers who might not usually bother to give feedback. On the other hand, brands that don’t offer an incentive are more likely to receive negatively skewed NPS scores, as they primarily attract complainers and fail to gather balanced feedback.
Loyalty
What type of small incentive should you offer? What if you don’t want to be seen as a brand that is promotionally led? These are challenges we’ve helped our clients overcome many times before. Check out these ideas:
Drive traffic during slower times – Can you offer something that seems substantial, but its redemption encourages visits during slower dayparts, like a bottle of house wine, redeemable lunchtimes from Monday to Thursday?
Showcase an underperforming product – Do you have an item on your menu that doesn’t sell well, but is loved by the customers who do buy it? Consider offering this as a complimentary item.
Increase visit frequency – Set a shorter redemption window compared to your average visit frequency to encourage more visits within a year.
Increase average spending per customer – Offer a money-off voucher when a customer spends over a certain amount. Set the threshold higher than your average spend to increase revenue per person.
Implementing these ideas will help foster brand loyalty and contribute to your overall revenue.
Top Tips
Drawing on our years of dependable experience we’ve summarised some further tips to help you get the most from incentivising feedback.
Prize draw vs small incentive: A prize draw is better than no incentive but people aren’t compelled to respond to a call to action with a prize draw. A small guaranteed prize or thank you will drive better results
Make it on brand: Whatever you choose to offer make it on brand! We love the example below from The Breakfast Club!
Watch out for fraud: Sadly we’ve seen brands fall victim to receiving fake feedback in exchange for vouchers. We use several secure methods to ensure bots can’t spam your survey for vouchers. Our system also allows for the use of EPOS redeemable codes to be uploaded ensuring vouchers are single use only. Lastly, we integrate with Toggle, Zonal Voucher Manager and Eagle Eye to add unique voucher codes and QR codes dynamically onto vouchers making them traceable and single-use without the need for any manual intervention.
CRM journeys: Set up a voucher reminder trigger in your CRM to encourage a booking with a voucher expiring soon.
Make it fun: Did you know that 125 offers a scratchcard gamification option with a chance of winning a bigger prize? In this scenario, you would have a standard prize e.g. complimentary bowl of olives but can also set a chance of winning something bigger and better e.g. £25 gift card. Both can have specific Terms and Conditions for redemption and the ‘chance’ can be set to whatever you want from 1:2 chance to 1:50,000!
