Dollar Bill Survey
There is a section of the population that responds to surveys. I am not in that section. A piece of mail from J. D. Power and associates arrived by post, and I opened it for some reason. “Another survey,” I muttered to myself after I saw the questionnarie. But before I tossed it away, I noticed they had enclosed a crisp one-dollar bill. I instantly had two thoughts. First, why bother insulting someone with such a paltry incentive? Second, I wondered if the postman would figure it out and collect all the letters. (I quickly realized that the surveys are randomly dispersed, so a single local postman wouldn’t have much of a shot at collecting the money.) But the first thought still puzzled me.
Back to that section of the population that responds to surveys. It turns out that it’s typically 2 percent. That statistic alone isn’t the worst problem for a marketer. The bigger problem is that the people who do fill out the survey are the kind of people who fill out surveys. In other words, it’s not a good sampling. So, marketers experimented with different incentives, like sending a cash incentive in the initial mailing, or entering respondents in a prize drawing. Of course, this affects the cost of running the survey. Experiments with cash incentives (for example, $1 and $2 vs $5 and $5 vs $10 vs $20) have been done and compared to a lottery of $250. The incentives drew more reponses, and the higher cash incentives drew more responses. But the biggest pop was from, you guessed it: a one-dollar bill.