Are you conducting a survey of your customers and wonder what would best motivate them to take part in your study? A survey is a great way how to collect feedback from your customers or potential users. You can discover many unexpected insights and ideas on how to improve the product.
But the response rates are decreasing year by year. Here are some ways how to attract more people to take part in your questionnaire.

Questionnaire length: keep the questionnaire as short as possible


Here is an easy rule – don’t make long questionnaires. Many studies have revealed an increasing drop off with each additional question.

Comprehensive questions are the key


Be sure people understand the question in the same way as you. If there are ambiguities in your questionnaire, you will get the wrong results and make wrong decisions!

The first impression is super important


You have only a few seconds to convince people to take part in your survey. They need to recognize some value for their participation – an improved service, for example, or the possibility to express their meaning; or an interesting look and feel or reward. If the introduction text or first question is too sensitive or boring, respondents will cancel.

Keep respondents awake


If your questionnaire is longer, make it more interesting in terms of content, design, or functionality. Try to be more creative. Nice image, an interesting question, you can also use gamification to make the study more appealing.

These elements will kill respondent’s attention:

  • Long and repeating grid questions are killers of any survey. Participants will start to click on any answer just to get through.
  • Long texts – people are not willing to read long text paragraphs in the questionnaire; they will skip it. You will need to find a way how to pass the information differently.

Make the survey mobile friendly


Your survey will probably reach your respondents on mobile devices. Choose the survey system that supports mobile automatically and deliver the right mobile version to the respondent.

Survey incentives


You can add incentives to your survey to increase the response rate. There is not the best way, find a compromise between the effect and costs. Try to be creative.

Incentives for all participants

You can give discounts, credits, free vouchers, gift cards, and other general or specific incentives. If you have many participants, the total costs might be very high.

Raffle winners

In this case, you won’t give incentives to each participant but give a prize only to randomly selected survey participants. Find interesting prizes that are somehow connected with your product and together create an interesting story. Not only material gifts work – you can invite winners to your factory or offer them participation in a workshop, etc.).

It’s also important that your audience is sure that the winners will be chosen in a fair way. For this purpose, we have created a trusted random picker app. Just put the participants into RandomPicker and it will randomly select winners and generate a certificate that your drawing was without any bias.

How do I conduct the survey?


You probably know many survey tools: SurveyMonkey, Survio, SurveyGizmo, Google Forms, Typeform, Frill – customer feedback tool, Lime Survey, OpenSurvey, Qualaroo, and many others. They are easy to use and provide all common question types and functions you will need.

Which one is the best survey software?


It depends on what limits and features you need. Most survey apps have a free version so you can test them and choose the one which works best for you. Here are the main factors:

  • How many participants do you expect to take part in? Usually, there is a limit of 100 free participants; you will need to buy a paid plan if you need more
  • Is it a simple and straightforward questionnaire, or do you need some survey logic? Skip questions, answer piping, and other functions are usually included only in paid plans.
  • Do you need some advanced question types?
  • Will you customize the look and feel of the questionnaire?
  • Do you want to include the questionnaire in your automation process? Then check if the survey system supports Zapier, IFTT, or other automation platforms.


To get a detailed overview of survey systems and their features, we recommend this article.

If your survey platform supports a third-party code, you can embed the RandomPicker form in your questionnaire. Just put the iframe code snippet into the last page of the survey, so your respondents fill in their contact or phone. They will be automatically uploaded to the RandomPicker drawing. It will help you make the winner drawing much easier, and their answers will stay anonymized (not connected with the contact information).

Ready to Start Your New Giveaway?

Try RandomPicker, the platform for giveaways and random drawings chosen by more than 200k companies worldwide.