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Chance for a gift card? Vendor Surveys?

DrewAment

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Apr 30, 2009
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Does anyone actually fill out the surveys from the providers/venders?? Since I have multiple dealer/group emails I probably see more than the average person, but dang. 20 min of time for a "chance" to win a gift card -- LOL. I must get 7-8 of these a week.

"You will be entered into a drawing to win a $20 Amazon gift card" -- really, does this work? How many people spend time doing these?

Have you read the rules?? 2 winners a month on one -- from ALL the entries received in a calendar year. For us with only car guys math -- better odds the first couple months ;) Another sends the email with a $20 gift card, but the rules say $100 gift card. Would the $$ make a difference in completion?
 
Does anyone actually fill out the surveys from the providers/venders?? Since I have multiple dealer/group emails I probably see more than the average person, but dang. 20 min of time for a "chance" to win a gift card -- LOL. I must get 7-8 of these a week.

"You will be entered into a drawing to win a $20 Amazon gift card" -- really, does this work? How many people spend time doing these?

Have you read the rules?? 2 winners a month on one -- from ALL the entries received in a calendar year. For us with only car guys math -- better odds the first couple months ;) Another sends the email with a $20 gift card, but the rules say $100 gift card. Would the $$ make a difference in completion?
lol yeah if someone gets excited about the chance to win a $20-100 gift card for filling out a survey, they are probably the wrong target market for the vendor's survey.

There are two reasons I reply to surveys:

1) I love your company / product and want to provide feedback to help make it even better, which in turn will make us better.

2) I hate your company / product and want to provide feedback on why so you will hopefully improve, which in turn will provide greater competition to companies that I love (and motivate them to continue to improve to remain competitive and love-worthy).


Money, especially only $20, is not one of the motivating factors.

I started to fill out a survey on Sincro last week but bailed because it was 50 steps long. Keep it simple and quick for the best chance to get candid feedback from decision-makers.
 
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Admittedly, I do quite a few of these.
Sometimes it's for the prize, sometimes I just genuinely enjoy seeing a new product and providing feedback.
If there's an option to do it passively (ie: just a survey or a recorded webinar) I do these on my iPad in the evening while I watch TV.
I also do Google surveys, AskingCanada and various other more generic consumer survey things.

Even better, when my job title on LinkedIN changed to "VP of Engineering", the offers got much better.
Cloud companies will offer me a guaranteed $100 Amazon gift card just to consider their security, CDN or hosting product.
 
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I started to fill out a survey on Sincro last week but bailed because it was 50 steps long. Keep it simple and quick for the best chance to get candid feedback from decision-makers.
I did a survey for Vistaprint 2 weeks ago - they gave me $50 to spend in their new tool, in exchange for filling out a survey about my experience.
I ordered my custom t-shirt and swell bottle and the survey pops up - it's only 10 questions, but not a single one had a text field.
I had a long list of feedback to give them and not a single place to put it, so now they just get 1-10 ratings of useless things like "Did you find what you were looking for?"
 
LOL -- I changed my title years ago so I would get less calls/emails/etc - it was insane having a CXX title.

There's this one site that a couple of them have used - it gives you a digital Amazon gift card as soon as you book the meeting, whether you attend or not.
The last vendor gave me $250 Amazon gift card to meet with an intern who barely knew their product.

I think it's overall a bad strategy, but I see this as the vendors way of "buying leads", which is something I see dealers do with mixed success as well.
Maybe the vendor is also ok with a 5-10% closing rate.
 
The "rule of equal incompetence" is strong!

I originally came up with that after watching salesperson and manager after salesperson and manager quit or get fired to return a year or two later to my store. Every time they came back they brought the other dealer's intel and practices. It made all dealers in our marketplace equally incompetent.

I've now got well over a decade in this vendor world and see the same marketing people at the next vendor's office. Support people, sales people, executives, etc. Not to mention the same consultants are advising all these businesses.

OEMs are far more incestuous.

This story about how bad some surveys are making me realize just how far the rule of equal incompetence goes :oops::hidepc:
 
We've had success with both vendor survey gift cards and gift cards in exchange for a demo. The keys for us for surveys: shouldn't be more than 3-4 questions, take less than 1 minute to complete, and you get the gift card for completion. The keys for the demo: rapid follow-up and hand-off to a skilled sales person. Both close rates and ROI have been fantastic.