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Papa Murphy's – To Prize or Not to Prize – That is The Question

Do I need to provide an incentive if I want my surveys completed? I'm often asked. My answer is always the same: "It depends."

Some surveys have incredible completion rates with no incentive. These are usually the surveys that go out to a community of people who have strong feelings about the survey subje

Papa Murphy's is an enormously successful pizza chain. Voted "Best Pizza Chain in America" three years in a row, Papa Murphy's is the world's largest and fastest growing take-and-bake pizza chain. With this success under its belt, expanding into Canada seemed like a natural next step.

Jeff Branton, vice-president of International Operations at Papa Murphy's, was wise enough to know that Canadian pizza eaters might not be the same as their American counterparts. He approached us and asked if we could help him survey Canadians to learn about their pizza-eating habits and to find out if they were willing to try a Papa Murphy's take-and-bake pizza. As his research partner, our goal was to survey a statistically relevant number of Canadians.

We decided to use a Web survey, and send out invitations to the survey by email. We had an internal list of 1,400 names of Canadians who have worked with us in the past so we decided to start with them. Our goal was to deliver 600 completed surveys – an overly aggressive 42 per cent response rate on an email campaign targeting 1,400 names. To reach our goal, we knew we would have to see the invitation go beyond the names on our list, so we added an incentive. We would give away an Apple iPod to one of the survey participants. This was not a huge prize, but we believed the offer would encourage survey respondents to forward the survey invitation to their friends, thus increasing our response rate.

Our survey invitation was short and sweet, with a clearly visible photograph of the prize iPod. The invitation asked people to complete the survey, enter the draw and forward the email to their friends.

Of the 1,400 emails sent, 422 (or 30 per cent) completed the survey – an excellent result, but shy of our 600-survey goal. We watched the number of responses continue to climb and hit 600 within two days. By the end of the contest, an amazing 1,666 people had completed the survey. For those of you who like statistics, that's a 119 per cent conversion rate. That is, 266 more people than were contacted directly by email completed the survey.

Did the incentive play a role in this program's success? Would you have forwarded an email invitation to do a survey with no incentive? Would you have completed this survey, if there were no chance to win a prize? My guess is that most people would say "no" to both questions. We believe the success of this survey program was tied to simple, clear, value-driven messaging AND the chance to win an iPod. Without that incentive, we don't think the response rate would have been close to what was realized.

Our client was happy too. What did Jeff find out about Canadian pizza eaters? Aside from the fact that they are more than willing to try Papa Murphy's pizza when it arrives in Canada, apparently they don't order extra cheese on their pizzas as often as Americans and they like their pizzas big – bigger than those sold in the United States.

As a bonus, we suggested that Jeff ask survey respondents to opt in for future emails from Papa Murphy's. This would allow him to build a marketing database at no additional cost. 482 people signed up after completing the survey. Jeff now has a marketing database he can leverage in the future and a list of people who can help him fast-track revenue as he launches in each Canadian city. Solid gold.

If you have a survey requirement, call us 1.800.263.2980 and we'll see if we can repeat our pizza-eating Canadian success with a program customized for you.