In the last post I promised to give you an example of the law of Reciprocation in action - here’s a great one, which you can apply right now to get massive responses to your requests for feedback, in any format… whether verbal, or on the Internet.

It’s well known that surveys are a great way of getting feedback on how to improve your products, customer service, blogs, and for coming up with new ideas for your products, blogs etc. Unfortunately, the challenge is often getting people to respond to you in the first place. Have you ever found that when asking for feedback?

(Fortunately for me, I’m grateful to have blog readers who love giving feedback - thanks, guys and gals!)

Kris Mills had a property management client that wanted feedback from its customers regarding changes they were thinking of making to their systems and loyalty programs.

They knew that people were lazy about filling in surveys, and so response would be pretty abysmal - maybe 5% or 10% if they were lucky. They also knew that making some kind of an offer to their customers would drastically improve results.

However, instead of rewarding them after the survey, they decided to send a free gift at the same time as the survey. In the accompanying letter, they said:

“As a way of saying thank you in advance for letting us know what you think, you’ll see we’ve included an “instant scratch it” ticket. Good luck. I hope you scratch up a winner.”

Amazingly, an incredible 76% of people returned the survey form! All it cost them was the postage to send out the survey, plus $1 for each scratch ticket - they got back valuable market research data they could use to boost their profits.

Why did it work so well? The gift scratch card triggered in their customers the law of reciprocation, and the feeling of wanting to give back. We’ve all felt it at some point, haven’t we?

Stop and think about it. Can you think of ways you could immediately apply this in your efforts at getting feedback, whether it’s on your blog, in a forum post, or when asking your customers or even family and friends?

For instance, in your blog posts… if you have a question for your blog readers: give them the gift first, maybe in the form of valuable information your visitors can immediately benefit from, or maybe a free gift of some kind… making it clear that what you’re giving them is a gift in advance of them leaving you the requested feedback.

Let me know if you test this, and how it goes for you! If you have any other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

In the next post I’m going to share with you one more example of the law of reciprocation I came across just the other day on another blog - and I admit, it’s a stroke of genius I’d never even considered before! Then we’ll move on to the second (and my favourite) law of influence: Social Proof.

That’s going to be real fun… you definitely won’t want to miss out on our discussions of social proof!

By the way, I’d like to thank-you in advance for… well, you already know what I’m going to say, don’t you?

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