Having a comprehensive understanding of your target audience is crucial for any business. If you want to effectively reach and engage your target market, you will need to understand their wants, needs and preferences as well as their thoughts and feelings regarding your product and brand.

The best way to gain insight into your target market is by running a survey designed to provide you with all the answers you need to optimise your offering and tailor your marketing strategy to best serve your consumers.

One of the main challenges you will face when administering a survey is generating awareness and encouraging participation. Luckily for you, Gleam's powerful suite of apps can help you incentivise survey participation and drive solid results.

There are two key ways you can use Gleam to run a survey:

• Use a Gleam Campaign to Drive Survey Responses
• Use Gleam to Build Your Survey

If you're running a survey then one of the best ways you can raise awareness and drive participation is by running a Gleam campaign which offers users incentives to complete your survey.

If you want to use a Gleam campaign to drive survey participation you have several options:

Gleam's Rewards app is perfect for running campaigns designed to incentivise survey participation. With Rewards, you can encourage your audience to participate in your survey by offering coupon codes or other rewards to all respondents.

When you use Rewards to drive survey responses there are two main approaches you can take:

If you have created a survey with Typeform you can use our Typeform action to integrate your survey with a Gleam campaign and incentivise participation.

You can ask users to complete your Typeform survey in exchange for a reward, Best of all, Gleam will automatically validate survey completion to ensure that you're driving meaningful survey responses.

Check out this demo we put together to see how you can use our Typeform action to drive survey responses:

Another way you can use a Rewards campaign to drive survey responses is by using Gleam's Visit Action to direct users to your survey's webpage where they can complete your survey and claim their reward.

Check out this demo we put together to see how you can use our Visit Action to drive survey responses:

A great way to ensure that users are completing your survey and not just visiting the page and immediately leaving is by providing users with a verification code at the end of your survey and having users enter it into the Rewards widget before claiming their reward.

You can do this with a Secret Code Action.

Just remember to set the Actions required to unlock Reward to 2. You can find this setting under the Reward tab. This will ensure that before users can claim their reward they must have both visited your survey and received the verification code provided to survey respondents.

Ready to Run A Rewards Campaign?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Rewards or get started right away!

You can also incentivise survey responses by running a sweepstakes or giveaway with Gleam's Competitions app. With Competitions, you can run campaigns where users who complete your survey (and a host of other powerful actions) are entered into a draw to win a grand prize.

When you use Competitions to drive survey responses there are several effective approaches you can take:

If you created your survey with Typeform you can easily integrate your survey into a giveaway. Competitions will automatically validate responses to make sure entrants have completed the survey before they can enter your campaign.

Check out this demo to see how you can use the Typeform action in your Competition:

When you run a giveaway to drive survey responses, it's a good idea to allow users to complete other actions such as email signups, social media interaction and Viral Shares to gain additional entries and increase their chances of winning. This is a great way to maximise the value of your campaign.

As valuable as it is to drive additional actions your primary goal is still to collect survey responses, so it's important to ensure that all entrants are actually completing your survey and not just the other actions.

You can easily do this by making your Typeform action Mandatory. This will lock all other actions so only users who have filled out your survey can complete the other actions and earn additional entries.

Another great way to drive survey completion with a Competition is by providing survey respondents with a verification code and using Gleam's Secret Code action to award entries to users who provide the correct code.

When using the Secret Code action to verify survey completion and offer Competition entries it's important that you give users easy access to your survey. You can do this by using a Visit Action or including a prominent link to your survey in the campaign description.

Check out this demo we put together to see how you can use our Secret Code action to drive survey responses and other powerful actions:

Another approach you can take is driving traffic to your survey and redirecting successful respondents to your Gleam campaign where they can enter their verification code and receive Competition entries or a reward.

This is a highly effective way to not only incentivise survey responses, but also increase campaign participation. This is particularly beneficial if you are running a campaign which includes other entry methods you want to drive.

Remember, if your primary goal is to collect survey responses it's a good idea to ensure that all entrants have responded to your survey by making your Secret Code action mandatory and locking the other actions until users have completed your survey.

Ready to Run Your Own Competition?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Competition or get started right away!

As effective as Competitions and Rewards Campaigns are for driving survey responses, people still need to know about them in order for them to work. This is why it's crucial for you to promote your campaign and make sure you're getting it (as well as your survey) in front of a relevant audience.

You will need to consider who your survey is designed for and how you can best reach them. For example, if you are distributing an NPS survey, your target audience should be return customers because they would have existing knowledge about your product and brand. The best way to reach this audience would be by utilising customer mailing lists and social media channels.

Here are a few of the most effective ways you can promote your survey campaign:

• Spread the word about your campaign across all of your social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other platforms you have an active presence on.
• Send out emails to your mailing list promoting your campaign and asking for survey participation.
• Set up a webpage devoted to your campaign or install it in a popup tab to drive campaign entries and survey responses from highly relevant website visitors.
• If you're running a Competition, consider using our Viral Share Action to encourage social sharing and help expose your campaign to a wider audience.

A great way to drive survey participation from any page on your website is by using Gleam's Capture app.

With Capture, you can direct website visitors to your survey with anything from an attention-grabbing Popup:

To a subtle Notification or Bar Capture:

If you want to drive high levels of participation then you should try offering users some extra incentive to complete your survey. It's a good idea to offer a coupon code or redirect users to a Competition or Rewards campaign at the end of your survey. This will motivate users to complete your survey and maximise participation.

By offering discounts to users who complete your survey you will be able to drive some immediate sales as well as survey responses, making this a highly effective tactic.

To setup a Capture designed to direct users to your survey all you need to do to is follow these steps:

1. Choose your Template and Variation in the Layout tab.
2. Select Clicks under Capturing.
3. Customise your Capture in the Design tab.
4. Select Redirect in the Post Capture tab and insert your survey's URL under Redirect URL.

Want to Create Your Own Capture?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Capture or get started right away!

With Gleam's Competitions and Rewards apps you can build surveys within the Gleam widget and offer powerful incentives to encourage participation.

You can use Gleam to create in-depth and customisable surveys using the Question Actions.

With Gleam's Question Actions you can ask Open Ended as well as Single Choice, Multiple Choice and Image Selection questions. This gives you the ability to ask any questions you wish and craft a survey that perfectly fits all of your needs.

When using Gleam to build your survey you have two options to choose from:

• Run Your Survey in Rewards Campaign
• Run Your Survey in a Competition

Running your survey inside a Rewards Campaign allows you to offer coupon codes and other enticing rewards to anyone who completes your survey. This is a terrific way to incentivise participation.

Check out this demo we put together to get an idea of what types of questions you can ask and what your own survey could look like with Gleam Rewards:

You can make sure users have completed every action before claiming their reward by setting the Actions required to unlock Reward in your Reward tab to however many questions you have included in your survey.

If you would like users to answer your survey questions in a particular order, then you will have to lock each Question action until the preceding ones have been completed. You can do this by setting the Actions required parameter for each Question action to the number of questions before it in your survey.

For example, the Actions required to unlock your second question should be 1, the Actions required to unlock your third question should be 2 and so on.

If you want to ask a question but only accept particular answers you can use Gleam's answer validation feature to limit responses to those you have permitted.

You can use this feature to ensure you are getting legitimate responses when you ask certain questions with a limited amount of appropriate answers. For example, if you are asking users which of your products is your favourite you can limit the allowed responses to each of your products.

Ready to Run Your Own Rewards Survey?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Rewards campaign or get started right away!

Running your survey inside a Competition is another fantastic way to encourage participation and generate responses. With Competitions, you can build a survey where respondents go into the draw to win a grand prize and earn extra entries for every question they answer.

By incentivising each survey question with bonus entries, you can gamify the campaign, making it much more engaging for users to enter while also encouraging users to answer as many questions as they can.

Check out this demo we put together to get an idea of what your own survey could look like with Gleam Competitions:

By offering users entries for every question they answer you will be able to motivate them to answer every question in order to maximise their chances of winning. You can even offer bonus entries to respondents who answer every question, which is a highly effective way to encourage users to complete your entire survey.

You can easily create your own bonus action by following the example below and setting Actions required to however many questions are in your survey.

If you would like users to answer your survey questions in an order, then all you have to do is lock each Question action until the preceding ones have been completed. You can do this by setting the Actions required parameter for each Question action to the number of questions before it in your survey.

Run Your Own Survey Competition?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Competitions or get started right away!

Another great way you can use Gleam to build a survey inside of a competition is by building a user details form with your own custom fields.

Check out this demo we put together to see what your own custom fields survey could look like:

When you build a Competition with Gleam you can require users to complete a user details form before being able to enter your campaign. You can then use custom fields to build a survey into your user details form which participants must complete.

When creating your custom fields you can choose whether or not particular questions are mandatory by selecting Required. This allows you to incorporate both mandatory and optional questions into your survey.

When you are building your survey you can tick Automatic entry. This will create an action which will award entries to users who successfully complete your survey.

This tactic is an outstanding way to incentivise the completion of your entire survey, as it allows you to award entries to users once they have filled out your entire form. Once the user has completed the mandatory survey form, you can also add other actions to offer bonus entries and also incentivise more actions that are meaningful to your business.