Recruiting a House Panel
Posted by Vovici Blog on Tue, Apr 12, 2011
Recruiting members to join an in-house panel is in essence a marketing campaign, and market researchers building such a panel would be wise to enlist the support of their marketing department.
First, decide what to communicate to prospective panelists. Here are some key points:
- What panelists will be surveyed about
- How you’ll use the information
- How frequently they’ll be asked to participate in surveys
- Why it’s important that they participate
- How they can opt-out if they change their mind
- What’s in it for them
What is in it for them? Marketing the opportunity to provide feedback, to shape future products and to see how they compare to peers typically is more enticing to prospective panelists than traditional panel incentives (at least for house panels, as opposed to third-party access panels).
The key Call To Action for a prospective panelist is convincing them to join the panel by completing a panel profile: providing the demographic or firmographic information that you will use to select them for participation in future studies. Since this is in effect the first survey they will take part in, you’ll want it to be short, targeted and interesting, to maximize their likelihood of taking the next survey (see Panel Engagement for the key drivers of response rate across panel surveys).
How do you market your new panel? If you are looking to build a convenience panel rather than a probability panel, here are some of the techniques you can use:
Invitation Only Panel
- Direct email campaigns
- Direct mail campaigns (postal mail)
- Envelope stuffers (inserts with bills or other notices)
- Telemarketing campaigns
Open Recruitment Panel
All of the above, and:
- Dedicated panel web site
- Corporate email signatures advertising the panel
- Public-relations campaigns
- Media web sites
- Co-registration at partner websites
- Banner ads
- Trade shows
- Affiliate networks
- Search-engine marketing
- Social-network promotion
- TV ads or radio commercials
You may want to be able to calculate an overall response rate, which – for panels – requires two calculations: the recruitment rate (the percent of people who were invited to join the panel who did) and the percent of panelists invited to take a survey who did. To calculate this overall response rate requires tracking how many people were exposed to invitations to join the panel (which might be impractical with some of the methods shown above).
How much should you spend on recruitment? You need to calculate your ideal panel size then divide by your estimated recruitment response rate (I use 0.5% as a ballpark for invitation-only panels). So if your ideal panel size is 10,000, then you will need to market the panel to 200,000 individuals.
If that is impractical for your organization, and you already have an extensive house email list, then instead treat that list as an implicit panel, but survey the people on that list infrequently (see Empanel Customers without Their Permission).
See also: