Market Research Interview: Respondent Recruitment Tips

Over the last few weeks, I have written a series of blog posts on how to design a targeted and unbiased market research interview script and how to plan out the data collection process for a market research interview project.  This week, I will share 5 market research respondent recruitment tips to improve your team’s success rate in recruiting interviewees for your market research interview projects.

Securing a sufficient number of qualified respondents to participate in your research process is often times one of the most frustrating aspects of a market research project.  This problem can result from a limited target interviewee population, high level target interviewee persona, significant respondent time requirements or some combination of these factors.  Regardless of the reason, excuses do not produce valuable insight and that is the job of a market research team, so you are going to have to find a way to meet your target sample size goals.  Otherwise you will have no way of knowing whether or not your data and analysis are telling the complete story or providing misleading results.

Below are 5 market research respondent recruitment tips to improve your market research interview projects:

• Plan ahead, so that you are able to offer confidentiality to respondents if at all possible.  Offering confidentiality to an interviewee will increase the likelihood that they will be willing to participate in the interview process and will often open-up the level of information that an interviewee is willing to provide during an interview.
• Offer the respondents some form of compensation or discount on your products or services to incentivize them to participate in your research efforts.  Providing compensation or discounts on your products or services to interviewees demonstrates that you value their time and the information you expect to gain from them.  Additionally, doing so also increases interviewee engagement because the interviewee develops a sense of obligation or commitment to your research.  The level of monetary compensation or discount necessary to entice target interviewees to participate in your research project will be correlated with the seniority of an individual in a company’s hierarchy, the scarcity of the target interviewees and the time requirements of the interview process.
• Don’t be afraid to alter the compensation or discount incentive mid-way through the project.  The target interviewee supply and time you have allotted to your research project are often fixed or very difficult to alter, so adjusting the compensation or discount incentive is oft times the easiest way to increase the interviewee group’s willingness to participate in the research.  Identifying the need to adjust the compensation or discount incentive early-on, will minimize the adjustment necessary to meet your goals, as the supply of potential respondents will not be too scarce.  Adjusting the compensation or discount incentive downward can be a little trickier, especially if you are publicly advertising your research project.  Try to avoid negative incentive adjustments if the incentive amount is publicly advertised.
• Don’t underestimate the value of in-kind compensation incentives.  Depending on the scope and confidentiality of the research, you may be able to offer your interviewees a copy of your aggregated data or the final analysis in return for their participation in the research process. However, sometimes the confidentiality of the research will prevent you from sharing this information with the participants, so it is best to talk over in-kind compensation plans like this one with the key stakeholders in the project.
• Consider supplementing the phone interview with an online survey.  Online surveys are less time consuming and less invasive, so target respondents are oft times much more willing to participate in this form of research.  Sometimes meeting your target completion level is going to be incredibly difficult or require a larger compensation incentive than you are willing to offer.  One way to achieve the target completion level is to offer an online survey version of the questions.  Similarly sometimes you will want to get a larger sample of data for a small number of questions and a good way of getting this additional information is through a supplemental online survey.  In doing so, make sure that the supplemental survey questions will produce comparable data to those included in the interview script.  Also, be sure to streamline the questionnaire for survey-based participants to only the most relevant content areas.

The key is to develop a plan before you start the interviewing process because you will have a limited pool of target interviewees and time to generate the data you need.  Planning ahead will improve respondent recruitment and improve the experience of the interviewees, which will encourage them to participate in future research that your team conducts.

If you are interested in reading more about market research interviewing tips, I also recommend reading the previous blog posts that I wrote on how to choose the the right style for your market research interview questions.