Engagement

You sit down to dinner and the phone rings. Chances are it’s a telemarketer. This scenario happens all too often, making the telephone a less effective tool for data collection because respondents are unwilling to participate. Today, the Internet has taken the place of the phone enabling respondents to choose when and where they complete surveys. The key challenge is keeping people engaged so they continue to be willing participants.

Engagement means leveraging the Internet as the powerful tool it is. Instead of placing text on a screen, use images to make visual questions. Use answers to previous questions and send surveys on topics that interest your respondents. Our custom online panel system ensures that every step of your research makes your respondents feel engaged.

How do we do it?

Surveys That Are Short And Sweet

Make the surveys short and sweet. They are filing out surveys for your benefit.

The beauty of our custom panel system is you can go back to the panelists as often as you want. Ask them five questions this week that take 5-10 minutes, then go back next month and ask a few more questions. This is how engagement really starts to ramp up. You’re talking to your panelists once every 4-6 weeks, and this type of back-and-forth communication builds a comprehensive profile for each of your panel members, which means your learnings are cumulative.

Interactive And Visually Appealing

Leverage the technology as much as you can. We don’t think of online research as putting text on a computer screen. It can be so much more than that, and it should be. Use visual questions by adding images, video, and audio. The grid questions with the choices of “strongly agree, somewhat agree, strongly disagree” are notorious for high drop-out rates. And you can’t blame people for being tired of those questions. We like to do grid questions by showing images and ask panelists to drag ‘n’ drop the images into a bucket of how they feel about the item. We’ve developed something we call Fusion, technology that makes surveys feel more like a video game.

Examples of Fusion's Visual Question Types
Featured at ESOMAR

Create Two-Way Communication

Finally, your panelists want to know what you’re doing with their feedback. Don’t underestimate the power of a newsletter to let them know. We’ve had lots of clients see great results after sending out a newsletter. Tell the panelists what your company is doing thanks to the panel ("We are changing the color of our widgets because 89% of you hate green)”. Or, tell them how they compare to others in the panel (“Did you know 57% of you prefer to drink café lattes?)”. Whether you have a branded or blind panel, it’s important to show what you’re doing with your research.