Share what you know with millions of people
Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content
0
What are best practices for phone vs. online survey recruitment?
I'm curious what the Focus community believes are the most effective ways to recruit survey respondents over the phone and over e-mail. In my view, these are very different approaches to data collection and require different recruiting approaches as well. What are your best practices for each?
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
Related Activity
2 Answers
Recruiting by phone is generally more expensive than online. You can buy phone lists that can be very geo-targeted (zip code, state, county, DMA). Online is limited when you have short list of zip codes or are dealing with a small market. Also, phone lists can target income and ethnicity, which are highly correlated to zip code. Phone is expensive because essentially you have to pay people by the hour and you have to buy the sample lists as well as pay for the survey programming and setup. Although the call centers will give you per-completed survey pricing, the estimated hours needed to accomplish the task is built into the price. Incidence is a large cost driver. That is, the probability that someone will qualify for the survey within the sample list being used.
Consumer phone surveys are increasingly challenged due to caller ID, and increasing number of households that do not have a land line. Mobile phone lists are expensive and limited.
Business phone surveys can be very effective because you can get referrals and keep track of the companies surveyed much more reliably than online. If you have a very specific business decision maker(BDM) target target, then phone may be the only way you will get your required sample size. Online can reach BDMs, but sample can be limited, for example if you have very title-specific and or zip-code targeted requirements.
Online recruitment can be done through existing online panels who have double opted-in members and varying amounts of profile information per panelist. You can also, get into more general online methods like cost-per-action (CPA) or cost-per-click (CPC). For CAP, the action can be a completed survey if the survey is high incidence among general population and is country-wide. You can web-recruit in virtually every country. However, the online population may not be representative of your target group.
To quantify the price difference between phone and online, for a consumer survey, the difference could be roughly 4X or 5X more for phone than online.
Email can be very effective with a familiar audience, such as your customers, suppliers, channel partners, etc. Phone is great too, but email is faster and cheaper, and simply, the more recruiting you need to do, the more attractive email is.
We don't always have the luxury of a friendly audience though, so the decision isn't so easy. Email is definitely better for a mass audience where you're more interested in the volume of responses instead of quality. However, the opposite is true for phone. If your universe is small, exclusive, or hard to reach, phone is the way to go. They'll never resepond to email, and if you're just looking for a handful of people, you can't be the phone to qualify the right people on the spot. Email is so much more of a crap shoot, since you can never be 100% sure who is actually responding.
Answer This Question