Survey Participant Recruitment: How It Works & 5 Tips in '24

Figure 1. The popularity of the keyword “survey participant” on Google search engine between 2016-2023.

~90% of marketers use online surveys regularly in their research. However, even though you have found the online survey tool that aligns with your needs, finding the right sample for your survey can sometimes be tricky. Since obtaining accurate and reality-based results from your survey is the overall aim, high-quality responses are needed.

This article highlights the top drivers of survey participation and offers five solutions to increase survey response rates.

If you are looking for a survey participant recruitment solution, check out our vendor deep dive on the available software in the market.

Which factors influence survey participation rates?

Our research shows that survey tools have been searched 10.1k times in 2023 on search engines. Other product-based solutions were searched only 1k times compared to survey tools, indicating that they are very demanding among businesses as they offer great solutions for understanding the market, customers, etc.

However, conducting research on the market, on consumers, or on your employees requires a certain amount of data points to generalize the results. Research shows that participants may not always be willing to open the links, e-mails, or messages to fill out the surveys. Here are the top factors that can impact the level of motivation for online survey participants to take surveys:

• Survey length
• Interest in the topic
• Ease of completion
• Software functionality/user friendliness
• Topic knowledge
• Motivation to help others
• Trust the organization
• The fact that their opinion is valued

You can also take a look at challenges of conducting online surveys and our solutions.

How to increase the response rates in your surveys?

1. Don’t create a very long, open-ended survey

You may have dozens of questions to implement in your survey, however, when you do that, you may end up with very few responses who answer all questions. So, instead of asking a wide range of questions, only embed essential and indispensable ones.

If you are need a survey tool for market research, feel free to check out our vendor deep dive on the available market research tools on the market.

2. Work with survey participant recruitment services

Some survey panel companies help you find the right target for your project. You can get help from a company that offers survey participant recruitment services to run a seamless and fast process and have high-quality data.

Sponsored

Resonio is a brand of Clickworker and it is a survey participant recruitment service provider that works with a crowdsourcing model via an advanced platform, mobile app, and a global team of more than 6 million micro taskers. Resonio offers services such as collecting survey data, conducting market research and sentiment analysis. By working with Resonio, you can:

• Quickly reach your target audience through their survey participant recruiting service
• Be able to allocate individual survey links for each survey participant
• Obtain a high response rate on online surveys
• Seamlessly acquire relevant market data.

3. Be precise

Providing the participant with an estimate of completion time up front, and an indication of the respondent’s progress can eliminate uncertainty and increase the response rates.

Also, embedding a Likert-scale, multiple-choice, matrix, or ranking from the most important to the least can increase the variety of questions, thus enabling more answers.

4. Give vouchers to the respondents

Research shows that the number of incentives provided to complete the survey and the response rate positively correlate. Incentives of higher value can increase the response rate by 7% without decreasing the data quality. So, you can incentivize respondents by offering them vouchers (either prepaid or postpaid).

5. Add gamification to the surveys

Organizations have started implementing various features to increase engagement and survey response rates. One of these features is survey gamification, in which small games and quizzes are added to the survey. Studies show that gamification increases affective reactions to the surveys (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. A comparison of reactions towards a traditional online survey with Likert scales and a gamified survey powered by game mechanics.

If interested, here is our data-driven list of survey participant recruitment services and survey tools.

For those interested, here is also our data driven list of market research tools.

Further Reading

• Top 7 Customer Survey Software
• 5 Best Google Survey Alternatives: Analysis of 30k+ Reviews
• Zoho Survey Evaluation & Top 10 Survey Tool Alternatives

Please contact us if you have any additional questions about conducting surveys: