lorraine, Author at Pollfish Resources

Diving Into the Competitor Survey for All Competitive Analyses

All businesses should deploy the competitor survey periodically, to keep a watchful eye on their competitors and their target market’s perception of their competitors. Competition is alive and well across every vertical, so it is critical to stay in the know on this front.

94% of businesses are investing in competitor intelligence and for good reason, as one of the main reasons why businesses lose their customers is because customers abandon them for their competitors.

In fact, 89% of customers switched to doing business with a company’s rival due to poor customer service. As such, all businesses must strive to surpass their competitors in a variety of matters, from product satisfaction to customer convenience.

That way, they can build brand trust to arm themselves against customers abandoning ship.

This article examines the competitor survey, competitive analysis, its importance, when to use the survey and how to create one.

Understanding the Competitor Survey

The competitor analysis survey is a critical online survey that helps businesses across industries understand their competitors’ business performance, especially in comparison to themselves.

This survey is the leading tool in competitor analysis, which is the practice of identifying your competitors and evaluating them on their strategies, target market perception, strengths and weaknesses and other key characteristics relative to your own.

Competitor analysis allows you to assess and fully understand your market in terms of its key players. It also grants you insight into your own standing and how you compare with your direct contenders.

Competitor analysis helps you assure that you’re allotting resources in productive ways by understanding your competitors, what has worked efficiently for them and what hasn’t. It assures you don’t fall behind and keep up with them, whether it is through product improvement and innovation, customer support, CX and all else.

The competitor survey helps you understand your competitors through the perceptions of your target market. After all, it is your customers whose opinions matter most and you’d be hard-pressed for an employee in your rival company to reveal trade secrets — or any at all.

However, you can still gain competitive insights by surveying certain competitors with B2B surveys. This is especially useful in business partnerships. While you may not get access to your direct competitors, you can still collect crucial information from indirect competitors that help inform on the state of your industry and niche.

Given that competitive analysis is most productive when consistently conducted, you should deploy the competitor survey regularly.

The Importance of the Competitor Survey

This type of survey has several advantages.

First off, by using this survey, you get access to firsthand insights from your customers, allowing you to glean all of their opinions on your competitors’ performance. Whether it comes to their brand messages, products or CX, this survey gives you a clear view into how they see your business rivals.

As such, you can use this survey to form a comparison between you and the competition. You can do so by asking your respondents to choose their favorite brand in a list and include your brand. You can also ask them to rate each brand by using a ranking question.

Additionally, this survey grants you key data into your customer behavior as it relates to your contenders. In this regard, you can survey customers on where they buy from your competitors,’ how they shop from them, how often, whether they’ll buy more during a certain event (ex: promotion) and more. In this way, you can create a kind of RFM analysis from this kind of survey.

It allows you to conduct competitive research by keeping track of your competitors through the eyes of your customers. Essentially, it is a kind of brand tracking, but instead of focusing on how your own brand is perceived, the spotlight is on your counterparts — unless of course, you explicitly ask questions that compare you to your rivals.

By understanding what your target market likes and dislikes about how your competitors operate, you get a twofold advantage. Firstly, you’ll generate ideas on how to run marketing campaigns, how to innovate your products, augment your customer support and improve across your entire customer experience. Secondly, you’ll also know what to avoid and do away with, based on what your customers view unfavorably about your opponents.

In regards to the former, you’ll also form ideas on how to target and acquire new customers, which has the potential to lower your customer acquisition cost. This is because you’ll be armed with data for decision-making, the kind that shows you exactly what your target customers want and expect.

When to Use a Competitor Survey

There are various times to implement the competitor survey for your competitive analysis. These often depend on your marketing campaigns and the time of the year. The following includes several opportune times for deploying this kind of survey.

Shortly after your competitor(s) release new products or services.
During heightened times of customer attrition. For example, when you notice high bounce rates on product and landing pages, along with customers abandoning their shopping carts.
Shortly after you released new products, a new campaign or content.
1. This can include new services.
2. This can also include new website experiences, whether you offer a new subscription, UI elements, etc.
During an in-home use test.
1. One of many market research techniques, this allows companies to understand how their target market interacts with their products before they officially launch them.
2. It grants businesses to understand how their customers use their products in natural settings instead of at customer facilities.
Before launching a new product or innovating on a product idea.
1. You should be aware of similar such products from your competitors along with your customers’ opinions of them.
2. This way, when forming new products as well as post-production but before they go to market, you will understand how to best market them.

How to Create a Competitor Survey

To create a competitor survey, you will first need to work on another aspect of competitor analysis: identifying your competitors. This requires doing some secondary market research. A good starting point is to google the products sold within your niche.

Pay attention to the first and second-page rankings of the SERP (search engine results page). Additionally, take a look at the ads that show; these will appear at the very top of the SERP and are marked by the word “ads.”

When you google the common offering found in your niche, you’ll notice some competitors will rank for content aside from only the products and services. Some of these will take the form of a featured snippet. This kind of positioning places content above the very first search engine result.

Instead of appearing as a link and meta description, the snippet extracts more information from the page it’s highlighting. As such, the extracted content will be longer.

Companies that land feature snippets perform well in terms of SEO. As you’re gathering your list of competitors, you can move on to the following steps, which guide you on how to create the competitor survey:

Put together a list of at least 10 competitors, including indirect competitors.
Start by understanding how customers feel about them by targeting your various market segments and customer personas in a preliminary competitor survey.
In this survey, conduct brand awareness research on your competitors to see whether your customers know about their existence before you probe any further.
1. This will keep your survey short, which is a general survey best practice.
Next, choose a particular theme and campaign for the survey study.
1. It can be based on a new product your competitor released, a seasonal campaign, or one with general questions about how customers feel about it.
2. Use the above section on when to use this survey to provide some ideas on when to launch its study and what to base the study on.
Create several key questions based on the theme of the study.
Deploy your survey at a favorable time.
1. Learn about the best time to send a survey.
2. You should send it to a vast publishing network, along with identified, individual customers.
Analyze your survey results.
Decide whether you need further information and if you do, create a follow-up survey.
Choose another theme for the survey.
1. There are plenty of topics to base your survey on, such as testing the brand trust of your contenders or for brand tracking.
Analyze and iterate if need be.
1. Then, make decisions based on your customer data.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

To remain competitive, you’ll need to conduct a competitive analysis of your competition. You can easily achieve this with survey research. The key is to find a stong online survey platform to carry out your research and present it in a way that’s most convenient for you.

As such, you should use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy consumer surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.

Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

The survey platform should offer advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. It should also make it easy to form a customer journey survey to survey your respondents across their customer journeys.

Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to gain useful insights on your competitors from your target market.

by lorraine

How to Avoid Order Cancellation with Market Research

All businesses contend with the negative outcome of order cancellation, some at far higher rates than others.

Aside from canceling orders, some orders that go through wind up being canceled post-purchase, as 30% of all products ordered online are returned, compared to 8.89% in brick-and-mortar stores.

Although it is expected for customers to return products, incurring this rate of cancellation is worrisome, as it represents almost a third of lost revenue.

Unfortunately, order cancellation doesn’t merely occur within products, as it also rears its head in subscriptions. Nearly 40% of subscribers of any service type cancel in less than three months; over half of all subscribers cancel within six.

You can find the root cause of order cancellation, which almost always includes some customer dissatisfaction by conducting market research.

This article lays out order cancellation in its various contexts, its causes, how to reduce it through best practices and market research.

Understanding the Contexts of Order Cancellation

As the introduction briefly touched upon, order cancellation doesn’t simply occur among product purchases. Instead, order cancellation refers to the abandonment of all products and services that your target market was in the process of buying, along with the reversal of already purchased products and services.

In the case of the latter scenario, customers cancel an order they’ve already purchased or received, or in some cases, have already used for a certain amount of time, which often is determined by a business’ return window.

Customers cancel their orders for many reasons. The root source of order cancellation is customer dissatisfaction, as the number one reason customers cancel an order is due to changing their minds. Customers can change their minds for several reasons and due to various situations.

The key is to discover the causes of unhappiness among customers when interacting with your business, whether it stems from the products/services themselves, communication issues with your customer service team, or a lack of catering to other consumer preferences.

To avoid order cancellation, you ought to fully understand the contexts and causes of it.

The Causes of Order Cancellation

As aforementioned, order cancellation often occurs when customers experience dissatisfaction and unhappiness. These sentiments do not merely occur after customers have used a product or service, as various factors affect customer satisfaction and customer expectations.

The following addresses common causes behind canceled orders, whether they are products, subscriptions, or other services:

Longer Deliveries
1. 38% of online shoppers will cancel their order if the delivery will take longer than a week.
2. This rate declines when fewer days are required to wait for the delivery.
3. For example, 16% of customers will drop their order if the delivery takes 6-7 days; 15% will cancel their order if the delivery takes 4-5 days and 8% will abandon their order if delivery arrives in 3 days or fewer.
No mention of a delivery date
1. 24% of shoppers would cancel their order if the business they’re patronizing provides no delivery date.
2. Customers don’t appreciate being kept in the dark about when they’ll receive their purchases.
Unexpected Shipping costs
1. 25% of online shoppers will cancel their order due to unexpected shipping costs added to the order just before the checkout.
2. In this respect, transparency is key, especially since it involves prices.
High Shipping costs
1. 63% of shoppers abandon their orders due to excessive shipping costs.
2. When customers abandon their carts, they often turn to competitors who offer the same or similar products or services, but at lower or no-cost shipping.
Over-purchasing
1. 30% of shoppers deliberately over-purchase and subsequently return unwanted items.
2. 19% of shoppers order multiple versions of the same item, which they use to decide once they’re delivered.
3. Certain customer personas are prone to purchase more due to income, lifestyle or simply to later compare products.
Loss of interest or need
1. This can occur among products or subscriptions, whether they are of the physical or digital kind.
2. An example of the former includes subscriptions to items, such as hobby items (arts and crafts, toiletries, etc.) and food deliveries.
3. An example of the latter can include SaaS subscriptions or content websites, such as news sites, trade publications, statistics sites and market research publications.

How to Avoid Order Cancellation with Market Research

Despite the many sources of order cancellation, you can reduce it by conducting market research. This kind of consumer research allows businesses to understand their target market in greater depth.

By understanding all your customers’ wants, needs, interests, aversions and customer behavior, you’ll be in sync with your customers, allowing you to properly meet all of their needs. After all, the most ideal way to innovate, market and communicate with your customers is by knowing what they want and expect in the first place.

There are various market research techniques that you can apply to understand your customers in greater detail. This involves researching their preferences surrounding checkout, shipping and all other topics that involve their placement of an order, whether it is digital or physical.

Given that many cancellations occur before a customer receives or uses their purchases, many of these topics involve your customers’ UX, as they include the usability of placing an order and navigating your website and other digital properties. As such, you can conduct research on this aspect with the UX survey by using the proper UX survey questions.

To better understand how easy or difficult it is for your customers to interact with your company at any touchpoint, you should use the CES survey, aka the Customer Effort Score survey. This survey involves using its titular score, which measures the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a business.

To reduce order cancellation, use it to study your customers’ at any touchpoint that involves an order, whether it leads up to it, or occurs post-purchase. As such, you can ask questions that inquire into ordering something online, over the phone, changing an order, dealing with customer service and more.

Given that most order cancellations — especially those that involve customers changing their minds — involve customer satisfaction, particularly a lack thereof, you should conduct the customer satisfaction survey and its varieties.

This survey allows you to dig deep into various aspects of the customer experience in which customers can rate their satisfaction, as well as sound off on what went amiss, what they liked and didn’t like, along with the possibility of providing a recommendation. As for the latter, the best bet is to send an NPS survey (Net Promoter Score Survey), which uses a scale of 1-10, in which customers rate the likeness of their recommending the company to others.

There are various other kinds of surveys you can use to reduce order cancellation, such as the customer experience survey, which addresses various aspects of the CX. You can use it to zoom in on purchases, orders and customer buying behavior.

When to Apply Surveys to Reduce Order Cancellation

Don’t forget to survey various customers at various points in their customer buying journey to retain them. When you retain customers, you’ll in turn build loyalty and stamp out customer attrition, therefore lowering the chances of order cancellation.

The following lists when to survey customers and which points in the customer journey you should pay particular attention to minimize cancellations:

Customers who have saved items in their cart or wish list.
Customers who have abandoned their cart.
Customers who subscribed to a newsletter or other email messaging service.
Those who have interacted with your UI or other digital properties.
Those who have interacted with customer service, whether in-store, over email, phone, or chat.
Those who made a recent purchase.
Those who went back to change anything in their order, whether it is its quantity, a new item, change of address, delivery method, etc.
Customers who are waiting on a purchase delivery.
Customers who have canceled orders before they’ve arrived or have used them (includes both physical and digital subscriptions).
Customers who have received and used their purchases for some time (ranging from a week to months, depending on their purchase).

Best Practices to Use in the CX to Stamp Out Order Cancellation

Aside from carrying out market research, you should follow several best practices to minimize order cancellations. These will allow you to build loyalty by retaining your customers and therefore, the order that they make.

The following list displays the best practices to use to curb order cancellation. It addresses the causes of canceled orders that were highlighted in the previous section. Once you use these practices hand-in-hand with market research, you’ll be on the right track to fostering retention.

Avoid long delivery times.
1. Offer quicker delivery options, such as two-day shipping, next-day and even same-day delivery if possible.
2. This will give customers various delivery choices which they can choose based on their spending power and the urgency of their purchase.
3. Today’s customers have grown accustomed to rapid delivery options in e-commerce.
4. If a business cannot meet that demand, customers will turn elsewhere to buy from a business that can.
Always include delivery dates.
1. Never leave customers wondering when they’ll receive their items or subscriptions.
2. Creating uncertainty will only taint their perception and trust in your business.
3. If you’re not sure because if the delivery service you use isn’t certain either, offer an estimated delivery time.
Be upfront with all shipping and delivery costs.
1. Aside from hiding the date of delivery, omitting shipping and delivery costs is a major mistake.
2. Customers want to be in the know of how much they’ll be charged.
3. Whether you offer a few, a single, or various delivery options, always include all the fees involved.
Keep shipping and handling costs low.
1. Consider the fact that most customers are investing in your products and services. As such, they will want to keep shipping fees to a minimum.
2. Additionally, customers have become accustomed to free or discounted shipping fees that many companies offer.
Offer as many details of each product and service to avoid over-purchasing.
1. Avoid customers who purposely over-purchase for comparisons by providing detailed product and service copy.
2. Never allow your end-users to wonder how one item differs from another.
3. Accentuate all the benefits of each product and service.
Constantly survey your target market to understand their needs and interests better.
1. This will allow you to innovate appropriately and use data for decision-making properly.
2. Study your customers by breaking them down into distinct segments via market segmentation.
3. Study them further by analyzing and catering specifically to customer personas.
Personalize the customer experience.
1. Build marketing personalization campaigns, as this is a known method for retaining customers.
2. No one likes to be marketed to; instead, personalize the CX via market research efforts.
Implement various customer retention strategies.
1. Retention is far more important than customer acquisition, as it costs less and reaps more value.
2. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%.
3. Conduct the customer retention survey to understand customers better and retain them.

Retaining All Your Business

You’ll need to work towards retaining your customers to minimize order cancellation significantly. Conducting market research plays a major role in both matters, as it allows you to informatively serve your customers by understanding all of their wants, needs, dislikes and sentiments.

Each customer segment is different, both in terms of its demographic and psychographic makeup. To hyper-target your customers, both as a means of researching them and satisfying them, you’ll need to use a strong market research platform.

Use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create various consumer surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in their responses, cutting back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.

Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, such as those who placed a recent order, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reduce order cancellations and retain all of your customers.

by lorraine

Diving into the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey to Improve All Customer Service Sessions

The customer service satisfaction survey is the chief tool to use to assure you offer the best customer service sessions. Your customers are bound to elicit customer service activities with your business, no matter how well they know your products.

Whether it’s for technical support, a glitch in a product or help with your digital properties, seeking out and receiving customer service is a major part of your customer experience. It can occur in all parts of the customer buying journey, including pre-sales and post-sales periods.

As such, you’ll need to optimize your customer service satisfaction, just as you would with any other part of your CX. This is also because customers don’t keep their brand perception to themselves.

72% of customers will share a positive customer service experience with 6 or more people. However, unsatisfied customers also share their experiences; 13% of unhappy customers will share their experiences with 15 people or more.

To take matters into further perspective, 70% of customers say they’ll support a company that delivers great customer service. 17% of Americans are even willing to pay more for a business that has a good reputation regarding its customer service.

These statics prove the weight that customer service satisfaction has on businesses. You can optimize yours by gauging this experience through surveys.

This article explains the customer service satisfaction survey, its importance, when to use it and how to create one.

Understanding the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The customer service satisfaction survey is a survey that inquires into customer service satisfaction, as its name suggests. It is a kind of customer service survey, but it should not be mistaken for one, as there are a few distinctions between the two.

The customer service survey is a broader survey type that can be used across the customer buying journey, whereas the customer service satisfaction survey specifically focuses on the satisfaction portion of a customer service session. In this regard, this survey zeros in on support sessions, which are typically conducted after a customer has already made a purchase.

However, this is not a fast and hard rule, as there are other instances in a customer journey where customers receive customer service. Businesses will need to probe them on their satisfaction with these experiences as well.

As such, this kind of survey is centered on gathering customer feedback on the satisfaction aspect of various kinds of customer service. Businesses can use it to measure customer happiness and dissatisfaction during the service session, learn how to improve their service and discover how to streamline future customer service sessions.

When it comes to differentiating from other customer satisfaction surveys, the customer service satisfaction survey entails using customer service representatives to help come up with the questions. This is because you’ll need to use questions specific to the customer service session; otherwise, your customers won’t want to take part in the survey, as it will come across as too generic and not useful to their situation.

The Importance of the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The customer service satisfaction survey is critical to use for a number of reasons, including the ones mentioned in the intro.

To piggyback off of the intro, the importance of this survey comes into play, given that you can use it to improve your overall customer experience. Given that customer service sessions involve interacting with a company, usually for an extended period, it plays a major role in CX.

In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a business they love after only one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. There are many things that contribute to a bad customer service experience — some aren’t as obvious as others.

This is where the customer service satisfaction survey is useful, as it helps you find the things that bother your customers, ones which you may have overlooked or never had considered as sources of problems.

A poor customer service experience can be due to the lack of a follow-up. In this case, businesses that have time-poor employees are at a disadvantage, unless they commit to following up with the customers they’ve assisted in a customer service session.

However, even if you follow up with customers you’ve assisted, the customers themselves may lack the time and will to speak with you, if it’s over the phone. Emailing customers is the easy route; however, they may be unwilling to begin an email conversation with customer service agents.

In such a case, the customer service satisfaction survey is especially useful, as it provides a quick and easy method to follow up with your customers after a customer service session. You’ll show your customers you care about their opinions on their customer service experience without asking them for too much time while reaping the benefits of their insights.

As such, this survey helps build connections between you and your customers. The stronger your connection with customers, the more they’ll rely on your products and services. As such, this survey can be used as a tool that goes beyond merely learning about how satisfied customers were with the customer service they got. It also doesn’t stop at improving your CX. Instead, by building relationships with customers, you’re also building brand trust, the cornerstone of consumer loyalty.

Loyal customers are far more inclined on making repeat purchases than causal customers. These are the most quality customers you can strive for, as they will continuously purchase from your brand and even become brand advocates. Loyal customers also tend to have a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Given that this survey can help foster brand loyalty and a high CLV, it will in turn lower customer attrition along with your customer churn rate, as you are retaining your customers.

All brands should use the customer service satisfaction survey, as it can reveal critical insights on how to improve your customer service.

When to Use the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

You’ve probably had various kinds of customer service sessions with your customers. Sometimes, what may appear to be a regular in-store or online encounter, such as a chat, turns out to be something more significant, as it involves customers interacting with your support or sales employees for a considerable amount of time.

Or, it may be quick, but provided invaluable help for your customers. These qualify as customer service sessions as well.

This begs the question of when is the best time to send a customer service satisfaction survey.

The following lists the most apt times to send a customer service satisfaction survey:

After any situation in which a customer received assistance from an employee, whether it is a customer service employee or others.
1. This can involve solicited help, in which customers set up a call or at-home meeting with a representative, or when your employees approach the customers.
Directly after a scheduled meeting, phone call or other customer service session.
1. It is best to let the customers know that you intend to survey them by emailing them.
2. This is also a good time to collect their email addresses if you haven’t already.
3. This usually occurs after a customer has purchased from you.
After a customer sampled your product at a store and spoke with a sales representative.
1. This occurs usually before a customer has made a purchase and is still deliberating whether to buy from you or a competitor.
2. This is a good opportunity to understand customer satisfaction with your customer service in the early stages of your customers’ relationship with you.
After an impromptu customer service chatting session.
1. Some chatting sessions can be minor, with customers asking basic questions that can be found elsewhere on your website.
2. But others are more significant, granting key information to customers about all your offerings.
3. This can occur at various places in the customer journey, from pre-sales, to after a recent purchase and well after purchasing.
After customers interacted with a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, such as a phone call, or in-person experience.
1. At times, your support employees may offer specific customer service during these times, so these sessions can extend beyond customers’ venting about their issues or other feedback.
2. You can frame the survey as being sent to better help the customers further, even after they gave their VoC feedback.

How to Create a Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

There are various instances where you’ll need to use a customer service satisfaction survey, as the above section explains. They will help you gauge how satisfied your customers are at different points of being served.

If you’re not sure how to go about creating this survey and need a few pointers, the following will guide you.

The following explains how to create a customer service satisfaction survey in a step-by-step way. Check out how to create customer service survey questions.

Determine a recent instance with a customer, in which they received customer service.
1. Refer to the above section to help you decide what to accomplish with your customer service satisfaction survey.
Decide on the correct online survey platform.
1. There is a swath of online survey tools but they don’t all offer the same capabilities, user-friendliness and speed to insights as does Pollfish.
In the screener section of the survey, select the demographics, location and other traits with which you're going to qualify the respondents of the survey.
1. Use screening questions to select respondents even more granularly, by qualifying only those who answer in a particular way to take the survey.
Form a few key preliminary questions for the questionnaire portion and guide the direction of your survey.
1. These should be based on the nature of the customer service.
Choose the survey type you need for your campaign.
In the questionnaire section, add in your preliminary questions. Choose from a multitude of types of survey questions.
1. Create both general questions and those that are very specific to the customer service session you had.
  1. Your customer service representative will need to come up with the questions.
  2. As such, this kind of survey will involve more than just your analysts and market researchers, as it will require forming specific questions from sessions with your customer support team.
2. Use advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers.
  1. With skip logic, you can ask a quantitative question using multiple choice and follow-up with a qualitative, open-ended question.
Always make the survey unique to your brand if you send it to specific people instead of mass-sending it as in Step A.
Write an effective email invitation by mentioning the importance of the survey and the fact that you value your customers’ time.
1. You can include survey incentives.
Include a call to action (CTA) to an online survey, such as one that exists on a landing page, or post-checkout.
1. Be sure it stands out to your respondents.
Thank your customers for taking your survey with follow-up emails and a “Thank You” on the final page of your online survey.
Analyze your survey and use it to make changes to improve your customer service satisfaction.
1. This may include changing your customer service representatives’ tone of voice, their introduction statements to the customers, etc.
2. This may also lead you to omit certain things your customer service representatives currently use when assisting your customers.

Forging the Most Satisfying Customer Service Meetings

There are various key aspects that makeup of customer experience; customer service sessions are one of the most important factors, as these meetings allow customers to resolve issues, ask key questions about your products and services, acquaint themselves with your offerings and virtually anything else related to customer service.

You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your customer service satisfaction survey campaigns. The platform you use should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

It is also important to use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a shoddy mobile environment.

The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to measure and improve your customer service satisfaction survey.

by lorraine

What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research

A research panel is a frequently used means for conducting research, including market research (the study of your customers). This method involves studying the same group of opted-in participants through various methods and stages that are developed as part of a research campaign.

The technique that underpins a research panel counters organic sampling, which seeks out research participants, particularly survey respondents, in their natural digital habitats. As such, a research panel is an alternative to random sampling and has various differentiations.

You ought to know all the differentiators of research panels, how they stray from organic sampling, as well as what makes a research panel tick.

With this key information at hand, it will make your research endeavors simpler; it will also allow you to choose the best research method. This is a must, considering that there is a wide range of market research techniques. Panels are just one of many.

You may be wondering if panel research is a viable research method for your business needs or research campaign. Or, you may consider using it in tandem with another research technique or tool.

Luckily, we’ve got you covered on this topic.

This article explains the concept of the research panel in full depth, which can serve as a possible avenue market researchers can explore within the vast array of market research techniques.

What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research? Table of Contents

Defining the Research Panel
The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process
When to Use a Research Panel</a
The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel
1. The Pros
2. The Cons
Research Panel Examples
Why Online Polling Software is Better
The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative
What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for Your Market Research Campaign
1. How else do research panels compare to an online survey platform?
The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research

Defining the Research Panel

A market research panel is a pre-recruited and pre-screened group of research participants who have opted in to take part as the studied subjects of a market research campaign.

This kind of research method can involve studying its members repeatedly. In this case, the particular study is called a panel study.

It is also referred to as a longitudinal study, although longitudinal studies don’t necessarily need to involve panels, as there can be longitudinal surveys completed by non-panelists.

As such, it is a way of describing those who have agreed to take surveys on an ongoing basis, which, in market research, are typically members of your target market.

You can use a research panel for a wide range of subject matters. The members of the research panel can include a wide range of people across multiple sets of populations.

Whether you seek to study the workforce of a company or a major constituent of a national population, the term research panel can apply to all such groups.

The key is to use participants who represent members of your target market and most importantly your target audience also referred to as your survey target audience. That’s because a research panel is a recruitment method used to get respondents to take your survey.

In market research, the participants in a research panel are usually the people who belong to a business’s consumer base.

Moreover, they belong to a particular audience, known specifically as a survey target audience in survey studies. This label can also apply to research panelists, as they too can be asked to take surveys.

The members making up a research panel must share several traits, such as demographics, psychographics, geographic location and more. A market researcher may also study various segments that make up a target market.

There are various methods researchers can employ in their research campaigns, in which a research panel provides insights. These include:

Interviews
Focus groups
Surveys
In-home usage tests
Experimentations
Test marketing

The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process

A research panel is but one process within the encompassing practice of market research. Some businesses may decide to extract data from a research panel alone, while others may use it alongside probability sampling.

Also called organic sampling, this method involves reaching out to all the individuals who fall under the qualifications of your subjects of study. As such, it allows more individuals to take part in the sample.

Unlike many of the sub-methods of organic sampling, a research panel is not anonymous, in the sense that the panelists’ identities will not be hidden from the researcher.

They are still kept anonymous when it comes to sharing the findings with the public, as you wouldn’t reveal the panelists’ identities.

This allows researchers to study the members at a greater depth, in that researchers can match answers with the respondents themselves. This is due to the nature of pre-recruiting participants; when you do so, you’re going to need to collect information on each panelist, some of which may be personal.

This method will allow you to understand if they’re qualified to partake in your studies. As such, you’re effectively putting names and faces with data, essentially identifying each member. Additionally, this allows you to build a profile on each participant, adding bulk by applying multiple studies.

Forming profiles gives you a glimpse into the presence of personas in your target market. A research panel is the starting point in building a persona.

When you’ve profiled panelists through various means (interviews, focus groups, etc.), you have several kinds of data, from which you can form an analysis and draw conclusions.

You can test the prevalence of these conclusions by surveying other members of your target market, i.e., those who are not in the research panel.

Various survey sampling methods will not only complement your research panel but also give it validity and statistical relevance. After all, there are only so many panelists you can interview or meet with.

Even if you study your research panel via surveys, it is not practical to spend a lofty amount of time vetting people to ensure they fit your research campaign. Thus, a research panel may not be the strongest of the various market research techniques.

When to Use a Research Panel

While businesses and market researchers can use a research panel liberally, it is not always in their best interest. This can be due to the size of a business, a limited budget, the objectives of a research campaign and the length of the research study. There are also times when it makes sense to engage in research yourself and other times in which it may be beneficial to work through a professional market research agency such as IntoTheMinds.

With this in mind, there are particular times in which companies and researchers alike can benefit from using a research panel. These include the following instances:

Obtaining a constant, in-depth read of a certain group of participants.
Conducting a more intimate study on a particular group of people.
Running continuous studies on the same people, ie, for longitudinal studies.
Gathering data on subjects with scant studies due to rarities. Ex: people aged 100+
Large research projects that will involve multiple modes of data collection
When you are performing market segmentation.
When you are building research or customer personas.
To fulfill the preference of conducting research in a group setting.
To gain insights on a topic that you may not have considered from your list of questions/concerns.
1. These insights typically arise in conversations, as participants bring up points and considerations that you may not have originally thought of when forming your research plan.
To assist or act as a helping agent in conjunction with another form of research, such as survey studies.

The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel

The research panel tactic offers advantages and disadvantages that all market researchers should be privy to. Like other research techniques, it is not perfect and for some, the disadvantages may outweigh the benefits, while to other researchers, the opposite may be true.

You should mull over both the advantages and disadvantages that come with this form of research.

The following lists the advantages and drawbacks of using a research panel.

The Pros

Panel members have a more advanced understanding of the research topic since they can be recruited through a longer vetting process.
It can be used multiple times on the same survey, to study change within a particular group that represents segments of your target market.
It’s easier to conduct in recurring intervals, given that you have all the panelists’ information and don’t need to screen them as you would with a new set of participants.
Deeper reads and longer researcher/panelist interactions are suitable for the 3 main types of survey research methods.
It is much easier to follow up with panelists, should you need more research, as you already have their contact information.

The Cons

Lack of privacy: face-to-face interviews, along with phone interviews in which researchers know the identities of panelists can be intimidating.
1. Even a panel study lacks privacy, which can lead to intimidation or fear of answering honestly.
Acquiescence bias: along with other biases, this issue can take shape, as respondents may feel pressured to answer in a particular way, leading to forced or inaccurate responses.
Panel attrition: Due to re-interviewing, research panels are susceptible to fatigue, loss of interest, or pressure (Points 1, 2), making them easy candidates for attrition.
Ingenuine change of attitude/ opinion: Interviewing and reinterviewing can change attitudes, in ways that are not always genuine, due to re-interviewing.
Expensive: Whether you hire an in-house panel or use an external one, it is often an expensive affair, as you will need to pay each panelist. Since this is an ongoing study, you may have to pay them for each session.
Poor data quality: This is especially true when a panel member is a participant in multiple panel companies.
1. The quality of the data may be compromised when a respondent is a member of two or more panels.
2. This is because the respondent may partake in the same survey.
3. If they answer the same way, you will have duplicate data, but if they answer differently, there might be bias. At any rate, you’re getting data from the same person twice, which doesn’t improve the trustworthiness of research findings.
Missing out on a larger survey pool: This relates to the aforementioned lack of privacy. Not everyone in your target audience will want to give away their contact info, let alone have their answers be tied to their identity.
1. As such, you may not get enough participants for the specific quantity required for your survey sampling size.

Research Panel Examples

A research panel can be applied to all kinds of scenarios and has various use cases. Remember, they can be applied to both long and short-term research, despite being associated with the former more often.

They can be used in market research, which is for business purposes and is centered on customers. Or, they can be used for a wide range of other research types, such as medical, scientific, social, behavioral and educational research.

To help you better understand research panels, the following list includes seven examples of them across different areas of study:

A business studying the customer buying behavior of three of its customer market segments.
1. This is especially useful to compare segments with high and low consumer loyalty.
A university research group studying the effects of sleep deprivation among students over a semester or year.
An enterprise company seeking to release the most resonating ad campaigns by comparing how it's received across the world.
A condiment manufacturer who is interested in comparing flavor and texture preferences across different parts of the country.
A business that is intent on following its target market’s shopping habits and how they compare to their competitors.
1. This will need to involve research on competitors. That means you’ll need to inquire about them in the panel, as well as perform secondary research to complement the study.
A healthcare company seeking to find the relationship between device usage and obesity.
A government program that tracks the success of a new social program for certain populations.

Why Online Polling Software is Better

Online polling software trumps research panels for a variety of objective reasons. There are also various subjective and preference-based justifications for leveraging an online survey tool instead of a research panel.

Organic Sampling and RDE

First off, online survey platforms allow you to run random organic sampling, which allows you to reach non-professional survey takers and gain a far larger reach than you otherwise would have.

This is because organic sampling involves what’s known as Random Device Engagement (RDE), a kind of polling that relies on advertising networks and other portals on devices, to engage random people where they are, voluntarily.

Additionally, in Random Device Engagement, the surveys are delivered to users in their natural digital environments, capturing them where they prefer to be. They were not pre-recruited and thus do not face the same pressures and conditioning that they would in a research panel.

As such, they are more likely to answer questions truthfully, as they have no one to answer to, are kept anonymous and have nothing to lose.

Greater Privacy

With far more privacy afforded to them, respondents of organic sampling surveys are also less vulnerable to acquiescence bias and all the other biases that involve the respondents’ reputation.

On the other hand, there’s polling software. This method, as aforesaid, provides respondents with the most privacy, as they are not pre-recruited or pre-screened. In many cases, polling software reaches respondents organically, which affords respondents the most amount of privacy.

Some survey platforms (such as Pollfish), allow you to send surveys to specific individuals instead of simply across a vast network of online platforms; in this case, the study won’t be as private. However, it is another deployment option to expand how you run your survey study.

Greater Reach to Research Participants

It also has a far greater reach to respondents. This, however, will depend on the online survey platform you use. We suggest one that allows you to conduct global surveys with the same ease as you would with local surveys.

Upfront Incentives

When you use an online survey platform, survey incentives are usually mentioned upfront. This is typically the case with a survey platform that partners with gaming sites and other digital platforms that offer in-app awards, which can be either monetary or non-monetary.

With incentives being offered (or at least mentioned) at the fore, all kinds of customers will be more willing to participate in the survey study.

Less Time Consuming

Moreover, an online polling platform isn’t as time-consuming for respondents. This is because such a platform does not simply conduct longitudinal studies — and even when it does, it can target random people who fit into certain customer profiles and customer personas.

It is also far less time-consuming for researchers. That’s because they don’t need to conduct interviews or other actions to recruit participants; the polling software does it for them. As such, it’s a win-win for all the people involved in the study: the respondents and the researchers.

Less Room for Attrition, Boredom and Bias

As such, it isn’t reliant on using the same people repeatedly to take part in a study. In this way, it cuts survey attrition. This is because some panel members may feel exhausted, burned out or simply frustrated with having to continuously be part of a study, especially if it covers the same subject.

As such, using polling software grants you the opportunity to ward off boredom from your respondents, as well as gain accurate responses. As mentioned earlier, panelists are far more prone to acquiescence bias and other biases.

Respondents of a polling platform offering organic sampling are at a far lower risk of being biased or getting bored. The latter is especially true in a platform that offers a mobile-first environment. After all, mobile dominates online web traffic, as over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Thus, a good survey design, especially one built for the mobile space creates a pleasant survey experience, one that intrigues respondents to take a survey in the first place, and most importantly, complete it.

Aside from these advantages that online polling offers over research panels, there are many more. The other pros deal largely with the survey tool itself as opposed to its distribution and high-level polling aspects.

The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative

While a research panel has several benefits and use cases, online survey tools present a stronger alternative. First off, they have even more use cases and can be applied to all with greater ease.

This is because the survey tool itself does all the recruiting and screening for you. As a researcher, marketer, or business owner, you don’t have to worry about whether your survey respondents fit your target survey audience’s qualifications.

Identifying and acquiring respondents are both taken care of by an online survey platform, that is if you choose a potent one. This means you don’t need to have a pre-study interview to vet potential participants. Instead, everything is automated.

A strong online survey platform offers machine learning and artificial intelligence software to run all of its functions and mechanisms. This means, there is little to no manual labor required on your part.

All you need to do in your survey campaign with a strong online survey tool is:

Set your screener so that your survey targets the correct populations
Create your questionnaire
Analyze the survey

Those are the three steps involved in the Pollfish platform. If you’d like to learn how to make your own survey in just 3 easy steps, read the article in the hyperlink.

The online survey platform should handle all the rest. When it comes to running a high-quality market research campaign, there is a lot that goes into staving off poor-quality data and ensuring accurate results.

The following lays out what an AI-powered survey platform can do for your survey campaign:

What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for YOur Market Research Campaign

A lot is going on behind the scenes of an online survey platform. Luckily, you won’t have to worry about nearly all of them. Regardless, it is crucial to understand the depth of survey SaaS that runs on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Here’s what to expect from an AI-based survey platform:

A strong adherence to targeting
1. No respondent partially matches the demographic and psychographic screening that the researcher inputs into the platform.
2. All survey participants must match 100% of the respondent qualifications. If not, they are disqualified from taking the survey, no matter how close to filling all slots of the criteria they get.
  
  The Audience section on the organic sampling survey platform Pollfish has a rigid adherence to granular respondent targeting.
Respondent verification
1. This mechanism checks respondents for duplicated IDs to ensure each survey completed is done by a unique person, as opposed to one person taking a survey more than once.
2. The platform checks IP and MAC addresses, Google Advertising and mobile device identifiers.
3. In addition, the platform works with vetted publishers to send unique IDs as an added layer of protection against survey fraud.
A layer of security in the questions themselves
1. In-survey questions are designed as yet another layer of security against survey fraud.
2. For example, a question can request respondents to answer a simple math problem.
3. Or the survey would include identical questions with the response options re-ordered to verify answer consistency.
Antibot Policy
1. Bots are no match for an AI-powered platform that is designed to disqualify them from taking a survey.
Zero tolerance for VPNs
1. Most businesses and research campaigns put qualifications based on geographies.
2. A respondent on a VPN would tarnish any study with filters on who gets to partake in the survey based on location.
3. The Pollfish zero-tolerance approach to VPNs ensures the veracity of respondents’ location.
Removal of incomplete surveys
1. This speaks for itself, as surveys are meant to be fully completed. A partially complete survey would provide insufficient data.
2. Incomplete surveys are especially problematic in surveys with follow-up questions to past questions, or those seeking more depth to a certain issue.
Removal of surveys with suspicious activities
1. Surveys with any questionable behaviors are rejected.
2. This includes the removal of the following:
  1. Answering open-ended questions with nonsense
  2. Attempting to sign in from multiple countries/devices at once.
  3. Taking an inappropriate amount of time on the survey.
Multiple layers of quality checks
1. The survey platform uses a technical layer to perform other quality checks.
2. This process includes our technical experts continuously working to avoid survey fraud.
3. There are several layers that we use to maintain good data quality. These include checks on the following:
  1. Hasty answers Check: catches respondents who answer faster than the average time needed to read the questions.
  2. Reset ID Check: Activates when the respondent answered the same survey previously, but with a different device to avoid the same respondent from taking the survey more than once.
  3. Gibberish Check: Checks for answers contain nonsensical text. This is the kind of text without real words, such as “jnfjv vdf gre.”
    Avoid receiving gibberish answers thanks to the Pollfish AI-powered survey platform
  4. Same IP Participation: Checks if a survey has been completed before within a certain time from the same IP address of the respondent’s device.
  5. Carrier Consistency: Assures that the carrier of the respondent’s internet service exists in the targeting market.
Specialized questions to identify those not paying attention
1. Aside from a layer of security in all questions, we offer specialized questions that detect poor data quality.
2. These include the following question types:
  1. Red herring questions: Asks questions with odd answers to assure respondents are paying attention.
  2. Trap questions: Finds who is paying attention to a command, usually one that asks to select a negative response. Responders who choose positive responses will be caught.
  3. Quality Questions: Similar to red herring questions, they check if respondents read and understand what’s being asked.
Constant iteration until all quotas are met
1. With the agile research approach, the platform doesn’t merely provide speedy insights.
2. Instead, it creates constant iterations until all the quotas and the desired amount of completed surveys are met.
3. As such, the platform doesn’t cease, or pause (unless you set this command on your dashboard).
4. It allows you to gain the proper amount for your sampling pool.
5. With this, no survey pool is too large (relative to the necessary sampling size).

How else do research panels compare to an online survey platform?

Respondents can rest assured that they do not need to give away their data. To add to this, they can still be incentivized to take part in a survey study.

An online survey platform does all the heavy lifting in terms of retrieving responses, while in a research panel, the researcher has to make sure that all the participants respond adequately. This is to say that the researchers themselves must check for gibberish answers, questions left unanswered and much more.

This is especially more difficult in focus groups and one-on-one interviews, in which a researcher has to make sure everyone participates in the former, and that the panelists are willing to truthfully answer all the questions in the latter.

An online survey tool also effectively eliminates the need to worry about survey response rates, as it keeps iterating until the preset requirements are met (including the number of respondents).

As such, researchers have plenty to gain for their research needs from using an online survey tool in tandem with a research panel, or even as a replacement for a research panel.

The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research

A research panel is a useful method for conducting market research, particularly for studying the same group of participants to monitor their opinions and behaviors and changes thereof.

However, a productive market research campaign will rely on using more diverse methods to extract data. This involves using random organic sampling, which forgoes the conditioning and pressures of a research panel.

As such, you should opt for a survey platform that offers RDE, or Random Device Engagement, which, as mentioned earlier on, distributes surveys randomly, across a wide network of digital properties. This includes websites, mobile sites and mobile apps.

With this survey function, the platform does all of the work when it comes to identifying respondents and covering all quotas. That means you don’t need to do anything in this regard, as the platform performs these tasks.

But there’s more.

To piggyback off of the section on the role of the research panel, online surveys and research panels do have some beneficial similarities. For example, they’re both ideal for creating and validating personas.

A research panel can identify a persona over several rounds of interviews/ surveys/ etc., while an online survey tool can conduct further research to find whether those personas are statistically significant.

Thus, these methods work well hand-in-hand when it comes to conducting market research. A strong online survey platform will ensure a synergistic relationship between random sampling surveys and research panels.

It should allow you to survey specific people, such as via email, or whichever digital channel you seek to use. Luckily, there’s the Distribution Link feature, which enables you to do just that.

Frequently asked questions

What is a research panel?

A market research panel includes participants who have willingly opted to participate in a research group regarding a specific subject. These members are pre-screened and pre-recruited.

Why are research panels important in the market research process?

Research panels are essential because they are not anonymous, unlike the respondents who take the surveys incognito. This is important because it allows researchers to find out everything about the members to match answers with the respondents themselves, ruling out chances of inaccuracy.

When should businesses use a research panel?

Businesses should set up a panel to facilitate in-depth research of audiences and their behavioral patterns or conduct a detailed, intimate study on customers. Large research projects that require multiple modes of data collection or market segmentation also work well with a dedicated research panel. You can also use them when building customer profiles.

What are some pros of using a research panel?

Panel members usually have a more advanced understanding of a research topic. Research panels are also easy to conduct in recurring intervals, and researchers do not need to screen information as they would with a new set of participants. In this way, it is faster and more efficient.

What are some cons of using a research panel?

With a panel, participants do not have privacy. They may have to participate in interviews which can be intimidating. This may pressurize a respondent to answer in a particular way, leading to an incorrect response. Research panels are also prone to fatigue, loss of interest, and panel attrition. Also, hiring a research panel is usually costlier as you may have to pay the participants for every session.

by lorraine

New Demographic and Targeting Criteria on Pollfish

We're constantly innovating our market research platform to equip you with strong survey research methods and the best survey experience for your respondents.

The first step to creating a survey in Pollfish is selecting your target audience. However, choosing a target audience can be a challenge if you’re unsure which segments are available or how to get started.

To ensure you’re reaching the right respondents, we’ve provided a full list of all the ways you can segment and select your target audience.

Targeting by Gender

Male
Female
Gender Quotas
Other

We've updated the Gender targeting filter on the Audience page. The Gender filter now includes a new choice — "Other'' — a non-binary gender option.

The option will not be preselected. if the researcher enables it. It has no additional cost, much like the 16-17 age range. Thus, the maximum price of the gender filter is also not affected. If your results include respondents identifying themselves as ''Other,'' post-stratification will not be available on the results page

The researchers can select the ''Other'' option along with making quotas in the gender filter.

Targeting by Age Range

Six preset age groups (16-17, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-44, 54+)
Specific Age groups (Min/Max)
Age Group Quotas

Your survey begins with age and gender targeting included.

Targeting by Geolocation

Country (over 160 countries available)
City
Region/ State
Radius (from physical location)
Residential Postal Code
US Postal Code*
US Census Region*
US Census Division*
US Congressional District*
US DMA*

*Available in United States only

Residential Postal Code

This filter will be based on the data you collect through our demographic portion of the survey (at the demographic info collection section in the screener). Hence, the respondents will declare their location in response to the demographic question of ''What is your zip code?'' since the filter will be global originally.

In addition, we allow researchers to target either by residential postal codes only or by the other geolocation criteria available on the Audience page. This includes targeting by respondents based on their country, city, radius, zip code, etc.

You can contact Pollfish to enable Residential Postal codes on your account.

Targeting by Demographic Criteria

Pollfish asks each respondent to complete a profile in advance of taking their survey and uses rolling profiling to ensure that answers are up-to-date. Targeting can be used to reach people meeting any of the following criteria.

Marital Status:

Single
Married
Divorced
Living with Partner
Separated
Widowed
Prefer not to say

Number of Children:

None
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six or more
Prefer not to say

Education:

Middle School
High School
Vocational/ Technical College
University
Post-Graduate

Employment:

Employed for wages
Self-employed
Unemployed and looking for work
Unemployed but not currently looking
Homemaker
Student
Military
Retired
Unable to Work
Other

Career:

Agriculture Forestry Fishing or Hunting
Arts and Entertainment or Recreation
Broadcasting
Construction
Education
Finance and Insurance
Government and Public Administration
Health and Social Assistance
Homemaker
Hotel and Food Services
Information—Other
Information—Services and Data
Legal Services
Manufacturing—Computer and Electronics
Manufacturing—Other
Military
Hotel and Food Services
Processing
Publishing
Real Estate, Rental, or Leasing
Religious
Retail
Scientific or Technical Services
Software
Telecommunications
Transportation and Warehousing
Energy/ Utilities/ Oil and Gas
Wholesale
Advertising
Automotive
Consulting
Fashion/ Apparel
Human Resources
Market Research
Marketing/ Sales
Shipping/ Distribution
Personal Services
Security
Other

Race/ Ethnicity:

Arab
Asian
Black
White
Hispanic
Latino
Multiracial
Other
Prefer not to Say

Household Income:

Lower I
Lower II
Middle I
Middle II
High I
High II
High III
Prefer Not To Say

Household income mapping varies by country. To see how this breaks down, see the full list under household income criteria by country.

Number of Employees

One
2-5
6-10
11-25
26-50
51-100
101-250
251-500
501-1000
1001-5000
5000+
I don’t work
Prefer not to say

Organization Role

Owner or Partner
President/ CEO/ Chairperson
C-Level Executive
Middle Management
Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Chief Technical Officer (CTO)
Senior Management
Director
HR Manager
Supply Manager
Project Management
Business Administrator
Supervisor
Administrative/ Clerical
Craftsman
Foreman
Technical Staff
Sales Staff
Buyer/ Purchasing Staff
Other non-management staff
Prefer not to say

Targeting by Mobile Device Criteria

OS Platform

Android
iOS
Web
Windows Phone

Manufacturer

Acer
Apple
Blackberry
Carrefour
Google
Samsung
..and more. (Due to our rapidly refreshing audience, it’s best to type the name of the manufacturer you are looking for into the dropdown search for the most up-to-date list of who we support)

Mobile Carrier

AT&T
B-Mobile (BT)
Bell
China Mobile
T-Mobile
Telstra
Tesco
Softbank
Sprint
Verizon
Vodafone
..and more. (Due to our rapidly refreshing audience, it’s best to type the mobile carrier you are looking for into the dropdown search for the most up-to-date list of who we support)

Pollfish offers 3 screening questions to help you define your audience even further. You can also use these to narrow in on specific behaviors, beliefs, or motivations of your target audience. Be sure to check out our post on how to use screening questions effectively to get the most out of them.

Once you have selected your targeting criteria, you’ll see a preview of your audience makeup on the right side of your dashboard, along with an estimated time to completion. Review how to set up targeting with our video to get started.

https://vimeo.com/304695551

by lorraine

Building Brand Purpose with Market Research

As businesses seek to scale, grow and differentiate themselves from others in their field, they’ll need to have their brand purpose on full display.

Making light of your brand purpose is a critical way to show that your brand is mission-driven and exits beyond the shallow purpose of making a profit. Customers, especially the younger generation are fond of brands with a purpose.

In fact, 92% of Gen Z and 90% of Millennial respondents say they would support a purposeful brand, compared with 81% of Gen X consumers.

Consumers from across the globe also view brands that actively display their purpose in a positive light. 64% of global consumers say brands that communicate their purpose are more attractive. 62% want companies to take a stand on the issues they care about.

This article delves into brand purpose, its importance, examples of companies with visible purpose and how to find and build your own through market research.

Understanding Brand Purpose

This concept refers to a brand’s moral reason for being and what it stands for aside from making a profit and other commercial interests. Typically, a business assumes a brand purpose aligned with what its customers believe.

Also called the North Star and the noble purpose of a brand, it largely deals with finding a reason for the brand’s existence and using it to help its consumers.

Brand purpose is essentially the “why” behind a company. This “why” allows the business to show customers the values it holds and the noble cause it hopes to either achieve or contribute to.

A business’s brand purpose can serve as a reflection of the founders’ lives and experiences, what they consider to be gaps in their market or a major change in their market.

A brand’s purpose can be ethical, moral or political in nature, giving customers the chance to do business with a brand that supports a certain cause or way of life.

A brand purpose should not be confused with a brand promise, which is the general expectation a product or service offers to its customers.

Coming Up With a Brand Purpose

When coming up with a brand purpose, consider how your business intends to make the world improve, or at least a component of it. This can involve affecting social obligations for your target market, environment or society at large.

This will resonate with your consumers and their values and give them another reason to patronize you.

Ask yourself the following to begin finding your brand purpose:

What does your brand stand for?
Does your business have a mission?
What does your business strive to do – or commit to never do?
What values does your brand uphold or plan on upholding?
How can you use your values as a company to strive towards a goal for the greater good?

Questions like these are at the core of brand purpose. Once you answer these, you can study your customers to probe further.

The Importance of Brand Purpose

A brand purpose goes far beyond appearing conscientious in your market.

First off, a powerful brand purpose will set you apart from the competition. Plenty of business rivals may offer similar products, services and experiences, but they are unlikely to share the same brand value of your brand — or any at all.

A brand purpose is a potent aspect of your business to use for building your reputation and strengthening your brand equity. You can do so by establishing your brand as one that is socially, environmentally, politically or otherwise conscious and caring about issues besides its own bottom line.

In turn, this humanizes your brand. Your business will no longer be seen as merely another provider or another cash cow. Instead, it will be recalled as one with a human conscious, one that cares bout a certain issue and it attempting to reach goals that ultimately benefit society in one way or another.

By improving your reputation and heightening your brand as one not solely concerned about profits, you can thus apply your brand purpose in your branding. You can do this across a wide span of campaigns, from branding to PR to advertising and beyond. Your best bet is to apply it to the main conduit of your communications: your content marketing strategy.

This involves directly mentioning your purpose and alluding to it across your blogs, resources pages, social media, landing pages, videos and any other channel that grants you the opportunity to make consumers aware of your brand purpose.

Finally and most importantly, having a brand purpose makes the brand more appealing to the customers, as they will feel that their spending is making a difference in the world. It will also make them feel like they are a part of something greater than just a customer buying journey or shopping session.

A brand purpose enables your business to connect with consumers on a personal level. This is important, as aforementioned, given that customers are becoming increasingly invested in brands that have a purpose.

In fact, 52% of customers say they are more attracted to buy from brands if they stand for something bigger than just the products and services they sell, especially if it aligns with their personal values.

Moreover, 71% of customers say they prefer to buy from a purpose-driven company over another one, should the cost and quality be the same. What’s more astonishing is that despite the statistics of consumers leaving brands after one bad experience, 72% of consumers say they would forgive a company with a brand purpose if it made a mistake.

The implications of these statistics are major, pointing to higher levels of brand trust in purposeful companies. Additionally, it means that when a customer contemplates a brand with purpose, they are also more inclined to remember it, purchase from it and want to work for it.

In addition, when a customer sees a logo of a purpose-driven brand, they’ll associate it with being compassionate, responsible and ethical.

All in all, when brands exhibit a brand purpose, they are effectively standing out among competitors, improving their reputation, gaining ideas for marketing and branding and resonating with customers and their values.

All brands should therefore strive to be purpose-driven.

Examples of Companies With Brand Purpose

Companies across various sectors have taken up a brand purpose. This has given their customers a much deeper meaner to their brand and offerings.

The following lays out a few examples of companies that actively demonstrate their brand purpose:

Dove: The personal care company aims to help women discover the value of real beauty and improve self-esteem worldwide. Their #speakbeautiful movement encouraged women to be kinder to themselves and embrace their natural bodies. The brand creates relatable and realistic marketing instead of the highly edited images common in the beauty industry.
Muji: The Japanese retailer of household items and apparel promotes self-restraint, humility and the natural state of the environment, along with supporting simplicity and moderation. It sustains the latter by offering functional products with a simple design and are practical to use. As for the former, Muji emphasizes reducing production, recycling and packaging waste.
Crayola: The art supply company works to help parents and teaches foster creativity within children. It enables those in children’s lives to inspire them to be “creatively alive” instead of simply using their products. Crayola had various programs dedicated to this purpose, a mission they attempt to achieve globally.
Everlane: The American clothing retailer has a threefold brand purpose. It is bent on creating environmentally friendly products, providing high-quality products and being transparent as possible. The company sources only from ethical factories — the kinds that have fair wages and hours. It uses fine materials and brands itself as being radically transparent. When it comes to the latter, Everlane gives information on how much their clothes cost to be made, which materials they used, the labor involved and even the transporting methods.

How to Find and Build Brand Purpose with Market Research

Market research can help you discover the possible themes and nuances of your brand purpose. This is because there are various market research techniques you can use to study your target market, the group of customers most likely to buy from you.

You can begin conducting market research via secondary sources, such as trade magazines, news websites, blogs and competitor websites to see the kinds of purposes your competitors are aligning themselves with.

You can also use these sources to understand which purposes resonate the most with customers and the kinds of campaigns brands in your field and beyond have created based on their brand purpose. This will help you form the onset of your brand purpose.

Next, shift into primary market research by conducting survey research on your target market. This will give you firsthand insights into all of your customers’ thoughts in relation to current issues and popular causes.

Use a trusted online survey platform to reach the correct target market sample. This platform should allow you to extract the exact amount of respondents that you input in the screener, including quotas on various audiences.

Your survey platform should have the option of being able to incorporate multiples audiences in one survey. That way, you can observe different target market segments and customer personas under one survey study, allowing you to analyze the data via the same dashboard.

You should also be able to reach the correct respondents via demographics, behaviors, and even by their specific answers to screening questions.

Ask your respondents about various social issues, from the environment to education and all else. In your survey, you should seek out which issue and which message resonates the most with your target market, along with which elicits the strongest reactions. In this way, you may need to insert elements of emotional marketing.

You should also add A/B testing into your surveys to see which messaging or issues affect your customers the most, along with which they care most about. Remember to conduct market research beforehand, as you’ll need to know your customers before you set out to find your brand purpose.

You can continue surveying customers after you’ve decided on a brand purpose, to find the right messaging and images. Do so with A/B testing, including sequential testing.

Differentiating Your Business

Creating a brand purpose and applying it to various marketing campaigns will differentiate your business and ultimately allow it to survive. But before you insert a brand purpose into your branding, you’ll need to find a strong one that your target market deems important and compelling.

To do so, you’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform, since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.

The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers into making repeat purchases.

by lorraine

What is a MaxDiff Analysis? The New Best-Worst Scaling Feature

by lorraine

How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research

You’ll need to cultivate repeat purchases from your customers given the weight of customer retention. Even if you operate a B2C retail establishment, your business will greatly benefit from existing customers shopping from your business continuously.

90% of customers are more likely to purchase more, and 93% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases at companies with excellent customer service.

61% of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat purchases of existing customers, rather than from new customers. These statistics demonstrate how clear the value of repeat purchases is.

However, despite these perceptible benefits, 96% of customers stop doing business with a company due to poor customer service. This damaging statistic proves that almost all customers will not simply make fewer purchases with a business, but abandon it entirely.

As such, brands must elevate their CX and understand their customers to retain customers.

This article explores the concept of repeat purchases, their implications, importance and how to foster it with survey research.

Understanding Repeat Purchases

A self-evident concept, repeat purchases refer to instances of customers purchasing more than once from the same business. This behavior is usually associated with buying from a business multiple times, instead of just twice.

As such, repeat purchases result from customer retention, which is the result of consumer loyalty. There are many building blocks of loyalty, including providing a great customer experience, reasonable prices, product satisfaction, brand equity, brand trust, satisfying all of your consumer preferences and more.

When strategizing how to stimulate repeat purchases, businesses can create various campaigns, from advertising to PR, social media and various others to facilitate repeat purchases through different purchasing methods. This means that although you may have customers who purchase in-store, you can still pique online or phone orders.

For example, assume you have a customer persona who prefers buying via the brick-and-mortar way. They can still be swayed to make an online purchase, should it be compelling enough. You can achieve this by offering a special online promotion, introducing an online rewards program, or appealing to this persona in some other way that makes it tempting for them to buy online.

At any rate, you can forge repeat purchases through omnichannel communications and various purchasing options.

The Importance of Repeat Purchases

Repeat purchases are important for several reasons.

First off, when customers buy from the same company, it is a sign of customer loyalty, which means that not only will your customers continue buying from you, but they will be less inclined to shop from your competitors.

As such, you’ll be drawing in a larger customer retention rate, and as you’ve read across multiple CX, marketing and eCommerce outlets, customer retention is more profitable than acquisition. Various figures prove this, such as the fact that acquiring new customers costs five times as much as keeping existing ones and that selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70%, while it is only 5-20% for new customers.

High levels of repeat purchases also point to a low customer churn rate, another necessity for keeping your business afloat, given the need to retain a stream of customers. In addition, once customers churn, it is going to be difficult to bring them back to your business, as they've already made up their minds — and not from hearsay but their experience from being your customers.

If your customers didn’t like your products, they wouldn’t buy them — unless it was due to utter necessity and no other choice. As such, when customers buy repeatedly from you, not only are you lowering your customer acquisition cost due to higher retention, but you’re also building trust around your brand. The more customers buy from you, the more reliable you are perceived to be.

Customers who make repeat purchases are also important given their higher expenditures, as repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. This isn’t surprising, as retained customers know what to expect from their favorite brand(s), therefore being more liberal with their spending.

Customers who buy from you year after year are critical, as they signify a segment that has the potential or currently carries a high Customer Lifetime Value. This metric relays the worth of customers during their entire relationship with the company. It involves both purchases and the length of a relationship customers have with businesses.

Value also increases in reverse, meaning that a brand appears to be more valuable to customers who make continuous purchases. As such, these purchases exemplify high levels of customer value, which is the perception of what a product or service is worth to a customer versus its alternatives.

All in all, when customers make repeat purchases, they are easier to sell to, improve a brand’s reputation and generate higher overall value for a company.

7 Effective Ways to Increase Repeat Purchases

Businesses can try experimenting with different methods to increase and strengthen customers by making repeat purchases.

The following enumerates 7 methods you can use to increase repeat purchases:

Offer perks via VIP programs.
1. These programs grant elite status to customers who buy more, directly leading to repeat purchases.
Create referral programs with incentives for current customers that bring in new ones.
1. This will whet customers’ interest in staying customers, as they will be rewarded.
Create discounts and seasonal campaigns to draw in continuous purchases for special occasions.
1. This will entice customers to buy repeatedly by buying more than just one kind of product. For example, various Halloween candy or Christmas decor.
Retarget customers via email marketing.
1. Target your customers directly after they make their first purchase via email marketing.
2. You can give them the option of subscribing to a mailing list or suggesting similar products now and then.
Create exclusive deals for customers through rewards programs.
1. While creating seasonal promotions is useful, you can extend your deals and discounts by creating rewards programs for customers.
2. This directly leads to customers buying more.
Appeal to customers with marketing personalization.
1. No one likes to be marketed to, especially in generic ways.
2. Creating personalization makes customers feel seen, heard and far more special than they would as recipients of non-personalized offers and messages.
Ask for user-generated content.
1. This involves content that your consumers produce via using your products and services, which you then feature across your website and other digital properties.
2. This method creates bonds between brands and customers, which gives brands an edge in that customers view them as more than just another business.

How to Stimulate Repeat Purchases with Survey Research

Market research is the underlying mechanism for increasing repeat purchases. This is because, to appeal to your customers, you’ll need to understand them at a deeper level. This way, you can properly market to and serve them.

When you understand all of your customers’ desires, needs, aversions and perceptions, you’ll be able to create marketing campaigns that compel them to interact with your brand, as you push them further down the sales funnel until they convert.

There are various market research techniques that you can apply to better understand your customers; this involves gaining insights into customer behavior and your customer’s needs, along with their reactions to your current marketing campaigns.

Wheel secondary market research is a good starting point for learning about your customers, your best bet is to gain insights that are timely and unique to your target. You can achieve this by conducting survey research, a kind of primary research.

Surveys allow you to inquire into any topic, granting you full control over your market research study. You can create surveys for several purposes, as there are various surveys and different types of survey questions you can ask.

The following lists some of the key survey types to use to increase repeat customer spending:

The customer service survey
1. Bad service can deter customers from making any further purchases from you and this survey gauges your customer service.
The customer retention survey
1. Given that repeat purchases indicate retention, use this survey to help you determine your degree of customer retention.
The CES survey (Customer Effort Score Survey)
1. This survey measures customer effort, the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a company.
The longitudinal survey
1. You can measure the opinions your customers have on your products and services by surveying them over longer periods with this kind of survey.
The product satisfaction survey
1. Especially useful for observing attitudes and opinions of your products, this survey allows you to get direct feedback on the products themselves.
2. This helps you improve your product features and innovate new ones.

Fueling Your Business

You should always aim to encourage your target market to make repeat purchases. After all, these are the lifeblood of customer retention, yielding all of its benefits. To spur this shopping phenomenon, you’ll need to understand your customers at a deeper level.

You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so that you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.

It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers to make repeat purchases.

by lorraine

The Best UX Survey Questions to Power Your Surveys

You need to have a reliable set of UX survey questions to power your UX survey. The questions steer the direction of your entire study and campaign and should therefore be woven carefully.

This kind of survey assesses user behavior in relation to your products, services, digital experiences and other user experiences. It is meant to reveal how your consumers experience your offerings firsthand, revealing the difficulty and ease of using your products.

Achieving a good UX is critical for numerous reasons, such as the fact that top companies that lead in UX outperformed the S&P index by 35%. Good UX also has a strong ROI, as every $1 invested in UX, brings $100 in return, indicating an ROI of 9,900%.

You ought to avoid bad UX like the plague, as it even turns away the customers who love a brand. In fact, 32% of customers who love a brand will leave it after just one bad experience.

This article presents various examples of UX questions, their importance in different settings and where in the customer buying journey to use them, so that you are never at a loss of how to fill your UX survey.

The Importance of UX Survey Questions Throughout Different Touchpoints

There are various touchpoints that you should use as the basis of your UX survey questions, as the experiences your users undergo there are critical to study.

By asking questions based on different moments in the buying journey, which include pre and post-sales, you’ll paint an accurate picture of how your consumers perceive all of your UX offerings, whether they are digital or physical.

This includes understanding the difficulty and ease of interacting with your company and using your products, services and experiences. As such, you can use the insights from your UX survey questions to improve across all customer touchpoints, accelerate product innovation and ease the process of your experiences.

Additionally, by studying UX across various touchpoints, you’ll unearth your consumer preferences, see what’s driving demand in your offerings specifically, understand what’s inciting repeat purchases and much more. The key is to ask relevant and specific questions.

Where to Use and Draw Inspiration for UX Survey Questions

While it is important to look at your customer experience as a whole, there are several key moments that you should zero in on to study your UX.

These provide excellent opportunities for asking UX questions, whether they involve questioning users then and there, or following up with a UX survey that asks questions on different points in their UX.

The following lists key moments in the buying journey to pay attention to and use for UX survey questions:

The first visit(s) to your website, mobile site, app or other digital property
1. When: Pre-sales
After an asset download
1. When: Pre-sales
2. This is especially useful for B2B consumers.
Interactions with a UI element or experience
1. When: Pre or post-sales
2. This can involve quizzes, games, UI marketing collateral and more.
Subscription sign-ups
1. When: Pre (if free) or post-sales (if paid for)
2. This can be a free or paid subscription to content.
Trying a product via an in-home use test
1. When: Pre-sales
2. This involves the users trying out your products, who are usually recruited for market research purposes.
For customer development
1. When: Pre-sales
2. This is a framework used to discover whether a product satisfies the need(s) of a target market, part of the lean startup concept in order to bring a product to market more efficiently.
After a week or more of purchasing a product or digital asset.
1. When: Post-sales
2. This is especially necessary if you collected the customers’ email addresses.
During present usage of service, product or app
1. When: Post-sales
2. Example: UX with an app, a subscription, a product, a feature, etc.

Examples of UX Survey Survey Questions to Use

Now that you understand the importance of using UX survey questions across different stages in the customer buying journey, along with the specific times to use them, let’s analyze the heart of the survey: the questions.

Aside from being able to come up with reliable UX questions, it is key to be able to organize and label them. This will help you think up and sort new questions as they arise.

The following provides examples of useful UX survey questions to use in your UX survey:

Have you used the [new tool/feature]?
1. Question type: Yes or no
2. When to use: After (or during) the first visits to your website, mobile site, app or other digital property
3. Follow up? If yes, go to Question 2
How easy was it to use [new tool/feature] on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy)?
1. Question type: Likert scale
2. When to use: As a follow-up to the previous question, during present usage of product, service or app
3. Follow up? If the answer is between 3-5, follow-up with an open-ended question
Was this [asset name] helpful?
1. Question type: Yes or no
2. When to use: After downloading an asset
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question about how it was helpful.
What are your first impressions of [UI element]?
1. Question type: Multiple-choice, multiple selection and open-ended questions
2. When to use: After interacting with a UI element
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain the reasoning
Did you enjoy [UI element]?
1. Question type: Yes or no, or multiple selection ranging from “not at all” to “very much.”
2. When to use: After interacting with a UI element
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain this answer.
How easy was it for you to sign up for this subscription?
1. Question type: Likert scale
2. When to use: After signing up for a content, SaaS or physical subscription
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question on how to make it easier/better.
Did this product have any glitches or things you would change?
1. Question type: Multiple-choice of “none at all”, “1-3 things, but they aren’t major,” “1-3 things and they’re important,” etc
2. When to use: As part of an in-home use test
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question on what the problems the customer incurred or features they would like to see improved.
What is one thing you would change about [tool/feature]?
1. Question type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
2. When to use: As part of customer development/ product innovation
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain further.
What are the best / worst parts about using this [product, service, digital experience]?
1. Question type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
2. When to use: After a customer has used a product for a certain amount of time
3. Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain what they like and dislike about their UX.
Did this [UX/UI element] help you? Was it easy to use?
1. Question type: Yes or no or Multiple-choice of “not at all” to “yes, completely.”
2. When to use: Interactions with a UI element
3. Follow up? Yes, with a multiple-choice question on the easiest and most helpful aspects or those that aren’t.

Excelling in UX

Improving your UX and keeping customers satisfied in this regard goes a long way towards providing customer satisfaction and building consumer loyalty. You should therefore strive to optimize your UX whenever possible.

To do so, you’ll need a strong online survey platform, one that offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. It should also make it easy to form a customer journey survey to survey your respondents across their customer journeys.

The best-in-class platform uses random device engagement (RDE) sampling, for reaching customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for mobile devices.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to collect data on cultural awareness and virtually any topic.

by lorraine

All About Panel Surveys: 5 Panel Survey Examples and More

A survey panel also referred to as a panel survey, is a common research method used to gain insights from the same group of participants over a certain period.

This technique relies on examining research participants who join a market research study voluntarily. Aside from this, the participants are pre-recruited by researchers, to ensure they fit the respondent criteria they set for a particular research project.

This kind of research technique may appear to be a buzzword, given its prevalence in the market research space. However, whether it is useful and effective for your market research is entirely up to your research preferences and campaign needs.

Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand what a panel survey is before you can decide on whether you ought to implement it into your research strategy or not. Or, perhaps you want to use it in conjunction with another research method.

Either way, you should have a holistic view of everything this research method entails. This includes comparing it with random organic sampling and online surveys. Luckily, this guide provides all of this information and more.

This guide explores panel surveys, explaining them in full depth, along with their pros and cons, 5 examples of them and a comparative analysis of random sampling and survey panels.

Note: If you’re looking to do market research without the drawbacks of conducting panel surveys, try Pollfish. Our unique methodology guarantees authentic high-quality data, and it’s a fast and reliable way to survey targeted (yet randomized) people while they’re already engaged on their devices.

All About Panel Surveys: Table of Contents

Defining Panel Surveys
Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study
Using Panelists in Your Target Market
What to Study with a Panel Survey
The Importance of Panel Surveys
Panel Survey Examples: What Do Researchers Use Panels For?
Pros & Cons: The Advantages and Drawbacks of Panel Surveys
Organic Sampling: A Better Alternative to Panel Surveys

Defining Panel Surveys

Also called survey panels, panel surveys are a distinct form of market research that relies solely on panels to carry out the research study, as its name suggests.

Thus, it’s key to understand what the term “panel” means in the context of market research. A panel is a selection of participants who help researchers conduct market research by providing them with feedback on various studies.

The panelists do not join the study randomly, rather they are pre-recruited and pre-screened, based on the researcher’s panel needs and criteria.

A kind of research panel, a survey panel operates in the same way, except that it is strictly used within survey campaigns. As such, this panel is used for survey research alone, as opposed to other methods of panel usage.

Panels can be used in various research settings, including the following:

One-on-one interviews
Focus groups
Survey studies
All 6 main types of research, which include
1. Exploratory research
2. Correlational research
3. Causal research
4. Descriptive research
5. Experimental research
6. Explanatory research
Field research

In the context of this guide, we’re going to focus on panels used in survey research alone. Hence, they are called survey panels, or panel surveys.

One of many market research techniques, this kind of research process uses a consistent group of participants, with the researchers returning to them repeatedly, either for a single survey campaign, which can require using multiple surveys or for multiple campaigns.

Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study

It is important to know that when referred to as a panel survey, this kind of research method is known as a longitudinal study. As such, this process is paired with longitudinal surveys.

This type of research study is often associated with correlational research.

As a type of longitudinal study, panel surveys involve correlational research because they examine the relationship between variables over an extended period. The period itself can vary.

As such, this kind of research method can be conducted in the following ways, occurring throughout:

Weeks
Months
Years
Decades

Regardless of the time dedicated to performing this research, it always involves the same survey target audience. By surveying the panelists at different points in time, researchers can glean a wide variety of changes and consistencies within their research subjects, aka the panelists.

Using Panelists in Your Target Market

While the panel remains the same, the topic(s) that can be scrutinized are virtually limitless.

For market research, the topics deal with a business’s target market. As such, all members of the panel survey must also have the qualities of those in your target market.

You can perform panel survey studies by zeroing in on your target market’s various market segments and customer personas. These are more distinct and defined groups of people who fall under your customer base.

This is the ideal way to conduct this kind of research and many others, as your target market can include a wide range of subgroups, whether they differ based on the following categories:

Geographical locations
Demographics
1. This involves groupings based on gender, age, income level, ethnicity, employment type, education, etc.
Psychographics
1. This involves their attitudes, lifestyles, aspirations, values and other psychological criteria.
2. It also involves whether they engage in a particular customer behavior.
Firmographic
1. This label is particular to studying a panel of business personnel, which you may do in B2B research.
2. As such, it requires running B2B surveys.

Whichever categories you intend to group your panelists into, remember that they must fit into the qualities of your target market, as this group is the population of people most likely to purchase from your business.

What to Study with a Panel Survey

As aforementioned, you can explore a wide variety of topics in your panel survey. The following list enumerates some of these topics. Note that this is not a comprehensive list, as various other topics of concern may crop up, depending on your business, your customers and your research needs.

Here’s what this kind of research method allows you to study:

Changing attitudes, opinions and sentiments
Changes in customer buying behavior
Changes in customer lifestyles
Changes to consumer preferences
Developments in your target market needs
How your target market views your competitors
The willingness of your customers to make repeat purchases
Gaining a more in-depth glance at your market segments and customer personas
Performing time-based research, such as longitudinal studies, retrospective studies and prospective studies
Acquiring a snapshot of the present through cross-sectional studies

In this post, we’ll look at five-panel survey examples, which delve deeper into some of the topics on this list. But first, we’ll explain why this research method is important for researchers and their market research campaigns.

The Importance of Panel Surveys

Panel surveys are important for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons may hold more weight than others, depending on your research needs and preferences.

Firstly, these panels are ideal for longitudinal research, as the same group of participants agreed to partake in your study. You would make it known that they would be used in continuous studies.

Aside from facilitating longitudinal studies, panel surveys are also ideal for another time-based research campaign: retrospective studies. As such, these panels aid researchers in completing their retrospective surveys.

This kind of study is used to examine changes over a long period, except the survey itself is only administered once. That’s because retrospective studies invoke occurrences from the participants’ past, whether they are experiences, inclinations, feelings, or attitudes.

The study may ask participants to compare past phenomena with how they feel in the present. The purpose is to study historical data and compare it with the present.

Panel surveys are also necessary for prospective studies, which also can last for years and study changes and developments. However, unlike retrospective studies, they involve participants who do not have a certain outcome. Instead, prospective studies seek to study people before they develop a certain outcome, such as a disease or a new shopping habit.

Aside from enabling researchers to study changes, these panels also make it possible to conduct cross-sectional studies, which are different from the prior three kinds of research studies — longitudinal, retrospective and prospective studies. Nonetheless, cross-sectional studies are still one of the key survey research methods.

As opposed to studying survey subjects at multiple points in time, a cross-sectional study entails gathering research about a particular population at one fixed point in time. Because of this, this type of research method is often referred to as a snapshot of a studied population.

This kind of study is conducted by using cross-sectional surveys, which are designed specifically for the cross-sectional model and can be sent to your panelists. Although cross-sectional studies don’t require a panel survey, given that they focus on a single point in time instead of several to examine changes, they can still be administered via these panels.

That’s because you can recruit panels for virtually any study, whether it includes partaking in a survey, an in-person interview, field research, or a focus group. Thus, panel surveys are not limited to any form of study, making them multifunctional.

This grants plenty of convenience to researchers, especially those bogged down by various other tasks they have to uphold, instead of putting together a group of respondents.

Panel surveys are especially important, as they provide an ongoing sampling pool of participants, which researchers can turn to whenever they seek to conduct more research. This can be to jump-start a new research campaign or conduct further research for an ongoing campaign.

This constant access to a sampling pool can also assist researchers who initially thought they had enough data, only to later discover they need more information. After all, if the panelists have already opted in, there is no need to seek out participants any further.

Panel surveys are also useful due to the quality of the panelists. Although identifying and vetting panel members may take some time, the result is a quality survey panel, one that ticks off all the panelist criteria you have. With this, you can mitigate fraud and rest assured you’re studying the correct populations.

All in all, panel surveys are useful for a variety of market research campaigns and come with a good share of benefits, despite some of their shortcomings.

Panel Survey Examples: What Do Researchers Use Panels For?

Now, let’s get to the heart of these panels, by going over what they can consist of, when, where, and how to use them.

The best way to explain the uses of a panel survey is by providing several panel survey examples. In this section, we’ll review five examples of when panel surveys can be used to good effect.

This will allow you to understand how panels work, along with some of their best-case scenarios for usage.

Example #1: Tracking Changes Over Time

Given that studying changes over time is the main purpose of leveraging a survey panel, it’s key to review this use case.

As such, one of the strongest examples of a panel survey is when researchers ask the same question(s) to a group of the same participants over a long period.

For example, if you were conducting a sociological experiment to understand if (or how) age correlates with wealth, you can set up a survey that studies panelists on the following:

Income
Expenses
Assets
Changes in employment
Willingness to change jobs
Willingness to switch job fields

A survey covering this topic ought to be conducted every two years, possibly spanning a decade (or more if need be).

That way, you can track changes relative to the scope of the issue you’re researching. Given that people typically stay at a job for about two years, it is key to follow up every two years on this research subject.

However, this has changed due to the Great Resignation, which saw the largest exodus of employees quitting their jobs in recent history.

The Great Resignation is not slowing down any time soon, with large numbers of people seeking better pay and benefits, along with the rise in job openings and remote work. This makes it much easier to switch jobs.

As such, the length of time you devote to tracking changes will depend on the circumstances of your study.

Alternatively, if you run a business, you’ll need to acquire ongoing insights into the market – and into audience behavior. For example, if your gym wear company wants to track the fitness habits of people over the year, a panel can be questioned every three months. You can run surveys with the same questions about how long people exercise, where they exercise, and how they do so.

For any business endeavor, you can implement the brand tracking survey, which allows you to track any changes that deal with your brand. This involves studying how your business is perceived, how in-demand its offerings are, what concerns your target market has that your business can address and much more.

Example #2: User Experience Research

Another common example of using a panel survey is for UX and UI design research. While UI refers specifically to designing web experiences, UX is far broader.

User experience can refer to a wide range of experiences that your customers encounter when interacting with a product, digital experience, or service. As such, it covers a wide range of aspects, all of which have some impact on how users experience your business’s offerings.

You can use these aspects as key considerations for driving your UX research. The following lists the four key components of user experience, which you should use in your research:

Value: Does this experience give customers value?
1. You can ask your panel whether a certain product, service, or digital experience provides them use and how so.
2. It is key to study how your offerings can be made more valuable.
3. Also, you should inquire about the products/services that your customers don’t find useful.
Function: Does a product or product feature work?
1. Ask your panel whether there are any bugs or glitches in how a product, feature, or service works.
2. You can also study whether new needs arise in terms of your product’s functionalities.
Usability: Is it easy to use?
1. While your offerings may provide value, ask your customers whether they are easy to use, regularly.
2. Study if your offerings can be made simpler over time.
3. Also, look into whether customers seek other ways to access your offerings.
  1. For example: different devices, operating systems, web and app access
General impression: Is it pleasant to use?
1. Track changes to the overall sentiment towards your products, services and business at large.
2. Ask your customers whether your offerings delight them or upset them.
3. Ask customers to reveal anything else they’d like to see from your business to improve their UX.

When a company is building an app or a digital product, they want to gauge the customer experience as they go.

While usability testing (i.e. tracking how a person interacts with a specific feature), is often done using different methods, you can conduct qualitative research about design and experience by way of panel surveys.

The benefit of a panel survey here is that the participants remain constant – which removes a key variable.

Additionally, you can select panel participants based on their background or expertise, which will allow your pool to answer questions in a way that adds value to your product development process.

Example #3: Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction is central to keeping your business alive, whether you want to release new products or build a steady base of loyal customers. As such, you can use panels to keep a watchful eye on your customers' satisfaction with your business.

Doing so will allow you to increase your customer lifetime value, a metric that measures the total monetary value a customer will bring to a business during their relationship with the business throughout their lifetime.

If you want to gauge customer satisfaction and positive/negative sentiment over the lifetime of their interactions with your offering, use a select group of long-term customers and ask them questions periodically about your value proposition.

Use a customer satisfaction survey for this campaign, which can be framed to reveal hidden sentiments, or can be explicitly focused on asking how satisfied they are with what you offer.

For example, use the following questions/considerations to measure customer satisfaction:

On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with [a product, service, experience]?
1. A rating scale question
What would you change about [a product, service, experience, or your company] if you could?
1. Open-ended question
How easy was it for you to [do something] with our product?
1. Options include a scale of extremely easy to extremely difficult
2. This is a Likert scale question,
How would you rate your experience with our new [a product, service, experience]]?
1. This can be a Likert scale.
2. Or, it can involve multiple choices of varying answers.

In this panel survey example, the business would be able to track patterns of customer happiness over time – for example, to see whether features continue to add value months or years after the customer signs up. And you can incentivize participation with gifts, reduced subscription fees, or extra services.

Consider discussing the following topics with your panel:

What are their overall thoughts about your business?
How do they receive product updates? (Poorly, well, etc.)
What kind of value does your business provide and where does it lack in value?
What else can you do to delight your customers?

Example #4: Employee Engagement

Another crucial panel survey example deals with studying your human capital, aka, your employees. After all, it is the employees that allow your business to function daily.

As such, your business needs to track employee engagement and team morale. In essence, here, your staff are the members of the panel survey – and you might survey them every week, month, quarter, or year. In this case, you’re surveying the same people about issues that answer the following:

Are employees engaged at work, or do they have low morale?
Do employees enjoy their work?
Are they meeting their goals?
Do they understand the company's mission?
Do they understand the company roadmap and high-level goals for the coming weeks and quarters?
Are they happy with their compensation?
Where can the company improve?

If this is the type of panel survey you’re looking for, there are plenty of surveys that are specialized for human resources and employee engagement purposes.

This includes the following surveys:

The employee satisfaction survey
1. Used specifically to measure satisfaction, this survey focuses on what customers like and dislike about their jobs and the company,
The employee feedback survey
1. This is a general survey that should handle high-level topics.
The employee burnout survey
1. This survey focuses on the negative aspects of employees’ jobs and your company.
2. You can use it to avoid burnout by asking them what they’d like to see change in their employment, workflows, job processes, schedules, etc.
The employee recognition survey
1. This is conducted to measure and understand the degree of employee recognition within a business.
2. It gauges the perception of recognition that employees feel they have from their managers, peers and the company at large.
The eNPS survey
1. This functions the same way as a Net Promoter Score survey but for employees.
2. Employees are asked how likely they are to recommend their company to others, on a scale of 1-10.
The employee retention survey
1. This is used as an instrument to retain employees.
2. It delves into the topics that business owners and HR workers need to understand, to forge ideal work environments and cater to the needs of their employees,

Example #5: Customer Loyalty

It takes years to build solid consumer loyalty, which is a must, given that it is the core of the aforementioned customer lifetime value. By retaining your customers, you’ll spend less on attempting to acquire new ones, have a steady pool of revenue and maintain a good brand reputation.

Your panel survey can help you keep track of your customer loyalty. As you gain their insights, you’ll discover how you can raise their loyalty to your brand. To do so, use a market research platform that offers a brand tracker.

This tool allows you to keep track of a variety of brand issues throughout the year and beyond. It enables you to uncover whether there are any shafts in your brand perception or reactions to your marketing campaigns.

Consider tracking the following on customer loyalty:

What excites my target market about your offerings?
What kind of brand news incites the most interest?
Which segments of customers are most likely to make repeat purchases?
Which customer groups are the most loyal to your brand?
Which actions and offerings inspire loyalty to your brand?

Pros & Cons: The Advantages and Drawbacks of Panel Surveys

Now, it’s time to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using panel surveys for your market research.

One of the primary advantages of a panel survey is that the participants learn to trust the researchers, and therefore may be open to deeper and more truthful answers.

In addition, this ongoing relationship can allow researchers to dig deeper with follow-up questions.

Another advantage is that with screening having occurred at the start of the research, all following surveys are quicker to carry out than starting from scratch.

However, the disadvantages of panel surveys include:

Panel conditioning: When you’re surveying the same people repeatedly, previous surveys might influence their responses and/or behavior. For example, if they know a certain question triggers a longer process, they may choose an answer that offers the path of least resistance. Or if you’re asking about a particular activity, like eating donuts, they may eat less (or more) thereafter.

Note: Furthermore, panel surveys don’t tend to occur within a “natural” setting, and therefore the artificial environment might affect thought processes and responses to questions.
Panel fatigue: If a person feels like a pay-off for participating in a panel survey is no longer worth the effort, the quality of their response may drop. This leads to incomplete or poor-quality survey responses, and survey “straight-lining” – i.e. answering the same to every question.
Declining participation: Over time, inevitably, participants will drop out of the process – either due to panel fatigue, or other reasons. This will damage the quality and depth of your data.

And with survey panels, you run the risk of accidentally signing up “professional” panelists – especially when there are cash-based incentives on offer. Though screening should be designed to pick up these people before they enter the process, they’re adept at slipping through the net.

Organic Sampling: A Better Alternative to Panel Surveys

With increased pressure on people’s time, survey response rates have been decreasing. It’s harder than ever to guarantee consistent high-quality data, and as conventional survey companies scramble to include as many willing participants as possible, the quality reduces yet further.

At Pollfish, we don’t use conventional panels. Our unique methodology, called Random Device Engagement (RDE) uses the organic sampling approach for finding and procuring survey participants.

A kind of organic probability sampling, RDE polling relies on advertising networks and other device portals to engage potential respondents wherever they are voluntarily. This includes a variety of digital platforms and properties, such as:

Mobile sites
Apps
Website
Mobile games

All respondents gathered via the RDE method have no biases, as they are not pre-recruited and therefore face less pressure to answer things in a certain way. Due to this, they are less subject to a wide host of survey biases.

This includes the following survey biases:

Sampling bias: This bias occurs when the respondent selection process, specifically when a survey sample is not chosen at random.
1. This leads to under or overrepresentation of a certain segment of your survey target population, as only certain types of respondents are going to partake, while others aren’t.
Acquiesce bias: Also called agreement bias, this occurs when respondents gravitate towards positive or agreeable answers.
1. In this bias, respondents feel more social pressure to answer in a particular way, as their identities are known in panel surveys.

Organic sampling and Random Device Engagement obliterate these two (and other) biases. That’s because this process is completely randomized, stamping out sampling bias. Not only does it reach people randomly, but on Pollfish, this method is paired with our state-of-the-art survey platform.

Our online survey platform reaches specific populations based on demographics, psychographics and specific screening questions you can input. This ensures you’ll reach all the required target audiences to partake in your study.

Aside from reaching respondents organically and randomly, the respondents are completely anonymous. They don’t need to provide their names, contact information, or any identification to take a survey. Instead, they are simply reached and opted in.

They may also have the option of gaining survey incentives. This eliminates virtually all forms of acquiescence bias, as there is no pressure to provide certain answers over others.

Each screened participant has a unique ID, which prevents them from taking the same survey more than once, weeding out bias and survey fraud.

When working with Pollfish, you don’t need to use conventional panels – which are slow and subject to conditioning, fatigue, and declining participation. Instead, get authentic insights from our pool of over 250 million people (and growing) – who are already engaged on their devices and ready to participate.

As such, organic sampling, coupled with a potent online survey platform like Pollfish, provides a better market research option over panel surveys.

Frequently asked questions

What is a panel survey?

A panel survey is a type of survey method that involves repeated interviews of a group of people over a specific period of time.

What is a longitudinal study?

A longitudinal study is another term used to describe panel survey. It refers to any study that examines the same group of people over a period of time.

What are the benefits of panel surveys?

Panel participants often learn to trust the researcher and may reveal deeper, most honest insights. This type of survey is also a good way to track progress or evolution over time.

What is panel fatigue?

Panel fatigue occurs when the participant no longer feels that the reward for participating in the panel is worth it. If panel fatigue occurs, the participant may not give deep answers, but instead try to answer the questions as quickly as possible.

How can panel surveys influence participant behavior?

When interviewing the same people repeatedly, the answers to previous surveys may influence their behavior by causing them to reflect on activities that they previously gave little thought to. This influence is known as panel conditioning.

by lorraine

lorraine

Frequently asked questions

What is a research panel?

Why are research panels important in the market research process?

When should businesses use a research panel?

What are some pros of using a research panel?

What are some cons of using a research panel?

Frequently asked questions

What is a panel survey?

What is a longitudinal study?

What are the benefits of panel surveys?

What is panel fatigue?

How can panel surveys influence participant behavior?

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Diving Into the Competitor Survey for All Competitive Analyses

<img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-88511 size-full" src="https://resources.pollfish.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Diving-Into-the-Competitor-Survey-for-All-Competitive-Analyses-UIUXX-288_001-Hero-1.png" alt="competitor survey" width="3188" height="1798" />

Understanding the Competitor Survey

The Importance of the Competitor Survey

When to Use a Competitor Survey

How to Create a Competitor Survey

Staying Ahead of the Competition

How to Avoid Order Cancellation with Market Research

Understanding the Contexts of Order Cancellation

The Causes of Order Cancellation

How to Avoid Order Cancellation with Market Research

When to Apply Surveys to Reduce Order Cancellation

Best Practices to Use in the CX to Stamp Out Order Cancellation

Retaining All Your Business

Diving into the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey to Improve All Customer Service Sessions

Understanding the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The Importance of the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

When to Use the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

How to Create a Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

Forging the Most Satisfying Customer Service Meetings

What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research

What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research? Table of Contents

Defining the Research Panel

The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process

When to Use a Research Panel

The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel

The Pros

The Cons

Research Panel Examples

Why Online Polling Software is Better

Organic Sampling and RDE

Greater Privacy

Greater Reach to Research Participants

Upfront Incentives

Less Time Consuming

Less Room for Attrition, Boredom and Bias

The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative

What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for YOur Market Research Campaign

How else do research panels compare to an online survey platform?

The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research

Frequently asked questions

What is a research panel?

Why are research panels important in the market research process?

When should businesses use a research panel?

What are some pros of using a research panel?

What are some cons of using a research panel?

New Demographic and Targeting Criteria on Pollfish

Targeting by Gender

Targeting by Age Range

Targeting by Geolocation

Residential Postal Code

Targeting by Demographic Criteria

Targeting by Mobile Device Criteria

Building Brand Purpose with Market Research

Understanding Brand Purpose

Coming Up With a Brand Purpose

The Importance of Brand Purpose

Examples of Companies With Brand Purpose

How to Find and Build Brand Purpose with Market Research

Differentiating Your Business

What is a MaxDiff Analysis? The New Best-Worst Scaling Feature

How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research

Understanding Repeat Purchases

The Importance of Repeat Purchases

7 Effective Ways to Increase Repeat Purchases

How to Stimulate Repeat Purchases with Survey Research

Fueling Your Business

The Best UX Survey Questions to Power Your Surveys

The Importance of UX Survey Questions Throughout Different Touchpoints

Where to Use and Draw Inspiration for UX Survey Questions

Examples of UX Survey Survey Questions to Use

Excelling in UX

All About Panel Surveys: 5 Panel Survey Examples and More

All About Panel Surveys: Table of Contents

Defining Panel Surveys

Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study

Using Panelists in Your Target Market

What to Study with a Panel Survey

The Importance of Panel Surveys