Table of Contents
Recruiting participants
How do you reach participants? How do participants reach your survey? Find out more here.
You can reach participants passively, for example by publishing the link on your website, or actively, for example by email. First ask whether you can reach the relevant participant group yourself or whether you need help.
Option 1: You have participant data and know how to reach people: employees through internal communication channels, customers through your website, newsletter or social media page.
Option 2: If you want to reach potential customers or survey specific segments, panel providers can usually help. They maintain segmented panels through which people can be approached using your criteria, for example gender, income, role or decision-making authority. Our survey tool provides the necessary interfaces.
- Advantage: you reach participants with the attributes or behaviours you need.
- Disadvantage: it is a paid option, although you pay only for people who actually participate.
Option 3: You do not have participant data, but know where to reach your customers. Passive recruitment can work well: place a link on your website or provide an iPad in a shop or waiting room. You can also approach people personally, with staff asking customers to respond on an iPad, for example at a trade fair or outside a shopping centre.
Conclusion
The best route ultimately depends on the objective, target group and reachability. You can also collect responses passively through an iPad in a doctor’s surgery, or actively through interviewers surveying people at a trade fair.
Our recommendation: invite participants by email
For active recruitment, and especially email invitations, our customers generally achieve the highest response rate. You can prepare all participants before the survey, invite them later, and send targeted reminders during the survey only to those who have not yet completed it. This avoids unnecessary spam. LamaPoll also lets you address participants personally and send different emails depending on an attribute such as language or department.
Tip on reminders: Send a short reminder after a few days and keep it to exactly that. Too much information or overly insistent wording creates pressure, and future emails may end up in the spam folder. The first reminder usually has the greatest effect; a third or fourth reminder tends to do more harm than good.
If you would like to invite participants by email, LamaPoll offers different options:
1. Send the emails yourself
- An open survey is the simplest option: take the survey link and anyone you send it to can participate.
- You can exclude unauthorised people by protecting the survey with one or more passwords. The advantage of several passwords is that you can filter results by them later. If you provide different participant segments with different passwords, for example first-time buyers with password A and repeat buyers with password B, you can analyse results accordingly.
- The most secure option is a closed survey: each participant receives an individual link. This ensures that only authorised participants can take part and that no one can participate more than once. If you want to send keys or individual links yourself, mail merge is the simplest way.
2. Send the emails through LamaPoll
If you use LamaPoll’s address book, you can easily run closed surveys with individual links. You can also contact participants in anonymous surveys in a targeted way, for example only those who have not completed the survey. You do not learn who receives the email; anonymity is retained. Emails sent through LamaPoll usually come from noreply@lamapoll.de, but use your name and subject line. Replies are routed directly to your account.
Especially for customer surveys, make sure you consider the legal aspects, including GDPR compliance. Are you allowed to contact the customers? Have they freely given their consent? Are the invitation email and survey properly set up, including imprint, privacy policy and opt-out link?
How to import participants into LamaPoll’s address book:
How to send emails and invite participants through LamaPoll:
Invite participants with LamaPoll
LamaPoll makes inviting participants straightforward: upload names and addresses to the address book, create your own email template and send it. You can choose whether each participant should receive an individual link that is valid only once. You can also upload participant attributes such as gender, department or language. This lets you send targeted invitations, so English-speaking participants receive the English invitation, for example. You can later filter results by the attributes in the address book, for example to view only results from participants with the attribute “manager”. You can also use attributes to guide the participant journey: participants with the attribute “first-time buyer” may not see certain questions or pages, or may skip specific pages. Surveys can still be conducted 100% anonymously when using the address book.
