Our Top 7 Tips for Market Research and Effective Incentives

  • author

    BHN Rewards

  • posted

    Jul 06, 2023

  • topic

    Academic Research, Market Research

Our Top 7 Tips for Market Research and Effective Incentives

Between inflation and consumers’ post-COVID mindset, solving your biggest business challenges could come down to how well you pay attention to tips for market research and leverage effective incentives.

After all, launching a new product, refining existing ones, and even determining how to expand your offering in new territories requires customer feedback and market insights.

Whether you’re counting on surveys or qualitative research to figure out your next steps, be sure you’re following these tips for market research.

Offer the Right Rewards

Your first step should be to make sure that the rewards you’re incentivizing your customers with make sense. Be sure you are:

1. Giving a value that matches the level of effort, i.e., a higher reward for more time spent.

How to Calculate Digital Reward Value
Time to complete task
x
Value of respondents’ time
x
150%
=
Compelling reward value

2. Offering digital prepaid cards and gift cards so you can reward instantly as part of the research process.

3. Letting participants choose their own reward from a few curated options — and make sure those options are redeemable in their location.

Keep Your Target Audience in Mind

Are you trying to reach mothers with children under 5? College students? Men over 50 in the market for a new car? Your market research incentives should resonate with your target audience’s interests and lifestyle.

Let’s say your business is a big sustainable brand that needs customer input for its next product. Offering an e-donation option might be the right carrot to dangle to ensure you get enough responses for actionable insights.

READ MORE: 6 Tips for Increasing Survey Response Rates Among Millennials and Gen Z

Set Clear Expectations

Nothing will sabotage your research faster than a lack of clarity.That concept is important in many of our top tips for market research, but nowhere is it more visible than the survey invitation. Make sure you follow these guidelines for your survey emails:

  • Write a strong subject line. Your goal is to get people to open the message (and not mistake you for spam).
  • Personalize your message. Use the recipient’s name to establish a rapport.
  • Explain your mission. Tell them the purpose of your research and how they’re helping.

Be sure to mention whether survey respondents’ identities will remain anonymous, and make it clear how long it takes to complete the survey (or what kind of time commitment is necessary for qualitative methods) from the get-go.

Consider Using SMS

Some tips for market research — like this one — are especially important if your target audience falls in the millennial or Gen Z demographic. Even if you’re casting a wider net, conducting your survey via text instead of email will almost certainly get you more engagement.

Gartner reports that open rates for SMS messages are as high as 98%, compared with about 20% for email. These days, you can even deliver incentives by SMS with solutions like BHN Rewards.

Leverage Tracking and Reporting

Thanking consumers or research participants for their time is just one part of the equation. Knowing whether they redeem the reward or would be someone who could participate again in the future is valuable information as well.

Embrace Integration and Automation

Did you know that you can save time and effort by integrating your research incentives with your survey platform? Or that you can set up automated reward delivery?

BHN Rewards, for example, offers integrations with SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Medallia, and more than a dozen other survey, research, and community platforms. You can also set up a trigger action and connect it to your desired reward campaign, so as soon as someone submits a survey, they receive their digital reward.

Safeguard Your Budget

In today’s economic climate, you never know when your business will need to tighten its budget, and incentives may be first on the list to cut.

The last thing you want is to have your rewards wasted on spam entries or people trying to abuse the offer. Look for a solution with a built-in approval workflow that allows you to review the recipient queue and approve or reject each one.

Once you have effective incentives, you need tips for market research solutions that help save you time! Read 3 Market Research Technology Tools You Need to Streamline Your Program.

about the author
BHN Rewards

BHN Rewards puts the power of digital rewards to work for marketers, researchers, and HR managers. Don't forget to check out all the great content in our Resources section!

BHN Rewards puts the power of digital rewards to work for marketers, researchers, and HR managers. Don't forget to check out all the great content in our Resources section!