You may have a new project that lands on your table. When you flipped through the pages, you discovered that some things are apparent:
You need to find a target audience according to clients’ set preferences and desires.
You should have submitted this yesterday.
Everything should be cheap.
The solution?
Getting online consumer panels can be helpful. With these research panels, you’re essentially getting a cost-effective solution, as many users today are spending most of their time browsing the Internet. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to convert the set questionnaires into a survey and reach many users instantly.
However, is this the step to take? Do you know its pros and cons? To answer this, it’s essential to understand what a research panel is in the first place.
About the Research Panel
This is online research where users in specific demography are brought together to answer a series of questionnaires. These questions are about specific topics, and they do this for a commensurate incentive. Further discussions are found below:
- Group of People on a Specific Demography
Demography may refer to the users closer in age, the same gender, and many more. The point is that just anyone answering the survey may not have much impact on your research. These panels need to be profiled, verified, and carefully screened if they have duplicates so they can be qualified for a specific study.
Most panelists may need to provide information like profession, income, and gender before they qualify. Most of the firm’s profile several variables, and there are online firms that send surveys specifically for that one category.
In a business-to-consumer (B2C) research, you will need several people to do many roles, such as including grocery decision-makers to study about food or those who are tourists for travel research. Learn more about the B2C set-ups in this link here.
In B2B set-ups, speaking to individuals in a particular industry is a must. These are the CEOs, managers, supervisors, and decision-makers who lead a team. Healthcare studies may also involve specific asthma patients and oncologists.
- Surveys Made about Specific Research Topics
Methodologies used in online surveys have their advantages and disadvantages. Before you conduct an online survey, it’s essential to know that there are specific limitations of the techniques you will use. You also need to determine whether they are relevant to your research.
For example, if you want people to answer online surveys, they need to be present on the Internet and be online most of the time. This way, it will be easier to conduct a study about the users. This is prevalent in other countries like South Korea, where more than 80% of the population are Internet users. This may not be a good idea in Myanmar, though, where only a handful or 1.2% of the population is found online.
- Commensurate Incentive
Motivating the panelists may need an incentive of some kind. Many companies may award cash, points, gifts, or products if the respondents successfully answered a survey at a given time. The amount can be affected by many factors like the project’s scope, length of time, types, and many more.
Pros
- Ease of Incentivization and Sampling
The members of the panels may need to answer a question or two to pre-qualify them. It’s possible to pre-profile them so you’ll reach the right audience almost immediately, and these will be in the hundreds. It’s essential to provide incentives afterward for more extensive samplings so people will appreciate this more. Know that fieldwork often takes months, and this is a task that can reduce the months into hours.
- Minimal Costs
You might have to print the questionnaires before, which is essentially a waste of paper. In other circumstances, you might have to invite a number of people to your company for meetings and interviews, which can be costly. Get more info about the survey methodology in this url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_methodology.
For an online panel, the other costs are off the list. Most of the programs online can be revised without any need for paper. Reminders and emails are sent to respondents as well to increase their awareness.
- Automatic Collection
After the completion of the survey, the answers are usually found in a given database. You don’t have to input everything manually, and this means fewer errors for you. When you get your quote, you’ll be notified by the system immediately.
Cons
- Everything Is Limited to the Internet
Those who have access to the Internet are the ones who have the chance to answer the questions. This may not reach the rural areas and other countries that don’t have access to the Internet. However, this can work if your study focuses more on major cities and markets in areas where internet users are mostly found.
