Before you begin researching and collecting data, you should make sure you have enough participants within your community to be able to provide relevant and detailed feedback.
The minimum number of participants you should try to recruit initially is 30.
To achieve an interesting and self-sustaining discussion when examining multiple segments, 300 to 500 participants should be involved.
In my experience the first is that approximately 25% of all community members do not respond or engage with the research. Therefore over-recruitment ensures that enough participants are involved in the discussion for the project to be successful.
The second factor that affects the scope of your recruitment is the type of research. Virtual communities mostly revolve around collaborative and qualitative feedback, so the quality and length of responses is likely to be higher.
The number of participants in online communities should reflect the analytical capabilities of you and your team.
If you need quantitative and large-scale feedback, you may want to consider a panel as this can include a much larger group of respondents.
In addition to deciding how many respondents you want to collect nigeria phone number from, the other recruitment decision you need to make is where you are going to get these respondents. This depends on the focus and purpose of your study.
Maybe you want to target a specific subset of your customers or compare different customer segments. Maybe you want to discover new segments or find out why a group of consumers isn't interested in your product. All of these factors will influence where and how you recruit.
I share with you 4 ways to recruit people for an online panel .
Triggering
The basic rule in an online market research community is that the fewer trigger-based emails are necessary, the better the research.
Good communities will have an element that will allow conversations to develop naturally, drawing participants back to them of their own volition.
Researchers often find that email is the most effective method for engaging, but there are several considerations to keep in mind when designing email invitations or nudges to generate engagement within an online community .
The first and most important is timing. Email nudges should coincide with moments when feedback is most needed (e.g. after a press release, new product launch, etc.).
However, it is important to ensure that these emails are frequent enough to maintain a consistent level of engagement throughout the study.
To ensure that both goals are met, I would recommend planning your email encouragement in advance.
Create a timeline of all the important events you want to gather information about. This will become the building blocks that will lead to engagement.