Conducting traditional market research methodologies such as in-person focus groups and telephone calls can be costly for most businesses. Hence, many shift to an online panel, which makes it easier and more rapid to collect vast amounts of information in a short time. However, it is necessary to check the data quality and ensure that the necessary precautions have been made. It has been recorded that firms lose 15 million dollars on average annually due to poor data, emphasizing the necessity of acquiring high-quality data. In this blog, we will tackle the integral factors in choosing the right online research panel firm. We will tackle these topics:
• What is it?
• Warning signs to watch out for when choosing one
• Online panel selection checklist
• Difference between a panel provider and survey platform
What is an online panel provider?
In short, online survey panel providers are firms or agencies with a specialization in recruitment and management of respondents who want to take part in surveys. They can provide a multitude of services including:
• Survey Design
• Participant Recruitment
• Data collection
• Data Analysis
Additionally, these firms can offer access to a specific target audience that could be hard to reach.
Warning Signs to watch out for when choosing an online panel vendor
When picking the right panel provider, you need to make sure that they are relevant and would actually aid your organization in gaining valuable insights. To do so, you need to pinpoint and identify firms that would actually help you do so, and those who won’t.
These are common red flags to look out for in your online panel selection process.
1. Charging per completion
When trying to find a trusted online panel provider, it is beneficial to ditch those who charge per survey completion. To elaborate, being charged this way could increase market research costs and make you more strict on quotas, excluding participants who might be part of your loyal customers, leading to a decline in customer satisfaction and customer retention.
2. Requiring community members to use a survey app
When conducting a survey, you want to reduce friction points whenever you can to make the process smooth, fast, and efficient. To explain, apps hinder your processes, as people do not want yet another app to share their thoughts. Apps have little to no flexibility when it comes to engaging your customers, and there are other methods that have much lower friction points, like SMS and sharing links.
3. Requiring launch of a portal or a member hub
In past years, it was one of the best practices of panel providers to create portals where the respondents could log in and see the survey results, check the updates, and network with other respondents. These hubs are costly, financially and time-wise. They can affect your processes, as no one wants to recall lots of passwords, nor navigate and try to get familiar with the hub, and most hubs are not mobile-friendly. Even for researchers, having no portal means more time and money to direct your efforts to forging efficient research studies that would move the needle.
Online panel selection checklist
When searching for an panel vendor, you only have one main goal: get the right decision in a blink of an eye. Here are what businesses should look for in their process of online research panel selection:
1. Data Quality
Trustworthy and credible insights are essential for calculating and predicting consumer behavior. To ensure this, it’s important to ask your panel provider about how they verify the identity of participants during the in-survey process. The quality of respondents is critical to assure accurate and reliable survey results. Hence, it is vital to look for a provider that follows a strict screening process for its participants to ensure that you get high-quality responses.
2. Access to Quality Respondents Easily
When businesses are releasing a new product or improving an existing one, they rely on their panel provider to get the project into the field as soon as possible. This is necessary to quickly return relevant insights that are critical to their business decisions. In your process of online research panel selection, you need to look for providers that deploy different methodologies of recruitment like social media or e-mails. This is helpful due to access to quality respondents easily and also getting a representative sample of the population, which ultimately guarantees more accurate results.
3. Cost
When choosing a panel provider, it’s important to consider your budget. You likely want a provider that offers a reasonable price for the completions requested while still ensuring quality data from reputable online survey sites.
4. Access & Protection Of Survey Data
Your panel provider should give you access to a survey’s qualifying questions and aggregate data. This allows you to conduct your own analysis, improve your study for future iterations, and provides proof that your survey was carried out correctly. Moreover, it is essential to find a provider that protects data robustly. This ensures regulatory compliance and alignment with data protection policies and ensures that there will not be leakage of confidential or sensitive information.
5. Proof of Success & Experience
Finding a trusted panel vendor is paramount to ensure successful results. Thus, finding a reputable provider is not a luxury, but a necessity. This can be done by identifying client success stories and portfolios, even anonymized. In addition, showing tangible proofs in numbers or metrics that are essential for business.
Difference between an online panel provider and survey platform
An online respondent provider and a survey platform are two terms that are used interchangeably. Nonetheless, they are two distinct terms that have different meanings. To reiterate briefly, an online panel vendor manages already recruited and screened individuals who agreed to take part in the surveys. On the contrary, a survey platform is a software tool that is designed to distribute, create, and analyze surveys. It can actually be used with a panel, but it is more dedicated to reaching the general public who are not mainly part of a panel. Here is a table comparing the core differences between the two:
Panel Provider vs Survey Platform
ANALYTICS • INSIGHTS • IMPACT
| Online Panel Provider | Survey Platform |
|---|---|
| Primary Function Offers access to a curated, pre-recruited group of survey respondents. | Primary Function Provides tools to design, distribute, and evaluate survey responses. |
| Respondent Pool Maintains a vetted database of panelists who have opted in to participate in research studies. | Respondent Pool Enables outreach to diverse or targeted audiences, either through built-in capabilities or integration with third-party panels. |
| Purpose To provide businesses with a reliable source of feedback from a qualified group of people. | Purpose To create and distribute a wide variety of surveys, from simple polls to complex market research. |
| Example Use A company uses an online panel provider to access a B2B panel of business decision-makers for a survey. | Example Use A company uses a survey platform to create a customer satisfaction survey and send it to their customer list via email. |
All in all, we discussed what is meant by an online vendor, warning signs and red flags to look for when finding a trusted online panel vendor, an online research panel selection checklist, and the distinction between an online panel vendor and a survey platform. What we reached is that it is essential to pick a relevant, reputable, and trusted online panel vendor, and make sure that the process of your online research panel selection is thorough and done with caution to minimize time-waste and maximize efficiency.