Automating Recruitment for User-Research Panels

Recruitment Actions

Once you have your list of triggers, define one or more recruitment actions for each trigger, such as the following:

• routing someone to a recruitment landing page
• displaying interrupts such as pop-up messages on your Web site or in your application
• mentioning opportunities to participate in your user panel in a chat window
• inviting people to participate by sending automated email messages
• mentioning user-panel participation during in-person interactions

Pair Triggers with Actions

You need to pair the most appropriate actions with each trigger. You can pair multiple actions with a trigger, then use whatever is the most appropriate action in a particular situation. Table 1 provides some examples of trigger/action pairs.

Table 1—Pairs of triggers and actions

Trigger	Action
Lead sends a pricing request	Add a panel-recruitment call-to-action to an auto-reply email message.
	Mention panel recruitment during a pricing-inquiry call.
Lead abandons shopping cart or basket	Add a recruitment call-to-action to an automated email reminder about an abandoned shopping cart or basket.
	Offer a discount coupon in exchange for participating in a user-research panel.
Prospect receives a sales call	Direct a lead to a recruitment landing page at the end of a sales call.
	Highlight exclusive product-development, user-panel participation as a unique selling proposition (USP).
Prospect reaches or nears the end of a trial period	Mention panel-recruitment during a trial-evaluation call.
Customer or client receives an onboarding call	Mention panel-recruitment during an onboarding call.
Customer or client attends a training Webinar	Direct Webinar attendees to a panel-recruitment landing page.
Customer or client sends an email complaint	Add a panel-recruitment link to an email reply that addresses a customer complaint.
Customer or client visits or downloads a FAQ	Display an automated recruitment pop-up message when a customer is viewing certain sections of your FAQ.
	Send an automated email message asking whether the FAQ has answered all the customer’s questions. If not, prompt the customer to join the user panel.
Customer or client cancels subscription during a customer-service chat	Ask the customer about the reasons for canceling, and direct the customer to your feedback-panel signup page.

Design the Actions

As you can see, the way you define recruitment actions depends on several factors, including the nature of your business, the type of product on offer, your communications channels with customers, and your sales and marketing approaches.

If you have a unique product and your market consists of an involved crowd of specialists, it might be enough to just let them know about your open user panel. They’ll come willingly, happy to share their insights with like-minded people. (Ableton’s community of musicians and producers comes to mind.) However, if you’re conducting research on commoditized, generic markets, you’ll need to provide some extra incentives such as product discounts, coupons, exclusive opportunities, or cash. But such incentives can introduce bias into the recruiting process, so an incentive is not a silver-bullet solution for your recruiting needs.

Focus on good copywriting for your recruitment messaging. Hire professional copywriters or salespeople to write the copy. Test different variations of your messages. Panel recruiting is another type of sales process. Your potential participants need to understand the benefits of participating and be sufficiently impressed by your message to join your panel.

Examples of Triggers and Actions

All companies running UX research must at least have a recruitment landing page on which they offer an open invitation to potential research participants. Condens has put together a great list of examples of such pages, from companies that range from giants such as IBM to agile startups such as Sketch. This is your bread-and-butter invitation—a static page to which you can always point prospects and customers during your conversations with them. Make sure you write great sales copy for this page!

Interrupts such as pop-up messages are great for recruiting because you can tailor their message to precise conditions. If someone looks at your knowledge base for more than five minutes, ask her to join your customer-research panel. If you discover superusers who are spending hundreds of hours using a single feature, they must have something to say about it. Tools such as Popupsmart, HubSpot, Hotjar Surveys, or OptinMonster help you set up interrupts without coding. You could also code your own, as my company Airtime did for our Collaborative UX Research Playbook.

The benefits of automated email messages are twofold. Email lists are the best-converting sales channels. (Don’t forget, this is a sales process!) Plus, you can set up auto-emails to go out whenever certain conditions are met—just as you can for interrupts. Email-automation software such as Mailchimp and customer-relationship management (CRM) systems such as Salesforce can handle the whole process for you.

Don’t forget to train the members of your customer support, customer success, and sales teams to promote your user panel. Personal interactions through chat, email messages, phone conversations, or in-person meetings can be the most powerful channels—if you use them properly.

Conclusion

In this column, I’ve covered the basic steps you need to take in automating your recruitment processes for user panels, including the logic of pairing interaction triggers with the right actions, as well as setting up applications to make this as automatic as possible.

You might think this approach is relevant only for established companies because they can use their client base for recruitment, but I beg to differ. Any startup can enlist leads and prospects to participate in user panels during its go-to-market phase and, thus, involve them in product development. If you do this right, panel recruitment can become a great benefit instead of a chore. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

Of course, you do need sufficient traffic to fill the recruitment pipeline you’ve just built. You must also have a plan for the next steps to take once people sign up. I’ll discuss dealing with these two distinct issues in upcoming columns. Driving traffic to your Web site relates more closely to sales. Planning user panels requires a mix of customer-relationship management and screening surveys. In a nutshell, though, by using a combination of your sales pipeline and your existing clients and by creating strong messaging, you should enable you to recruit enough participants for your user panel.