How to optimize the cost of recruiting respondents.
When recruiting, as we described in our previous article: you definitely must put yourself in the shoes of the respondent, in this case, you can conduct the research with the highest quality, get important information about the product and reveal insights. The first thing we recommend to our clients is not to double the supply of respondents for research, as this will significantly increase the budget. We propose to track the turnout of respondents to the survey and if someone does not reach it, invite those who did not arrive the next day or initially allocate a spare day, thereby we will get two-fold savings since there will be no need to pay for the recruitment of spare respondents and compensation for reserve participants. The second possible recommendation is to initially make the schedule convenient, primarily for the respondents. For example, holding a focus group or interview in the evening, after 6:30 pm, is convenient for almost all respondents. We recommend that you do not conduct a research on weekends or holidays, since the turnout for such surveys is always very small and it is difficult to predict exactly how many people will reach the survey, despite the control calls of respondents few hours before the start. Practice shows that on Saturday or Sunday, most people have plans, an unplanned meeting with friends, a trip to the country, and so on. In this regard, weekdays are always more predictable, the route is usually stable: home, work, home. Thirdly, as an option, you can conduct a survey via Skype. Here, perhaps, it will be possible to save about 25-30 percent. It is also desirable to adjust the time to the respondents, it can be lunchtime or a break, time after work or when the respondent can leave work and take a survey, especially if he can do this using a smartphone. We want to say that in this case there is no need to be at the computer for the research, since during working hours the management will most likely be dissatisfied with what the employee is doing in the workplace.
When looking for experts, it is also important to understand that they are rather “hard to reach”. Adjusting them is a labor-intensive process and the time of such people is expensive. Often, top managers claim that their time is "worth the money." We described in detail in our article why our mentality is strikingly different from the European when recruiting and why our respondents cannot be motivated to participate, reporting that by their participation they contribute to the development of the product. But we advise you to assess the situation realistically and remote research cannot reduce the cost of a regular survey with an office attendance several times, unless there are two different target audiences.