Dancing Uphill

Often the first phase in recruiting test participants for either on- or offline research is send a mailing with a screening questionnaire to potential participants. The goal of the mailing is to get as many responses as possible. In other words: you want a high conversion rate.

Recently halfway through mailing a limited set of potential participants, the desired response was far below target. Focusing on the e-mail’s subject, body text, call to action and the incentive we were able to increase the conversion rate of the mailing by a whopping 330%. Here is what we changed.

Incentive

The first round of potential participants were told that if they completed the survey, they could win one of 20 coupons worth 40 Euros. The last half were promised 12 Euros for completing the survey. We needed 50 valid responses for our survey. The first incentive would cost 20 times 40, equals 800 Euros, while the latter would only cost us 50 times 12, equals 600 Euros. A guaranteed reward seems to be more motivating than the chance of a reward.

You’re probably wondering why the heck we promised 12 Euros rather than a nice round figure. We tried to achieve the opposite effect of psychological pricing. No idea if that works, but it’s fun, right?

Call to action and body text

In the original mailing the link to the survey read “You can start the survey right away”. The link was changed to “Take the survey now”. The latter one is obviously formulated more directly, urging action form the part of the reader.
The body text was stripped of wewe-in and rewritten to be more focused on the reader. For example they were told they were “selected”, as to create that special feeling.

Subject

The original subject read: “Help improve client’s name website”. This copy strongly addresses intrinsic motivation: the reward lies only in the joy of helping others. The problem is most people aren’t really concerned about helping others, especially some company.
We changed the subject to: “Take an online survey from your home (and earn 12 Euros)”. Here we tried to have the copy extrinsically motivate potential participants by specifying the reward (the benefit).  The reward was emphasized by putting it between round brackets. By mentioning participants could take the survey from their home we lowered the effort (the costs).

A couple of quick improvements leading to a conversion increase of 330%. Pretty impressive and inspiring, right? Think it’s time to review your standard recruitment e-mail? Got any tips on persuading potential participants?