Insight communities have become more important than ever because they allow brands to gather high-quality quantitative and qualitative feedback (including video feedback) from a group of pre-profiled consumers who have agreed to participate in research.
Once called MROCs (Market Research Online Communities), this approach to capturing insights reduces research costs, improves engagement, provides faster responses, and yields higher-quality data over time.
But how do you take full advantage of these benefits? The key is to implement up-to-date best practices that align with the behaviors and expectations of modern consumers. The most effective community research techniques prioritize the participant experience and help insight teams optimize their processes.
This guide shares tips and benchmarks for better insight community management so you can maximize your market research ROI.
To make the most of your research communities, it’s crucial to improve recruitment, maximize engagement, and speed up the insight-gathering process. Below are tips on achieving these goals. For a deeper dive, consider watching our informative webinar.
The quality of customer feedback you get from an insight community is often a direct reflection of your recruitment process. Overlooking this crucial step can lead to having the wrong people in your community or having disengaged participants.
To ensure your insight community recruitment process is up to scratch, consider doing the following:
Use multiple channels to recruit participants, such as email, QR codes, social sampling, and APIs. The goal is to recruit a diverse and broad group beyond “professional survey takers.”
Each channel has its own benefits. For example, APIs allow you to connect your community with your CRM and automate recruitment invitations based on triggers. On the other hand, traditional sample providers offer speed and more predictability than other recruitment sources.
For a full breakdown of different channels and their benefits, check out our insight community recruitment guide.
Asking participants to download a survey app and create a password introduces unnecessary friction in the community recruitment process.
Simplify the process. For example, rethink long surveys that ask many profiling questions. A top insight community platform allows you to use progressive profiling, so you don’t have to ask lengthy qualifying questions from the onset.
Also, consider using contact cards via mobile or SMS to share your contact details with community members as soon as they join your community. Participants can save your community’s dedicated number to their phones, ensuring that any future invitation you send is branded and instantly recognizable.
When it comes to research communities, engagement is everything. It drives higher response rates, more thoughtful responses, and better outcomes.
But what response rate should you aim for? And is it possible to exceed industry standards?
Communities that run on our conversational research platform typically see an average response rate of 40 to 60% — far above the benchmarks provided by companies like Qualtrics, which recommend aiming for 20-30%.
That said, getting high response rates requires following some modern techniques in community management.
Since people today want a more engaging and personalized experience, traditional boring surveys will no longer cut it. If your surveys and community activities feel like an interrogation, people won’t participate.
It’s better to create surveys that simulate a conversation rather than a standard questionnaire. For instance, you can use the “message cards” feature on the Rival platform to pre-program responses based on the participants’ answers, making surveys feel more like a natural dialogue.
Some of the best insight community examples also regularly use videos in their activities to humanize their approach and show the people behind the communities.
Sharebacks involve sharing research findings with participants to build trust, create a sense of community, and promote engagement. In the past, sharebacks on traditional insight communities involved creating email newsletters and other time-consuming initiatives.
Today, mobile-first, more snackable approaches to sharebacks work a lot better. For example, rather than a lengthy email, why not share a quick 30-second video from your CEO or someone from your research team to thank members for their participation?
Sharebacks also don’t have to be a separate activity in your research roadmap. Instead of a standalone email, you can take the introduction of your mobile survey to share an interesting learning from your last research, for instance.
Speedy access to insights is crucial for quicker response to market changes, enhancing competitiveness, decision-making, and overall business success. Thankfully, insight communities can help deliver this speed.
Here’s how to obtain timely data much faster:
In our industry, we know that shorter surveys are better…. But many research teams still rely heavily on surveys that are 20 minutes or longer.
So, what’s the ideal survey length? According to SurveyMonkey, surveys over 7-8 minutes long have high abandon rates, with completion rates dropping by 5 to 20%.
According our our research-on-research, communities on the Rival platform typically see an average LOI of 4 minutes and 18 seconds. Does this mean these companies are getting less data and feedback? Not at all. The low LOI comes naturally because the participant experience feels more natural and engaging.
Communities on the Rival platform typically see an average LOI of 4 minutes and 18 seconds.
In addition, companies can leverage features like Profile Variables and survey logic to avoid asking for information they already have about the participants. With this approach, you gradually collect information about a participant over time without overwhelming them with unnecessary questions about their demographics, attitudes, and behaviors that you may have already asked in previous surveys.
Mobile is the preferred mode of communication for modern consumers. It's portable, accessible, convenient, and powerful. If you want authentic feedback from your community members, then you need to engage with them through text and video—how they prefer to communicate—and on the device they love.
A huge advantage of mobile-first research is that smartphones have features that allow you to notify and remind people to participate in real-time. This can be useful for insight community use cases like mobile diaries and other in-the-moment research.
AI can significantly reduce the time and effort required to analyze qualitative and video feedback to uncover valuable insights faster, especially when compared to traditional methods like manual coding.
Where manual coding involves painstakingly categorizing and labeling data by hand, AI automates this process through advanced algorithms, allowing for faster processing and more accurate results.
For example, the Rival platform provides AI insight summaries for open-ended chat questions. It categorizes data from that question into five distinct insight themes. Each suggested insight theme includes a title, a descriptive summary with implications of this insight for brands, and a collection of verbatim responses that contribute to the context of the insight.
We’re just getting started with AI. Through our new division called Rival Labs, we’re working with companies like ŌURA to test and with innovative insight community features.
Implementing these best practices can help you make the most of insight communities, assisting with improving recruitment, enhancing engagement, and accelerating speed to insights.
While these best practices are essential for success, having the right insight community provider is crucial.
Community 2.0 is a modern insight community solution on the Rival platform that makes it easier for you to launch and manage your community faster without burdening your team.
The platform not only improves recruitment in various ways, including maximizing the effectiveness of multiple recruitment sources and making it easy to opt in, but it also enhances engagement with features that help you create conversational surveys and manage sharebacks.
If you’re curious to learn more, check out Rival’s case studies or book a time with one of our insight community experts.
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