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Lesson
6

Keeping Your Panel Engaged

5 mins to complete

Whether your panel comprises 100 people or 10,000 people, it’s no use if none of those people respond to your study invites.

Once you’ve done the work of building a high-quality participant panel with Research Hub, it’s important to maintain the health of your panel over time by keeping your participants engaged. 

In this lesson of Building a Participant Panel, you’ll learn strategies for keeping your panel engaged over time, including:

  • Bulk emails
  • Opt-in forms
  • Branding
  • Invite rules
  • Fair incentives

📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Specialist, Kaylynn, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!

1. Use bulk emails to send nurture campaigns and study follow-ups. 

Bulk emails allow you to keep in touch with your Hub panel outside of studies to help participants see the value of their feedback and keep them engaged for future studies. Ultimately, keeping in touch with participants outside of the context of studies will improve your response rates when the time for recruiting rolls around again. 

Common use cases for bulk emails include:

  • Welcome emails for new participants
  • Following up with participants from a specific study to highlight how their feedback was used
  • Periodic research newsletters

To send bulk emails:

  1. Navigate to your Hub panel database and select which participants you would like to contact. 
  2. Click on the “Bulk actions” dropdown and select “Compose email.” 
  3. Confirm the list of participants selected, choose a Sender profile, and compose your email.
  4. Click “send bulk email” to send to each user individually.

Note that only Admin users (org admins and team admins) have the ability to send these Hub emails, to ensure that teams don’t mistakenly message or over-communicate with their panel. Emails will be sent to each participant individually, and will include the option to unsubscribe at any time. Currently, unsubscribing is general and will remove the user from the email communications as well as from Hub overall.

2. Re-send opt-in forms once a year to ask for updated data. 

Once in your panel, participants can update their data at any time by completing an opt-in form. When they re-submit, form responses will update any existing participant data in Hub. 

A popular use case for teams is to email out their form annually so they can capture any new information about participants. This is a great way to ensure your Hub data reflects any changes that participants may have undergone over the past year, and it’s also an opportunity to capture new data, confirm their continued interest in research, and re-sign your consent notice if it’s been updated.

Try using the bulk emails feature to send out links to your opt-in form with a request for updated data. 

3. If you haven’t already, set up customized branding and invite rules. 

In our previous Hub onboarding courses, we covered how to set up custom branding, templates, and invite rules. If for some reason you haven’t set these up yet for your team, it’s smart to configure them as soon as possible. 

Why? Consistent branding and professionalism—such as adding a logo to all participant-facing pages, using a trustworthy “from” domain (e.g. research@yourcompany.com), and setting up email invite templates—builds trust with participants and maintains good rapport with participants long-term. 

Adding a logo and sender profile requires minimal effort, but we find that Hub teams who take advantage of our branding features receive the highest application rates compared to teams who don’t. 

Invite rules and limits are also an important preventative measure for maintaining an engaged panel. Setting these up helps you avoid panel fatigue caused by excessive invites to the same group of people. 

4. Make sure you’re offering fair incentives. 

While we don’t require you to incentivize your own panel, we do recommend offering a fair incentive whenever possible. Guidelines for incentive ranges vary by study type, but they’re a good way to make sure the participants in your panel feel valued and motivated to continue applying to studies. 

Tools like the UX Research Incentive Calculator can give your team personalized, data-backed incentive recommendations for every study. Be sure to choose automated incentives distribution for every project to avoid delays and frustration. 

5. For bonus points: Learn from your marketing team. 

Engaging prospects and customers is the specialty of a good marketing team. When you’re exploring tactics for maintaining panel engagement, this is a great opportunity to connect with your marketing team for tips and guidance. 

Your marketing team may already have existing tools, campaigns, and tactics that they know work for your audience. For example, they may have tips on:

  • Sharing educational content and helpful resources
  • Creating a rewards system for high-value participants
  • Personalizing and segmenting email lists
  • Using effective branding, design, and email copy

Set up a meeting with your marketing leader and apply any learnings to help engage your research panel.

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