Survey is an important tool in market research for understanding the challenges and opportunities of your potential customers, as well as for benchmarking your performance against other companies in similar industries. Survey is also a useful tool to acquire new customers (leads generation).
We recently helped two companies successfully collect survey responses. The first company is an academic publisher and they wanted us to collect responses from researchers in academia; the second company is a reagent/instrument biotech company and they wanted responses from industry researchers.
Case 1. Survey to academic researchers
In May, 2021, our client, an academic publisher, wanted to understand the awareness of open access publishing among researchers. They offered the responders a chance to win one of the 5 gift cards of value $100. We used our Stork platform (https://www.storkapp.me) for this project. Stork is a new publication alert tool and over 200K researchers are using it. We embed the survey notice in the alert emails, and collected 90 responses in two days. They are pleased with the results.
Case 2. Survey to industry researchers
Our second client is a biotech company producing reagents and instruments. They wanted to understand the market in the cell therapy space. Before turning to us, they already collected enough responses from academic researchers. However, they are having difficulty in collecting responses from industry researchers.
First, we used LinkedIn to identify potential contacts. Our clients and us refined the keywords and other criteria (e.g. job title and companies to exclude) a few times to make sure the contacts are relevant.
Second, we compiled the contacts and also identified their email addresses.
Lastly, we sent out the survey invitation letter, drafted by our client, to the contacts. Our client offered a $50 Amazon gift card for each responses.
In about 2 weeks, we collected ~70 responses from industry researchers.
What we learned from the two cases:
- Give incentives (e.g. gift cards). In general, you need to give more incentives to industry researchers than academic researchers.
- Encourage responders to forward the survey to colleagues
- Ask qualifier questions in the beginning to make sure you collect relevant responses.
- Ask for contact information (e.g. email) in their survey
A list of online survey platforms:
If you plan to survey to either academic or industry researchers and need responses, please feel free to let us know and we can help.