Marketing research incentives
Editor’s note: Ian Floyd is the senior content marketing manager at Tremendous. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared under the title "New survey: Market research goes global, yet incentive strategies lag."
Market researchers target hard-to-reach and global audiences. Their incentive strategies and budgets need to evolve to keep up.
The industry had long clung to old school payment methods – paper checks, plastic gift cards and envelopes of cash. COVID-19 compelled many organizations to seek a digital solution but many still offer limited redemption methods and use time-consuming manual tracking processes. In fact, only 42% of those we surveyed report using an incentive platform.
Tremendous surveyed three dozen market research leaders, project managers and recruiters at Quirk’s NYC 2022. (Naturally, we incentivized their participation with our product. We paid $20 for approximately 10 minutes of survey time.)
Here’s how some of the industry's top in-house research teams (such as PepsiCo, Anthem and H-E-B) and market research firms (including Forsta, IvyExec and OvationMR) approach incentives.
Incentives are increasing in the market research industry
A vast majority of respondents (70%) raised their incentive budgets in the last two years. On average, payments increased roughly 18%.
Many cited inflation, COVID-19 and the need to pay more to recruit quality participants. The U.S. saw 7% inflation in 2021 and 8.5% this year (at the time of publication).
Others said they’re increasing incentives in line with “more internal demand for research” – particularly global research in areas where “audiences are harder to reach.”
Two-thirds of respondents conduct international research. Among them, half conduct research in more than 10 countries. As we note below, international research has been a particular pain point for researchers.
Of the 66% of respondents conducting international research, 74% intend to increase their incentive budget in 2023.
Offering charity donations and cash incentives
When paying, market researchers (72%) prefer to send digital gift cards. Demand for digital cards is expected to stay strong but researchers are increasingly interested in offering other options as well.
Only about 20% of respondents offer cash transfer payout options (like PayPal or Venmo). Half say they intend to offer these incentive options in the next two years.
The same pattern holds true for charitable donations. Only 17% offer it today, but 36% want to add the option. Charitable donations are particularly effective at recruiting participants who aren’t enticed by $100, think C-suite executives or people in industries that can’t accept incentives (like government employees). Without this type of incentive, these populations are hard to reach.
Meanwhile, researchers signal little or decreasing interest in physical incentives (cash, checks and physical cards).
Adjusting incentive approaches
Many of the participants piecemeal an incentive system together themselves. For example, 44% of respondents rely on manually sending Amazon gift cards. Among other challenges, this approach creates huge headaches for cross-border incentives.
It’s no surprise that manual process and scaling issues are a top pain point related to market research incentives. As budgets increase and research becomes increasingly more complex and global, solving these issues will become paramount. For reference, a little more than half of respondents manage annual budgets under $50k, while one in 10 manage budgets over $500k. When it comes to selecting an incentive provider, respondents show strong interest in something that just works.
User-friendly design is overwhelmingly the most important factor. But security, digital incentives, tracking and cost were important to roughly half of those surveyed.
As research grows more complex and global, researchers must shift from a do-it-yourself approach to incentive strategies that scale.