5 Tips for Successful Live-Intercept Recruiting
How to recruit website visitors for UX research
Sometimes, the best way to find participants for qualitative research is by recruiting them directly from folks who visit your site using a pop-up, bar, or another intercept tool. At Marketade we’ve joined the chorus of those who are partial to Ethnio, which creates small pop-ups that are easy to add to a website. Here are some tips for helping to determine if intercept recruiting is right for your project, and how to use it successfully.
1. Make sure the traffic is on your side.
Intercept testing has a really low “catch” rate; so it works best for large or frequently visited websites that have hundreds (or thousands) of page hits a day.
2. Make sure intercept testing is a good fit.
The most important question to ask is, “What is the likelihood that a person who visits this site will be a great fit for this study?” If it’s less than 90%, intercept testing might not be the right choice. Personally, I find that intercept testing is a great fit for my projects where (a) any visitor to the site is likely to be in our target market for testing, and (b) those folks might be difficult to find through a larger or more generalized recruiting service.
3. Try to get the intercept form down to one or two questions.
For a recent project, I deployed Ethnio with just two questions: name and phone number. Everything else I needed to know about the recruits, I could ask during a short phone screen. If you feel like you need a lot more information about a person before you want to invest the time in phone-screening them, see Tip #2 — intercept testing might not be the best fit for your project.
In addition to being efficient and having a better completion rate, keeping forms as short as possible is a basic UX best practice!
4. If someone fills out the form, reach out ASAP.
The further away you get from the form completion date, the less likely that person is to remember filling it out, and the more likely your reach-out is to be interpreted as spam or irrelevant. We try to call within a couple of days to get the best impact. In addition, people might have visited your site in the midst of a larger browsing session— after a couple of days, the finer details about their visit might be blurry or hard to recall.
5. Don’t make compensation a first-line focus of the intercept.
We’ve found that form completion rate is higher when the compensatory aspect of the research isn’t foregrounded. Presumably, it makes the pop-up sound like spam. We’ve had better success when we come from a “help us improve our website” perspective. We still mention the compensation, but it’s in the body text rather than the headline.
