Sampling plans for populating research panels
Panels represent opinions waiting to be shared. The question of the day is whom do we want to invite to the party? If your goal for 2015 is to create, manage and leverage a survey panel then careful thought needs to be given to deciding whose opinions are worth surveying. If you are involved in sales management or human resources then employees are your primary target (either sales professionals or company employees). If you are in marketing then your interest is in current and prospective customers.
Sampling theory provides a few options to consider when deciding whom to invite to the panel. If you have base-level statistics on your employee, customer and prospect groups then these percentages can be incorporated into your sampling plan. For example, if your company is divided into regions then ultimately the percentage of employee panelists should mirror the distribution of employees across the company’s geographic regions. Other base variables can be considered as well including job roles, tenure, staff function (manager or staff) and so forth.
Customer panels should be based on the market segments you are targeting. For example in B2B marketing research key variables include: industry vertical; job role; staff function; and tenure as a customer. I might also consider other firmographic variables including company size (employees), number of IT employees, number of facilities, annual revenue, etc. These percentages, in theory, should mirror those of your customer base. However, there is room for variation, especially if have a keen interest in a particular market segment. You can choose to disproportionately structure your panel to include a larger percentage of panelists from market segments of interest.
Creating a prospect panel often requires a bit of black ops. Creating a blind panel, where the panelists are not aware of the sponsor, allows the researcher to conduct brand awareness and tracking studies without the fear of the brand’s reputation unduly swaying opinion. When creating such a panel it is advisable to include prospects from sources outside your internal sales prospecting databases. This minimizes the potential for bias, especially if your marketing team actively promotes to your house files.
Panels are living entities and panelist retention must be taken into consideration, more on that in another post. However, suffice it to say you will need to leverage your profile survey to see who is involved in your panel and how it matches up to your base-level statistics for these groups. Use this comparison procedure to guide your future panel acquisition activities.