If you haven’t ever participated in any of the market research methods, you are losing out on making pocket money and sharing your voice with the brands. But if you’ve heard about them or have participated, you might not know some background information that could benefit you immensely.

This blog post is a detailed layout on primary market research methods, legit online surveys, market research vs. online surveys, how to find them, your data security, and how to make the most of your efforts and time as a market research participant.

101 on Market Research and Online Surveys for Participants Like You

1.    How to Find Legit Surveys and Other Market Research Opportunities

The field of primary market research isn’t untouched by scams, owing to the remuneration involved for the participants. Some studies might only want your opinions but won’t pay (which isn’t wrong if you’re in the mood for charity). But scammers would steal your identity. Or they might distribute your personal data to telemarketers.

Here are a few guidelines to avoid getting trapped in such sinister motives and to participate only in legitimate ones.

Payments and Fees

Frauds might lure you with “win a $50 cheque”, “pay your college debts by filling out surveys”, or “make these market research methods your friend and never worry about money”. If the compensation looks too good to be true, never submit to them. No brand would make you rich just by boasting of flashy market research or online surveys and helping you pay off your education loan or mortgage.

Professional brands and legit panel companies only pay you as reward points, cash via PayPal, freebies, payment in single digits, or gift vouchers.

Also, if a panel company asks for an enrollment fee or charges you for registration, you’re in the danger zone. Such panel companies would never revert after you pay the joining fee.

Reviews and Achievements

If a panel team approaches you and the offer looks legitimate, check its reviews online and on social media. What if it remunerates in pennies and takes ages to pay you? It might not even be worth your time and effort.

Checking the user testimonials on social channels and review websites would help you decide if you want to pursue the survey. If people are talking about their negative experiences in the comments section, abandon the survey immediately.

Data Security

Even if a company is legit, the survey could just be a pretense to get user data.

Some unethical brands might sell your data to third parties for marketing purposes. Who knows if they misuse your personal data to thieve your identity for cyber frauds or hack your socials or bank accounts?

Never share sensitive personal information like your home address, social security number, or bank or card details. We will discuss more on this topic in a separate section further.

Terms and Conditions

The survey panel or the researching company should have a dedicated page for terms and conditions. They must mention how they will process your data and where you can raise your concerns. The brands and panels should follow all the regional, national, and global policies during each stage of their market research methods.

2.    How to Create Your Survey Profile

Once you’ve figured out the right panel, the next is to make your user profile. Here is how:

Create Email Address

Don’t use your personal, work, or school email address for surveys. You should create a separate one to compartmentalize the surveys and important information. This also helps you aggregate and search your survey data, earnings, results, and issues in one place.

Make a PayPal Account

Most legit surveys pay in the form of coupons or points. But those who directly pay money often use PayPal accounts (or similar authorized ones) to transfer your earnings.

Register with the Panel

Make your profile with the panel company. It gives you access to all their surveys. You can also track the survey history and your earnings. The more accurate your profile is, the better your chances are of getting surveys that interest and concern you.

Read this detailed list of 7 simple steps to start with a survey platform for more information.

3.    How to Answer the Survey Questions for Best Benefits

Correct Prerequisites

Before participating in any other market research methods, you need to fill out a prerequisite form. This usually includes your demographic data, hobbies, and interests. Sharing the right details fetches you the surveys of your concerns and interests.

Genuine Answers

Never answer the survey questions in jiffy and choose random options in multiple-choice questions just to reach the end. Don’t ignore the importance of minor differences between the multiple options.

If you choose “others” from all the available options, there’s often a text box to write the reason for this choice. Do mention your answer in the text box for the panel’s clarity and analysis.

Be Attentive

Sometimes, the survey asks a question twice or instructs to select a predefined option. Or they might ask to select a particular one from a set of multiple images. These tricks are to check your attention. Making mistakes in such questions can disqualify you from surveys.

Open-Ended Questions

These are the questions where you don’t choose a predefined option but write subjective answers, explaining your thoughts and opinions. Such are the why and how questions. Don’t make typos, add smiles, or use slags and vernacular words. These are difficult to interpret during text analysis.

Never skip such questions, even if they’re optional, as they give good insights to the surveying company. Always share your truthful opinions because wrong data skews the survey results.

Read a detailed post on providing meaningful, open-ended feedback.

Timely Response

Most surveys come with a last date, and if you don’t abide by that, you lose the chance to make some bucks. Also, they come with a quota of responses. If the panel team receives sufficient responses before the closure window, they might take the survey down.

So, don’t wait for the last hour and rush with half-cooked responses.

Complete Before You Submit

It’s a good idea to check the survey form and complete the questions that you’ve missed to answer. This will not only help the panel with proper feedback but also portray you as a responsible respondent.

Learn to answer paid surveys the right way to avoid rejections.

4.    What Happens After You Submit Your Opinions

Once you and hundreds of other respondents submit the survey form or finish that personal or group discussion, a lot goes behind the scenes before the brand takes action.

Data Consolidation and Cleaning

A lot of survey responses come with missing or illegible data. This happens more often with open-ended replies. So, cleansing of data is necessary before processing and reporting. The data handling team of the panel company substitutes missing and misleading data entries with default values.

Once this step is finished, the data coming from various sources and all the respondents is consolidated in a central database. This repository makes it easy for the reporting team to generate insights.

At this level, the data never reflects the respondents’ identities, and the data is usually at the aggregated level.

Reporting And Analysis

At this stage, the research team and executives generate the reports for data analysis.

Analysts create reports at various dimensions to study the users’ thoughts and opinions, their buying habits, and intentions. Dimensions here mean demographics. For instance, insights are generated across locations, genders, professions, interests, etc.

Decisions and Actions

With your feedback on various aspects of a brand or product (pricing, packaging, design, features, impression, utility, etc.), the product teams and brands make decisions on improvement.

For instance, if the product is marked as pricey, the brand tries to bring down the market rate with design changes or other measures. Or they decide to market the product as niche and affluent.

Similarly, the brands even test the ads with a sample of users to work on their marketing.

Feedback Loop

Brands also connect with users like you to share feedback on updates and actions taken based on their opinions. This strengthens the customer engagement and users’ trust in the brand. A feedback loop also shows the progress and efforts made by the brand.

Data Archival

Another important point after a survey is how the panel maintains your sensitive and demographical data. This might seem like a realm beyond your worry. In fact, this is one area you should always crosscheck before signing up for any panel membership.

A legit panel company archives the user data from time to time into a safe repository. A very limited few get access to these archival records with limited authority. So, your historical data is in safe hands. The companies also pledge never to sell your records to a third party.

Read more about how your survey inputs evolve into decision-making insights.

5. Why Your Opinions Matter to the Brands

Your precise opinions are important for you to enjoy better products and services. However, your feedback helps brands in so many more ways. Here are some:

To Improve Products, Brands, Services

Your opinions matter to a brand to improve its brand image, amend faulty products, fix shortcomings, and serve you better. User feedback also helps enhance customer care services and the look and feel of a brand’s website.

To Fill Market Gaps

Comments from users help brands analyze what is missing from the market. This creates an opportunity for the brands to innovate and create new products or introduce features that users might need.

For instance, if users from one region express interest in a product that’s not available in that area, a brand can explore that territory and maybe ace the market as a pioneer.

To Price Right

After surveys from users like you, an organization can figure out the issue with their product’s pricing. What if that’s the main reason for low sales? In such cases, the company can work out the design, raw materials, spare parts, and marketing strategies to make the price competitive.

To Market Well

With ad testing and several user preference analyses using market research, a brand finds out what would attract its target audience through marketing projects.

Learn how voicing out your opinions can drive real change.

6. How to Increase Your Survey Rewards

Now that you know how to find legit surveys and write better feedback, here is a list of tricks you can adopt to reap the most out of your efforts and time.

Avoid Survey Fatigue

If you’re filling out too many surveys too often, you might get bored by the activity. After some time, the monotony of sameness would start clinging to your emotions and discourage you from filling out more surveys. For that, avoid similar kinds of surveys (the next point covers the how part).

Give yourself a break from participating in market research.

Participate in Diverse Surveys

The market research industry is so diverse, and with the kind of surveys brands need, your options are several. Other than online surveys, you can participate in focus groups, CATI surveys, personal interviews, and diary studies, to name a few.

Focus groups pay better than most as they’re usually a group discussion and need expert advice.

Most of the surveys mentioned here are different from one another and are interesting in their own ways.

Here is a list of surveys and their details you can participate in.

Use Survey Routers

Survey routers are your assistants that save you a lot of time while filling out surveys. These are the websites that collect varied surveys from numerous panels and provide you with a list of all active surveys. You don’t need to hunt on your own over the internet.

Just browse through the available survey and research options and select the ones that interest you.

7. Your Data Security and Identity Protection in Market Research

Consent

Before you submit a survey, make sure the form seeks your consent. Not seeking consent and assuming that you and other users are aware of all the terms and conditions is ignorance at its worst in market research. This is the location where the company should also inform you of all the policies governing data collection, processing, and sharing.

Global Policies

Most regional, national, and international governing bodies restrict sharing of user data, which can jeopardize customers’ security and privacy. Despite that, the panel company should mention all such terms and conditions explicitly on its website or an accessible digital location. The company must also share the link for the same while seeking consent.

Read about 7 consumer rights in primary market research before you scroll down.

Opt-Out

Know that while you provide consent for any market research program, you’re bound to participate in any other study. Every research should explicitly seek your consent. Also, you can opt out of a panel anytime without any obligation. If you’re participating in a longer study that spans over days, you can back out before it ends.

Anonymous

While demographics help panels deduce quantitative insights, some surveys allow you to submit your opinions anonymously. If interested, you should check with the panel company for its provision.

Transparency

All market research programs must be transparent. No panel can hide how they’re going to use your personal data and opinions. It must seek your consent, explain the context of the survey, and inform you about its policies related to your privacy, security, and ethics.

Know complete facts and aspects regarding your data security and privacy here and here.

8. Facts You Should Care About as a Market Research Respondent

Your Profile

Never create duplicate profiles to gain more surveys for petty compensation. Don’t fill in the wrong data to personify someone else just because you want to participate in surveys that are niched and need expert opinions.

Diversity

Try to participate in varied surveys. The more you diversify your participation with disparate primary market research, the more you get to collect diverse data. And diversity means opinions from a wider range of audiences, leading to unexplored stats.

Opinions Vs. Incentives

Yes, your efforts and time should be rewarded. However, opinions are way more important than financial benefits in the long run. With your feedback, products improve, and brands make changes conducive to your experience.

Survey Results

Surveys are extremely important to brands, governments, institutes, society, and anyone conducting them. So are the results and actions for you. They help you receive better facilities, products, and services. That’s why you should chase the brands for the actions being taken.

Most brands share the survey results with the public unless it is sensitive. Keep an eye on the brand’s or panel’s social media handles and your emails to get the latest updates and actions taken after the surveys.

If you think survey results shouldn’t be shared with the audience, clear this myth. To learn more, here is a detailed rundown of myths related to surveys and the facts behind them.

9. Why Enrol with Opinionest as a Panel Member

Opinionest, the panel of Track Opinion, offers several market research methods through which you can participate for free. Right from online surveys to CATI to focus groups and many others, your options aren’t limited.

At Opinionest, we work with a diverse audience and various clients from numerous industries. Our rewards are cool, and our data security policies are on par with global laws. Moreover, you can register in a few clicks without any fee.

Before You Participate in Surveys

While making a few extra bucks might sound appealing and fun, do remember that participating in surveys brings in a responsibility. You must share opinions only if you use a product or know about it. One wrong or jarring answer skews the data and fails the purpose of researching organizations and panel companies.

Also, know that your honest feedback returns multiple benefits to you and other users in the long game of product improvement. So, fulfill this responsibility with honesty and diligence.