Recruiting users for research is hard.
Especially at early-stage startups where you may not have well-oiled communication channels, an allocated budget or many users to contact.
But, there are many ways to recruit users for research depending on your available budget, time and resource.
You can try:
- Guerrilla testing: i.e. going out into the wild and asking people. It’s scary but free and quick
- Asking colleagues, friends, family: quick & free but potentially not the right users
- Recruitment tools: pay services to find you users or use an unmoderated testing platform
- Run paid ads to recruit people: I’ve never tried this, watch out for costs and targeting limitations on ads
- Ask your users in your product: pop up a little modal asking a question or linking to a survey. Often requires development resources or a drag-and-drop tool to be implemented
- Ask your users via CRM: free & easy. Requires an email list to start with.
My favourite? A mix of all of them.
The one I use most frequently? The last one. Its easy, quick, and you can often segment users before emailing to get the right people.
But I’ve been in the situation where I need to write a user research recruitment email and I get writers block. I stare at the blank draft email unsure how to frame it.
So, recently I searched through my email inbox for ‘we’d love to know your thoughts’ and ‘your feedback is important to us’ key phrases.
I found research emails from Notion, Typeform, Strava, GoDaddy, Finimize, Bloom & Wild and many more.
So, I thought: let’s do some research about research. Let’s dig into how big brands across B2B and B2C craft emails to get users to fill out their surveys and give feedback, and what you can do to get more responses to your outreach attempts.
Starting with one of the big fishes is B2B Saas: Notion.