We are lucky to have such a diverse marketplace for online community platform software, which comes in use for the plethora of different use cases we are faced with in the world of research and insight. However, knowing which platform is right for your research needs can be overwhelming.
Fear not, InsightHub is an agile research platform that empowers global brands to streamline, scale and supercharge customer insight. InsightHub is a springboard to host everything from surveys to long-term communities, to dedicated panels and short-term projects all within the same easy-to-use space. Offering an in-built database with mapping capabilities, qualitative opportunities, integrated video capture and much more. InsightHub supports 60+ languages, and a range of sample sources, is available on all devices and can have unlimited concurrent projects.
In my experience in the market research industry over the past seven years, I have seen a hugely diverse range of research use cases that clients have used and continue to use InsightHub. From short one-week question board projects to strong, vibrant communities that build up over the years, each case is unique, but all have one thing in common — it has to be as quick and easy as possible to set up, run and analyse the output. That’s where FlexMR’s InsightHub comes in. InsightHub is packed full of intuitive tools and features, and with it comes teams of individuals at FlexMR who are equipped with the knowledge and skills to make running research as simple as possible. From our experience of using InsightHub daily, we have collected a few of the most useful ‘hacks’ along the way. Some of these may seem obvious, but are often overlooked.
1. Communicating with Participants
When running online research, an important consideration is both the content and the number of associated communications that are sent surrounding that research. Having a log of previously sent invitation and reminder emails is key to planning ahead, for example, to plan out the next emails, to get inspiration for wording/tone from previous emails etc. Not only this but from an engagement perspective, to be able to view sent and open rates for emails is an extremely useful tool. InsightHub allows you to do this in one place.
In InsightHub, go to back room > projects > select a project (such as ‘main community’), then go to the ‘messages’ tab, you will see the full log of these emails here. The information provided includes:
- View the sent, delivered and open rates for your InsightHub emails including Invitation and reminder emails, but also community newsletters.
- View the task that was associated with an email using the ‘information’ icon, to make it easy to see the emails that have already been sent out for a task and plan ahead for future emails.
It’s really that simple. You may be used to sending just task invites and reminders, but have you heard of newsletters?
Newsletters allow you to create a more graphic, visual email communication to send to your community members. The main benefits of newsletters include the ability to include imagery, buttons, sections, and more.
2. Managing Data Fields
When running online research, you need to have data fields at the forefront of your mind when it comes to moderation and analysis. Did you know, there is an easier way to manage your InsightHub database than running manual data appends? The data mapping feature within InsightHub database allows the mapping of data from InsightHub tasks (such as surveys) back to InsightHub database, to InsightHub user fields. Once you have done this, you can easily refresh/update that field with the click of a button at any time.
It’s as easy as this: go to the InsightHub database area, ‘Add and edit user fields’ and click ‘map data’. Then, type in a name for your data map. Next, choose which task you want to use for the data mapping, and choose the corresponding ‘user field’ from the database. It’s then just a case of matching up the answer options from the task (e.g. survey question answer options) to your database user field.
3. Increasing Reach with Surveys
SurveyMR 2.0 has different options for running external surveys. These options will help you reach a wider pool of respondents and therefore, boost your response rates.
- Embedded surveys — embed a survey into a webpage (customers can complete the survey on any external website where the survey is embedded)
- Pop-up surveys — embed a survey so that pops up in a window on the website (similar to newsletter subscription or account creation pop-ups on retail websites)
- Conversational surveys — a feedback-style survey whereby the respondent answers questions in a conversational, chat-style format, with the use of AI. Similar to WhatsApp or SMS surveys, with algorithms able to identify opportunities for follow-up questions and ask for more detail where necessary.
Don’t forget, surveys have a generic open link option too. It’s great to promote surveys within your InsightHub, but you can also generate an ‘open link’ for a survey, via the surveys ‘ ‘sample’ tab, by clicking on ‘Get an open link’. You can then use this open link to reach a wider audience, and share this open link on channels such as social media, CRM emails, off the back of customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) and more.
4. User Statistics
Curious to know how many users voted in quick polls during a certain time period? Or maybe how many users logged in during the last 3 months? Or maybe some statistics for user points? Often during online research, having engagement levels at the click of a button is essential; for example, to identify who qualifies to be entered into a monthly prize draw, or if you need to report on engagement per month or quarter, these stats will help you for sure.
You can view some quick top-level statistics via the Backroom> panel and community settings > user statistics.
Here you can both view and download community figures. You can choose from an array of different downloads on either a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.
5. Customisation Options
There are some customisation options for design that you may not already know about, so I’m here to tell you.
We understand that representing your brand through the online platform is important for building trust and brand recognition. Often, the online community or panel for a brand will be an extension of that brand. This benefits users in many ways, such as it builds a feeling of security for users, but also consistency with the brand. The users will feel they can openly share their thoughts in a safe place, particularly in sensitive research where getting branding exactly spot on can really help. In order to help in this, we have the ability to customise elements such as fonts, widgets, email branding, sign-up pages and more, which all help build trust.
6. An Easy Way to Search and Analyse Content
Are you interested in searching across InsightHub to find key themes, topics of conversation and more?
There is an easier way to do this than scanning through all of your forums.
First of all, you can head to the back room > Community tools > search content to search across community tools such as forums and blogs, to see if a specific word, phrase or topic has arisen during the research. You can also see each individual case where that was mentioned, along with some quick charts that are downloadable.
InsightHub Case Studies
Whether you already have an InsightHub platform and are looking for some ideas to expand the research boundaries, or you are considering InsightHub for your research needs, hopefully, this blog will have helped you out. Our clients are using InsightHub in many different ways and generating truly interesting and impactful insights every day, to discover more about their experiences, take a look at our case studies in the resource centre now.
This article was originally published on the FlexMR blog and can be accessed here.