Email Tracking

We offer integrated email as part of your insight community. This means:

  • Email invitations,
  • 1-click reminder emails,
  • Moderator emails,
  • 1-1 member emails,
  • Weekly activity update emails,
  • Incentive emails,
  • Automated “New set of questions added” or “New activity launched” emails.

We have now also added email tracking and management!

  • On each member’s profile tab you can now see a list of key emails sent to them. See the text of the email, if they received it and if they opened it.
  • For each activity see a list of all emails sent (invitations, reminders, 1-off) and view the email text and tracking metrics (delivered, bounced, opened).
  • You can even search by email address to see a filtered list of all emails sent to that user for a given activity.

This means you can get a better handle on community engagement and response rates. In addition, you can now see the incentive amounts offered as well as other email content in the historical email metrics to easily follow-up with respondents.

We hope you like this new set of enhanced features – it is already making our lives much easier!

Heat Mapping is Here!

We now offer integrated heat mapping – and yes, it works on mobile! You can now add heat map questions to your surveys, focus groups and live chats. Heat mapping is actually 3 new question types:

  1. Heat map: Create an infinite number of categories and have users drop customizable (icon shape, faces, colors) markers on the stimuli. Set min and max for markers as well.
  2. Timed heat map: Measure the time it takes for users to drop each marker (e.g., “where would you click to do X?”).
  3. Sticky note: Just like our regular heat map, but users can ad context to each marker and explain why they placed it as they did.

You can easily test:

  • Creative (advertisements, layouts, etc.)
  • Web mock-ups (not only can you get design feedback, you can even get some quick UX with time-to-task measurement – show Webpage A and ask “where would you click to edit your cart”, then show Webpage B and ask the same (or course randomize the order with our easy page groups and randomization). Compare how long it took to ????nd the “edit cart” button on A vs. B and you have some amazingly fast and powerful UX insights.
  • Text/content (just show an image of the text you want people to reaction to and let them mark what they like, what is confusing and so forth – just like the big white boards for in-person focus groups).
  • Any other images.

Reporting is awesome:

  • View the heat map or raw markers.
  • Change the color scheme for your reporting.
  • Add and remove categories from the heat map.
  • See interactive counts for each category.
  • Click on any comment and the heat map will show you where on the image that comment was made.
  • Create areas-of-interest (AOI) on the fly. Just select the area of the image you want to explore (and shrink or expand the square) and then drag it sound the image to explore and the charting and all associated comments will automatically update to match your AOI.
  • One click to export the heat map with your defined color scheme, AOI and more for easy integration in your reports.

International Capabilities Are Here!

We Speak Your Language – All of Them!

I am pleased to announce we now support real-time translations across our platform with Google Translate in addition to native platform translations (all shall be explained below). With new translation features and our expanded teams and capabilities, we can now serve all of your global insight needs. So, how does this work?

Native Platform Language Support

  • We have built the entire platform to contain native language support (meaning fully human translated and proofed languages can be added to your community for the languages you want to offer community members).
  • You can now set a “native” language setting within your community. This will load the platform (things like the “Next” button, login pages, error messaging, and so forth) in your native language of choice.
  • Community members may also set their own default platform language.

Google Translate

  • Beyond the native platform language, we have integrated Google Translate across all community member pages – including discussions, live chat, surveys, ideation sessions and more. This supports 100+ languages.
  • This means you can now easily allow cross-language participation, interact with non-native speakers and economically scale your community globally.

Insight Communities – To Incentivize or Not To Incentivize

We get a lot of questions about whether or not to provide incentives when it comes to online insight communities. And the answer is? Drumroll please…well, it depends.

Our typical advice is we don’t like “pay-to-play” – it provides the wrong incentive structure and invites the wrong people and activities. However, research should not be about trying to suck as much data from respondents as quickly and cheaply as possible either – you get what you pay for! But, “pay” can come in many forms. It can be cold hard cash, interacting with fellow community members with similar interests, seeing your feedback and ideas come to life and simply knowing that your feedback is being heard.

Our recommendation is to build a community based around altruistic reasons to join and participate – “Hey, help us make the products and services you personally use better – really we are listening!” And, then from there be fair with people’s time – pay them as you would anyone else providing a valuable service when asking for significant chunks of time.

Below are a few factors to consider when determining if it makes sense to incorporate monetary incentives in your online research activity:

  • Activity length/time commitment – When you ask a participant to complete a longer activity, an incentive will help sustain their participation and ensure reliable and better-quality responses. If a participant can provide feedback very quickly or easily, an incentive may not be necessary.
  • Your audience – Is this is a case where participants are already intrinsically motivated to join the conversation? For example, your customers or employees may be more intrinsically motivated to respond to a survey than just your average Joe. The same is true for communities where members have a very strong affiliation with the brand/product/subject matter and will participate out of love for a product, brand or having the ability to interact and learn from their peers.
  • Activity type – What are participants going to do? If you are asking complex questions or questions that require a lot of thought, an incentive can help boost participation and it’s only fair to compensate someone for significant time or effort.
  • The alternatives – Monetized incentives shouldn’t be the only weapon in your arsenal. In a perfect world, you’d want engagement to be the main driver of participation. Consider using intangibles to add value to your community (e.g., Look what we’ve done with your feedback, etc.). It is important that participants are being listened to and feel they are making a difference. Be sure to let the community know they are heard– rewards are just the cherry on top of the insight pie!

How much? How much? How much? As with a traditional focus group, the incentive amount will vary with the type of participant and how much you are asking them to do. We have found that incentives (ranging from $5 to $25) given at regular intervals to each member who qualifies and successfully completes an activity. This normally amounts to about $1/minute.

We hope you have found this helpful – let us know your thoughts and ways you have found to be successful when it comes to incentivizing an insight community (both monetary and non). No incentive will be provided for your feedback to this blog post.

User Archiving

We’ve recently added a feature that we call User Archiving. In a nutshell, this feature allows you to deactivate a subset of users OR your entire community – it’s your choice. This is a great feature for project-based activities! Don’t have the time or budget for a long term community? No problem, we’ll set you up with a month to month license and archive your users in between projects. Regardless, you still get to use our entire suite of research tools for rapid iteration and most importantly, keep all your data in one place.

By putting your short-er term projects on an integrated platform like ours, you get much better ROI (lower recruiting costs, better brand experience, a more engaged audience, longitudinal data); and many more opportunities to gather insights. Sometimes you need a long-term community, and sometimes it’s just nice to collaborate with a specific set of users intensively for a shorter period of time…we understand.

Not sure where to start? Just give us a call. We have all the expertise you need to get started including: how to set user expectations, how to maximize your limited time with them and how to collect and leverage your insights over time and across archived groups to accomplish your long term insights goals.

At icanmakeitbetter, we believe in the power of insights and the wisdom of YOUR customers. Sometimes that wisdom comes in short, action-packed bursts of activity. Sometimes in longer term, collaborative ideation-iteration-validation cycles. Either way, we want to be there at the moment of business impact and we feel that being locked into a long term contract shouldn’t deter you from learning from your customers.

Live Chat – Get Instant Aha!

Quick update: Live Chat now has integrated quantitative questions!

  1. Easily ask survey questions as part of your Live Chat session
  2. See the data roll in with real-time charting and respondent level data
  3. Easily probe and chat around the question, even share results with respondents so they can discuss as a group
  4. Include video, images and documents as part of any question

Announcing our newest, perhaps most awesome release – live chat! Capture immediate feedback with live chat. We provide a seamless respondent and client experience across any device and platform for easy concept testing, creative testing, ideation and more.

  1. Finally, an easy client back-room! No more sending out client invites that get lost or having the CEO search his spam folder. ???? Clients simply “knock” and you see them show up for approval. One click and they are in.
  2. Respondents can participate on their phone, tablet or computer. No software to download. No hassles for you.
  3. Include images and video – uploaded by respondent or moderator.
  4. Create pre-loaded questions and add questions on the fly.
  5. See real-time respondent status – who is online, who else needs to be invited and more.
  6. Moderate and manage from your phone, tablet or computer.
  7. Just like everything else on our platform – get a beautiful reporting interface, seamless respondent invitation and management, and integrated data across all your projects.

Below you will see the respondent and moderator experience across a computer, tablet and phone. The other image shows you the mobile experience for the moderator – easy! Any questions at all, just let us know!