What is the most effective way to drive participation in market research studies?

I think it’s helpful to have a customer advisory board - this is a select group of 5-10 customers who you meet with every 3-6 months to talk about big strategy topics like - company strategy, product roadmap and problems you can solve for them. This high-touch tactic generally requires a lot of prep / work but the relationships you build will pay off as these are likely the customers that will participate in future betas and other studies.

A few other tactics outside of leveraging your CAB:

• Incentives can help - they don’t necessarily have to be a cash incentive or gift card. In the past, I’ve offered, free access to a new product for a limited time, discounts on our product or higher-tier product, or free add-on implementation services.
• Networking oppys- When I’ve run focus groups, a lot of participants will join because they’re curious what their peers in other companies are doing. For example, when we launched D&I ratings at Glassdoor, I hosted a small focus group roundtable for CHROs and Heads of D&I at various companies to get feedback on how we should approach a new D&I rating. But we also reserved the last 30 minutes of the focus group for them to talk to each other to learn what new D&I strategies they were running. They loved learning from each other and commiserating about the challenges they were facing. I believe two of the companies started partnering together on their approaches to salary transparency after this and were grateful to Glassdoor for facilitating the connection!
• Invites from an exec/CEO- When I have recruited hard-to-reach Chief Executives, we had our CEO/CMO/CTO be the one to send out invites to ask them to join - these messages always got a higher response rate
• Sign ups in product - In your product, include a self-serve option for customers to sign up to “participate in future research” or be part of the Customer Advisory Board. Make it easy for them to sign up for these things!

There are a lot of great ways to drive participation, some more scalable (but generally lower response rates) and some more high-touch. Here are a few ways you can think about driving participation:

• Customer Advisory Board (CAB): This is one of the easiest ways, and channel that generally has the highest participation. If you have a CAB, then you should be meeting every ~3-5 months and can use an upcoming meeting to ask for participation or share a specific message to them to ask for their feedback. 
• In-Product Research: We did this at HubSpot and each quarter a set of customers was randomly selected and recieved an in-app message to participate in a survey. The group selected was different each quarter to ensure customers didn't get survey fatigue and it worked incredibly well. 
• Executive Outreach: A message from one of your core executives is likely to get a higher response rate. While it may not be possible every time you do market research, for a key study consider getting buy-in from an executive and working with them for outreach. 
• CSM Outreach: Aside from just executive outreach, CSMs talk with customers really frequently and personal outreach from CSMs to participate in market research can help generate higher open and participation rates.
• Incentives: This is one of the most common and does tend to generate a slightly higher response rate, but can be costly. There are other incentives beyond gift cards -- such as access to new features for a limited time.
• Paid participation: This is separate from incentives because it involves generally reaching people beyond your customer base. If you have a market research tool (like Qualtrics, QuestionPro, SurveyMonkey, etc.) there is functionality built-in to pay for responses. This can get costly for a very targeted audience, but if any of the other avenues aren't working -- or you just want to get feedback from people outside your customer base it's a great option to consider.