One thing is for sure, if your national brand wants to embark on an in-person intercept survey project at many of your locations, it will likely take a lot of time and will prove costly. To staff interviewers for in-person intercepts and travel to specific retail locations to collect feedback, logistics becomes a challenge.
For example, our intercept survey firm conducted a college football project for a sports marketing company a few years back — this involved staffing interviewers with tablets at some of the most popular college football stadiums in the country. Our staff interviewed fans at Syracuse University, Florida State University, Ohio State University, Georgia University, and Kansas University.
Each site employed a team of 5 to 10 interviewers to travel around the grounds and inquire about awareness of advertising and the impact on perceptions of the brand. The project was a blast, and our interviewers got to visit some major landmarks in the NCAA college football world.
However, this project was spaced out over 5 separate weekends to interview fans at each of the Friday night or Saturday college football games. As you can imagine, when staffing a team of 10 interviewers, providing tablets, accounting for travel time and expenses, etc. - the budget adds up quickly.
For this reason, many organizations are turning to GPS exit surveys instead of in-person intercept interviews.
Many organizations are turning to GPS exit surveys instead of in-person intercept interviews for a multitude of reasons. Our GPS exit survey firm outlines the key advantages of this methodology.
GPS Exit Surveys vs. Traditional Research Methods
Many of our national clients and brands are now jumping at the opportunity to transition in-person intercept surveys over to GPS exit surveys. These surveys go by many names, including geo-fencing surveys, mobile surveys, radius surveys, and location-based surveys.
This is particularly true for national brands who have a retail presence and they want to acquire feedback about a recent shopping experience or in-store visit.
Prior to GPS exit surveys, the national brand had 2 options to consider:
Option 1: In-person intercepts:
With this approach, the brand would be charged with staffing a wide variety of stores across the U.S., so the sample is not biased to shoppers or visitors in a specific region. The project would involve budgeting for likely hundreds (if not thousands) of interviewers to stand outside of the store and intercept respondents as they leave to ask questions.
The retail client would also be required to contact the hundreds (or thousands) of stores and make managers aware of the staff on-site. Couple this with actually managing the staff to ensure they are on-site, on-time, and not having issues, and you can easily see this approach is simply not feasible.
Option 2: Online surveys:
With this approach, you would work with a national panel company to email respondents and inquire about a recent store visit. Depending on the number of retail locations and the criteria to qualify (i.e., visiting the store in the past 24 hours), you can easily be looking at a qualification or incidence rate of less than 1% nationally.
Depending on how you word the questions, you would also have to be concerned with sample quality to ensure respondents had actually visited the store in the past 24 hours, rather than twisting the truth to qualify for a reward.
In this situation, your national brand is likely to make some sacrifices right? Can we adjust the screening criteria to people who have shopped in the past week or 30 days to increase incidence rate and lower cost? You can, but then you begin to impact sample quality.
GPS exit surveys allow your national brand to reach the right audience cost-effectively and also ensures your sample is nationally representative.
No need to pick out just 3 or 4 store locations and make assumptions the behaviors at those stores through the in-person intercept feedback is representative of the country as a whole.
GPS Exit Survey Benefits
At a glance, the benefits of this approach with our GPS exit survey company are easy to understand:
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Ability to pinpoint respondents: We know based on their location and mobile ID if they were indeed in an area geofenced by our software. This translates to truthful responses and high-quality feedback. It’s the difference between someone saying they shopped at Target today vs. actually knowing based on the location ID, they were indeed at Target that day. It’s trustworthy.
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Ability to scale: As we showed in our example above, a nationally representative sample with in-person intercepts is not feasible. With GPS exit surveys, we can set up quotas to ensure the feedback we obtain from recent visitors is nationally representative of all of your retail locations and stores.
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Quicker timelines: Rather than taking weeks to set up fieldwork and the logistics surrounding in-person intercept surveys, GPS exit surveys can move much faster. Once the survey is designed, programmed, and ready to roll, our team works with our panel partner to send push notifications through a mobile app inviting them to a survey if they enter/exit our geo-fence. For studies that are broad enough in scale, fieldwork can be completed in as little as 24 hours.
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Fresh, in-the-moment responses: Not only can our surveys target respondents as they exit a GPS geo-fence but we can actually target entries as well to intercept them in-store or on-site. If you want to collect feedback live, while the shopping experience is taking place, there may be no better methodology to get you the desired feedback on a scale like this.
How Does the GPS Exit Survey Process Work?
Here is a simplified bullet point list of steps from A to Z working with our GPS exit survey firm.
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Contact us (duh, we can’t help until you reach out to us, lucky for you: we make that easy for you here)
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Quote: we take your locations, length of the survey, and audience to create an estimate.
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Proposal: if it matches budget expectations, we build out a step-by-step proposal with our process.
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Kickoff: we jump on a call with your team to confirm objectives and talk about survey questions.
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Geofencing: we create geo-fences around your retail or store locations.
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Survey draft: our GPS exit survey company drafts up a full questionnaire to review.
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Programming: we take the survey and program it to prep for the GPS exit surveys.
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Launch: those who enter/exit the geo-fence receive a push notification on their phone.
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Feedback: we share a live data link with your team to watch the data roll in.
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Analysis and reporting: our team can prepares a topline summary or full report with recommendations.
Our GPS exit survey company in Syracuse can help. We work with some of the largest national brands and retailers to assist them with geofencing surveys in place of intercepts. Thinking about utilizing a radius based survey or location-based survey with our market research company? Contact us below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040