How to invite participants to studies via email—with best practices & sample templates to help you boost response rates and recruit faster.
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Our team at User Interviews sends over 2,000,000 recruiting emails per month, while our customers send over 150,000 of their own recruiting emails per month. After recruiting millions of research participants via email, we’ve learned a thing or two about writing study invite emails that people will actually respond to.
To help you boost response rates and fill your study with high-quality participants faster, we’ve rounded up:
Scroll to the bottom of this page for the roundup of templates and examples—or go straight to the deck now.
A user research study invitation email is a recruiting letter sent with the goal of soliciting applications to participate in a study. Typically, it provides an overview of the study focus, methods, time, location, and incentives, as well as a link to an initial screener survey.
Often, your invite email will be the first impression participants have of you, your UX research team, and/or your company. Writing consistent, professional, high-quality emails is key to building and maintaining participant trust.
🍾 Struggling to successfully recruit participants for UX research? Learn How to Break Open the Recruiting Bottleneck.
You don’t have to sweat over the keyboard in an effort to write the perfect email. There are concrete email invitation best practices that you can follow to ensure a high response rate and, ultimately, a successful study.
Learn how to write a compelling recruiting email with the following tips:
Successful research recruitment does not involve ‘blast’ emails.
Before you even sit down to write, you need to know who you’re writing to—and whose inboxes to avoid.
At this point in the user research process, you should have already created a user research plan. Your user research plan delineates, among other things, the specifics of your participant pool or target user personas: who you need to talk to and their defining characteristics, as well as who should not be contacted.
For example, you may want to talk to current customers (aka ‘B2B participants’) with high product usage, but filter out anyone who’s already participated in a study within the past 6 months.
To avoid over-contacting people or blasting your entire email list, segment your audience according to:
For example, if you only need 10 participants, but you have 500 emails matching the criteria, send your first batch to 100 people and see who replies.
🛠 You can do this segmentation using a dedicated panel management tool like User Interviews or a CRM tool like Salesforce.
When is your target audience most likely to check (and respond) to their emails? Your answer to this question will be the ideal time to send your study invite email.
For example, if your target audience includes working professionals, Monday afternoon through Thursday morning might show better results than on Fridays or weekends. If you’re targeting a general consumer audience, you might find that the opposite is true. Play around with it and see what reaps the best results for you.
Often, user researchers gain access to sensitive participant information over the course of a study—so gaining (and keeping) participants’ trust is critical.
But trust is a delicate thing, and even small details like a wonky reply-to email can shatter it. Whenever you’re sending emails to participants, your “from” account should be an authorized, company-associated domain. Not your personal hotmail account.
Ideally, your emails should be sent from a research-specific account such as “research@company.com.”
🧠 Did you know? User Interviews’s Research Hub allows you to set up a custom email domain for communicating with participants. Once you've authenticated your domain, you can create sender profiles so emails come from specific teammates, like “lizzy@company.com.”
Obviously, people need to know what they’re signing up for before they’ll apply to participate.
In your study invitation email, be sure to mention:
Even if you’ve jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon, you still need to write like a person, not a robot—that is, with a professional, yet approachable tone.
Participants are more likely to respond to an email when the sender has written it with warmth and simplicity. If you’re not sure whether or not your writing fits this criteria, reference this Handy List of Human Words from Content Designer Deanna Horton.
Your recruiting email subject line is the first impression you make on participants.
If that impression is dull, suspicious, or off-putting, they likely won’t even open the email, let alone apply to your study.
Here are some recruiting email subject line samples you can use for inspiration:
Your recipient has received your email, opened it, read the study information, and is interested in participating. What next?
Using clear, bold statements, tell people exactly what you need them to do to apply. Typically, the call-to-actions you see in recruiting emails are things like:
Remember when that intern from HBO accidentally sent out an empty email to a large portion of their mailing list, and the internet responded by sharing their biggest work mistakes?
It’s clear from the #DearIntern tweets that interns aren’t the only ones to make mistakes, be they small typos or major, reputation-damaging errors.
To avoid your own #DearIntern moment, send a test email (or two) to a coworker for a quick copy edit before sending it to your entire recruitment list.
In step #1, we discussed sending small batches of emails initially (e.g. if you need 10 participants and have 500 emails matching your criteria, send your first batch to 100 people and see who replies).
If you send that first batch of recruitment emails and the response rate is lower than anticipated, you can experiment with small changes in the next batch. Try some of the tips below to see if you can increase engagement:
🧠 Did you know? User Interviews makes it easy to schedule sessions with participants. Block off available dates and times for participants to choose from, and easily add or extend your session slots if need be. Learn more about updating your calendar in User Interviews.
Still haven’t received enough qualified applications? It’s okay to gently nudge people who haven’t responded. Just be sure to:
✨ Pro tip: Create email templates to streamline (and standardize) recruiting across teams. See tips for writing custom email template sets and making them available to your team in the User Interviews platform.
If email just isn’t working for you (or you don’t have enough emails in your database to successfully fill a study), don’t fret—you have other options!
Try alternative recruitment methods like:
Looking for some inspiration? Below, we’ve rounded up research recruitment templates and examples for:
Browse the deck to see examples of the best UX research recruiting emails and subject lines.
📈 User Interviews is the fastest and easiest way to recruit participants for user research, with:
Check out our pricing page to explore paid plans or sign up for a free account today!
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Marketer, writer, poet. Lizzy likes hiking, people-watching, thrift shopping, learning and sharing ideas. Her happiest memory is sitting on the shore of Lake Champlain in the summer of 2020, eating a clementine.
