How to recruit research participants (4 ways)

Four ways to recruit research participants in Versive: a public link, email outreach, integrated participant panels, or an embedded study.

There are four ways to get real participants into a Versive study: share the study's link, email people you already have a relationship with, recruit from a panel of vetted participants, or embed the study inside your product. Each one solves a different recruiting problem.

A public link is quick to distribute but gives you limited control over who opens it. Your own audience reaches people who already know your product. A panel provides access to new participants on a controlled schedule and at a per-participant cost. An embed collects feedback from active users inside the product.

The right channel depends on the audience you need and whether you already have a way to reach them.

Share your study's public link

Every study gets a public URL, in the form getversive.com/s/ followed by the study ID. Anyone with the link can take the study while it is live. Distribute it in a newsletter, a Slack channel, a social post, or anywhere else your target participants spend time.

You can append hidden fields to the link using ordinary URL parameters such as source=newsletter and cohort=beta. Versive stores them as response metadata, allowing you to filter and export by the link someone clicked. Keep the values non-sensitive and opaque because URL parameters are visible in browser history and logs. Do not put an email address or name in them. To track specific individuals, use a personal link from email outreach so the identifying metadata stays server-side.

A public link does not target anyone. Whoever finds it can start the study, so screener questions must determine who qualifies.

Email people you already have a relationship with

Versive's Audience is an organization-wide contact list for customers, users, and leads. Import contacts in bulk with automatic email deduplication, or add them individually. Custom metadata such as plan tier, signup date, or account owner becomes filterable columns.

Each contact added to a study gets a personal, trackable interview link instead of the shared public link. Compose the invitation in Versive's email editor with merge fields for name, custom metadata, and the personal link. Reusable templates support recurring invitations. Per-recipient statuses cover delivered, opened, bounced, failed, and flagged as spam, alongside study completion. You can export the participant table, links, statuses, and metadata to CSV.

Suppression is automatic: anyone marked unsubscribed or bounced is skipped on future sends, and every email includes one-click unsubscribe. This channel reaches only the contacts already on your list, and sends count against your plan's monthly email allowance. It fits research about your product or customers better than a study requiring strangers with specific demographics.

Recruit from Versive's participant panel

When the people you need aren't customers or contacts, Versive's Recruit tab connects a study to Prolific and Respondent participant sources for consumer and professional recruiting.

Start by defining the target audience. Consumer filters include age, education, and household income; B2B attributes include industry, seniority, and company size. Add multiple-choice, checkbox, text, numeric, or slider-scale screener questions to qualify people before they reach the study. A rough incentive baseline is about a dollar per minute of study length, with higher amounts for harder-to-reach B2B audiences.

With Prolific, you can search its demographic and screening filters by keyword, see pricing before publishing, and launch, pause, or resume the panel as responses arrive. Each submission appears alongside its interview in Versive. You can approve or reject responses individually or bulk-approve those that passed the screener. Versive also handles completion codes and redirects back to Prolific so participants can be credited.

Every panel project moves from Draft to Active, then to Closed or Archived. Funnel counts track requested, invited, survey taken, qualified, and paid participants. Closing a project approves completed respondents for payment. You can export profile fields such as name, job title, company, LinkedIn, skills, location, and match quality to CSV.

Panel recruiting is billed pay-as-you-go on top of your subscription, per qualified participant rather than against your credit allowance. It provides direct access to specific audiences at a visible cost per response.

For the full breakdown of targeting, screeners, and incentives, see the Recruiting participants docs. For guidance on writing screeners that hold up under a panel's incentive to qualify, see How to write screener questions that actually screen. To size the project itself, see How many participants do you need for user research?.

Embed the study in your product

An embed puts the study inside your product. The @getversive/embed SDK or a zero-code script tag can show a study as an inline widget or modal. The Launch tab's Embed section generates a ready-to-paste snippet. Before it will work, an organization admin must add your site's domain to the allow-list.

Use an embed to collect feedback from active users after a specific action or within a specific screen. It reaches only people already using your product, so use a panel when you need participants who are not customers. See Embed an interview inside your product for the setup walkthrough.

Combining channels on one study

Some studies need more than one channel, such as a panel to meet a demographic quota and an email invitation to existing customers. Named participant sources give each channel its own share link and redirects for completion, screen-out, and full-quota outcomes. From the same study, panel participants can return to Prolific for payment while customers reach a branded thank-you page. Every response retains its source in the results. Sources are available under Launch, then Link.

Which one to use

Open a study's Launch tab to find the Link, Send, Recruit, and Embed sub-tabs. The adjacent Simulate tab lets you test questions with AI personas before recruiting real participants. If you are setting a panel incentive, use Research incentives: what to pay participants to estimate the amount.