Increasing clinical trial sign-up rates can be a challenge, but there are several strategies that you can use to improve the effectiveness of your recruitment efforts. Here are a few tips to help you increase clinical trial sign-up rates.
Use targeted advertising
Digital advertising allows you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, which can help you to reach the most qualified and likely candidates for your clinical trial. By using social media advertising, search advertising, or other digital channels to reach your target audience, you can increase the visibility and appeal of your clinical trial to potential participants.
Scaleable: How many people you reach with digital advertising is directly affected by your total budget. By allocating more resources to advertising and outreach, you can reach a wider and more diverse audience, which increases the number of qualified and interested participants. In other words, digital ads are a scaleable form of outreach, compared to something like flyers or emailing a database.
Targeted reach: Digital advertising allows you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, which can help you to reach the most qualified and likely candidates for your clinical trial. For example, you can use social media advertising to target users based on their age, location, and other characteristics, or use search advertising to reach users who are actively searching for information about specific conditions or treatments.
Customized messaging: Digital advertising also allows you to customize your messaging and creative to appeal to different segments of your target audience. For example, you can use different ad copy or imagery to appeal to different age groups or genders. This can help you to effectively communicate the benefits and requirements of your clinical trial to potential participants.
Measurable results: Digital advertising also provides measurable results, which can help you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your ads and see how many users are clicking through to your website or signing up to learn more about your clinical trial.
Use online prescreening
Using a digital questionnaire to prescreen potential participants for clinical trials can help to increase the rate of high quality referrals. Here are a few reasons why:
Time-saving: A digital questionnaire allows potential participants to quickly and easily provide the necessary information about their health and eligibility for the study. This can save time for both the potential participant and the study staff, as only qualified referrals continue to phone screening and in-person screening appointments.
Accuracy: A digital questionnaire can also improve the accuracy of the screening process, as it allows potential participants to provide precise and up-to-date information about their health and medications in their own time. Doing this live on a phone call can be stressful and prone to errors.
Convenience: A digital questionnaire is also convenient for potential participants, as it can be completed at any time and from any location with an internet connection. This can make it more likely that potential participants will complete the questionnaire and provide the necessary information, which can improve the overall quality of the referral pool.
Easier to share: The prescreening questionnaire can also easily be sent to other people that might be interested. This increases the number of people your study reaches organically. People referred this way by someone they know are often very high quality.
Offer incentives
Offering incentives to potential participants can be a powerful way to increase sign-up rates. These can include financial compensation for time and travel, free treatments or services, or other perks. Be sure to carefully consider the ethics and legal implications of offering incentives, and be transparent about them in your advertising and recruitment materials. Always consult with your ethics board before mentioning incentives in your marketing materials.
However, sometimes the incentives to join are too great. A large monetary compensation can increase the number of fraudulent referrals. This introduces the need to check IP addresses, duplicate emails, time taken in the questionnaire, and many more factors that Wayturn uses to determine if a referral is fraudulent or not.
Streamline the process
Making it as easy as possible for potential participants to learn about and sign up for your clinical trial can increase sign-up rates. This can include providing clear and concise information about the study, offering multiple ways to contact you or learn more, and using digital tools to streamline the screening and enrollment process.
Build trust
Building trust with potential participants is crucial to increasing sign-up rates. This can include being transparent about the purpose and risks of the study, providing clear and accurate information about the study requirements and benefits, and demonstrating a commitment to the well-being and safety of participants.
Offering to let potential referrals contact you, rather than the other way around, helps build trust. People do not enjoy sharing their personal information – especially phone numbers – unless a certain level of trust has already been built.