How to Recruit Your Own Customers Into a Structured Health Study

In Part 1, we covered how to build a post-purchase observational study in Alethios. You defined your population, set your screening criteria, chose your endpoints, and designed a study schedule that maps to how your product actually works.

Now you need to get the right people into it.

This part is more straightforward than it sounds — but the details matter. A well-executed recruitment setup means your data comes from a population that actually reflects your intended use case. A poorly executed one means you're collecting data from the wrong people, or not enough people at all.

Your Recruitment Link Is Your Entry Point

When your study is live in Alethios, you have a unique recruitment link. This is the URL you'll send to potential participants. Anyone who clicks it will see your study description and can begin the screening process.

That link can go anywhere: a post-purchase email, a packaging insert, a customer portal, a follow-up SMS. The channel matters because it determines who sees it — and the best channel is the one that reaches your customer at the moment they're most engaged with your product.

Post-purchase email is almost always the most effective. When a customer has just bought something, their interest in it is at its peak. A well-timed email — sent 24 to 48 hours after purchase confirmation — with a clear, honest ask ("We'd love to understand how this works for you — here's how to join our study") consistently outperforms more passive recruitment approaches.

Writing Your Recruitment Ask

Keep it simple and honest. You're asking a customer to share their experience with your product in a structured way. That's not a hard sell — it's an invitation.

A few principles:

• Lead with what's in it for them. Most participants in this type of study are motivated by wanting to understand their own health data, contributing to something meaningful, or simply because they're genuinely interested in the product they bought. Speak to that.
• Be clear about what participation involves. How long will it take? What data are you collecting? How often will you check in? Clarity reduces drop-off.
• Don't oversell. Participants who enroll under inflated expectations complete at lower rates. Set honest expectations from the start.

Screening Does the Qualifying Work

Once a participant clicks your link and begins the enrollment process, your screening survey takes over. This is where Alethios determines whether they meet your eligibility criteria before they become active in the study.

This is valuable for two reasons. First, it keeps your dataset clean — you're only collecting data from people who fit your study parameters. Second, it handles the qualification step automatically, so you don't have to manually review each applicant.

When you set up your study in Part 1, you defined what the right participant looks like. The screening survey operationalizes that. For a post-purchase study, one common and useful criterion is simply confirming that the participant purchased your product within a defined window — ensuring you're studying actual recent users, not historical ones.

Watch Your Screening Statistics

Once enrollment opens, check your Screen tab in Live Mode. The distribution of screening answers — and the disqualification rate — will tell you quickly whether your criteria are working as intended. If you're seeing unexpectedly high drop-off at a specific question, it's worth reviewing whether that criterion is calibrated correctly before you're deep into enrollment.

With your recruitment link active and your screening working, participants begin moving into active status — and data collection begins. That's what Part 3 covers.

[Continue to Part 3: Collect Meaningful Data →]

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