In conducting our primary research, it would take too much time to survey all of our potential customers so we have to contact a sample of that population to come to conclusions on how we should operate our business. How many contacts we should make in our research is sample size. Sample size is an important factor for making inferences about our potential customers.This is an important aspect to understand about sampling for a business survey. You are only making inferences about your target population, not the entire population.
To do this you need to know characteristics about your target population, age, family structure, ethnicity, occupation, education, and other demographic and psychographic characteristics. Other considerations about selecting your sample would include if your population is time specific. For example if your market is seasonal or year round. Once you have an understanding of your target market population, the size of the sample is your next concern for having a statistically significant sample, enough respondents to represent your target population.
There are numerous websites that will help you determine the sample size you’ll need. Survey System is an example. The standard confidence level is 95% with a confidence interval of plus or minus 5%. This is an expression of how confident you can be as a researcher from the data obtained. In other words, you are 95% certain that the range of values contains the population mean within plus or minus 5%.