Online Market Research

Setting up a market test is by no means a difficult task, but it does require foresight and patience. In the direct or database marketing worlds, we might test offer, copy, medium (e.g. postcard vs. letter), subject lines, response rates and so forth. In online marketing research, several options are available for testing. Let’s take a look at a few…

Releasing an online survey is no different than any other direct marketing campaign. We are concerned with response rate, percent completing the...

Surveys are a form of structured communication. In a sense they are a “marketing campaign” just the same as an outbound email designed to solicit a sale, acquire a new customer or re-engage a lost customer. Our “sale” is a completed survey, our currency or profit if you will is information.

With this in mind, if you are part of a larger marketing organization then you may want to coordinate your outbound communications with your colleagues who are tasked with engaging customers and prospects....

What’s the difference between a survey and a poll? As we enter the political season, groups are conducting research weekly in an attempt to measure public opinion, an ever moving target.

At the basic level both surveys and polls are designed to measure attitudes, awareness and perception. Public opinion polls are often conducted by third parties such as media (e.g. CNN Poll or the Los Angeles Times Poll) or research organizations such as the Pew Trust. In general these polls are concerned with...

News flash…advertising is still big business. Despite the changing media landscape, declining interest in print, increasing interest in digital and the narrowing of broadcast, billions of dollars are spent annually on both the creation of advertising and the refinement of the media which exhibits the advertising. Marketing research is involved in both of these areas.

Although primarily the focus of consumer research, advertising testing can also apply to the B2B market. Online survey platforms hav...

Is social media a viable option for promoting your survey? The growth of social media platforms certainly is enough alone to make you stop and take a look. Facebook has in excess of 840 million subscribers globally and Twitter has approximately 130 million. LinkedIn has over 150 million subscribers in queue. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Social media platforms are the king of the engagement hill. Facebook users spend an average of 23 minutes on the site. This provides plenty of time to view a...

Those running social media campaigns can take a tip from presentation and meeting professionals: If you want people to remember your pitch and your product, focus on the beginning and end. For example, you well know that first impressions matter, and if you've ever attended a conference, it's often the ending and call to action that sticks with you the most.

Follow the same rules of thumb with social media marketing. Don't get bogged down in details, but spend more time preparing. Use market...

Time is one of the many resources we can never recoup. With that in mind, it makes sense that we hold our survey respondent’s time in the utmost priority. This level of respect is often pushed when trying to garner completed responses for your latest survey project.

If you are a member of any survey panel then you are fully aware of the barrage of emails stating that a survey is waiting. If you belong to multiple panels then this number adds up quickly. What message does this send to the...

If you are not on LinkedIn and following one of the many marketing and online survey research groups then I highly suggest you do so. There are good nuggets to be found.

I recently came across an interesting post by blogger Akshay Kanyal on ways for increasing online response rates. Much of this is grounded in common sense, but it bears repeating. His focus is from the perspective of a panel management provider, but it is germane to all survey researchers who use online data collection methods.

Th...

Is customer satisfaction strictly a function of the product or service the consumer purchased? The short answer is no. Is it solely dependent upon the context of the purchase situation? Again, no. From the depth of customer satisfaction research we can glean that customer satisfaction is a multi-dimensional construct, in other words there are several variables which feed into the overall satisfaction calculus. Several of these are within the control of the marketer, while others are internal to...

Marketing researchers have insight to share. Yet if you are involved in research and answer things truthfully you will, more likely than not, be screened out of most online survey opportunities. In full disclosure on a few occasions I have not listed myself as a research guy because of being really interested in the topic of the survey. I did this not to be secretive but because I felt my opinions would be of use, after all I am a shopper, a parent and owner of various technological devices. In...