Sensorpro

SUPERFREAKONOMICS

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:10:00 +0000

Book review: SUPERFREAKONOMICS by Levitt and Dubner.

The sequel to the bestselling Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics, starts out by telling us that the authors lied in the previous book by telling us that it had no "unifying theme" when, in their own words, it had, namely that "people respond to incentives". Based on the near hysterical reaction to this book, it looks like they will need another clarification for book 3, if there ever is one. Let's deal with that furore first. Much has been negative and mostly on the theories raised on the cause and cure for global warming a topic that can cause many an eye to glaze over. I think they have missed the point: namely that Levitt and Dubner are asking us to look at things differently, to ask questions in a different way and how data can reveal surprising results -often contrary to popular thinking. As data people at Sensorpro Research, our mantra is "do you think everyone else thinks like you do" and this book speaks to that in terms of questioning commonly held views. Let's look at a few:

On unintended consequences. New York pre motor car was awash with horse manure and every block had a horse pooh mountain causing no end of misery to its inhabitants. Along comes the motor car. Problem solved but new problem created. The point being that solutions to these problems can come from the most unexpected quarter. The authors call this the law of unintended consequences and it's one of the most potent.

On War. From 2002-2008 the US military averaged 1,643 deaths per year. The corresponding "no major war" period of the 1980's show 2,100 deaths per year. When the authors looked at the data it turned out that the non-war figures were higher due to accidents when training. So less military lives are lost in wartime. But of course no right thinking citizen would say that war is good especially since they fail to take into account the victims of military attacks. But these numbers on their own don't lie. It is the like of these examples that are causing such furore. They are diametrically opposed to what we consider to be 'Normal thinking'. Our view? Question the numbers being thrown at you -they may not stack up. And for your business following 'Normal thinking' may not always be the right answer.

On TV. The authors claim that the long held view "violence on TV begets violence on the street" is not valid. Their claim is that children watching a lot of TV, even family-friendly ones, are more likely to engage in crime when they get older. Their approach was to compare crime statistics with the rollout of TV in the US. The data stacked up. US States that were behind in the rollout had less crime. What they did not do was answer the question "why it did this?" Instead they postulate: -was the resulting less parental attention a factor? Or the ineptitude of the police in certain shows made them less afraid of getting caught?

On Altruism. So how kind and unselfish are we? Turns out, when it suits us and that people respond to incentives. So some interesting lessons if you fundraise for a charity –reason enough for you to read this book But the section on altruism raised a much more interesting debate and a concern I've shared for the longest time. Namely that of research conducted via the University. We employ a number of online panels for our research. Their makeup, diversity and sourcing are critical to the results of any research. The authors question the veracity of the University approach. They find a type of "forced cooperation" -where the research assistant reports back the very things the researcher is most eager to find. For example is it appropriate that senior researchers use students for research when that student may at some point be awarded a grade from the researcher? Of course it's not. Does it happen? Of course it does. Our view? Bravo, Levitt and Dubner.

Conclusion. So you might think we liked this book but overall found it somewhat lacking when compared to the more meatier Supercrunchers by Ayres and Buyology by Lindstrom. It does, however, concur with our view on data and how to use it to benefit your business. This book reminds me of Gladwell's "Tipping point": interesting as a blog post but as a whole book? Well, No. Levitt and Dubner have learned in a very public way that not everyone else thinks like they do.

The commercial. Buy the book http://amzn.com/0060731338 Learn more about Levitt’s firm http://www.freakonomicsconsulting.com Our research platform http://www.sensorpro.net

The authors will be presenting in London, 13:00 GMT Tuesday 10 Nov and you can watch live http://bit.ly/superfreaklondon The event will be on Twitter using hashtag #superfreakonomics We’ll be there as @sensorpro

Measuring Campaign Effectiveness for Brand Management Companies

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:59:00 +0000

The recent acquisition of Omniture by Adobe confirmed how valuable web analytics are for companies that can measure campaign effectiveness, all the way to sales completion. But what about companies that sell through indirect channels such as through retail stores, partnerships, and Joint Ventures? What is the best practice for top brands who need to measure campaign effectiveness under these constraints?

We at SensorPro work with some of the world’s best brands and many household names. We developed an approach that allows these brands to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of both offline and online marketing campaigns. The solution uses a combination of control/exposed group testing using our enterprise grade survey platform in combination with our email marketing partners and other techniques. So how does it work?

1 First, define the objectives of the campaign evaluation

Like every good market research project, the brand team need to define the objective of the evaluation: was it raising awareness? the announcement of a new promotion or partnership? or just the good old fashioned increasing sales? Once the objective is defined you can move onto defining a project approach and time table. For the purposes of this article we are going to assume that the objective is to “increase sales” and that the deployment is online using an email marketing platform.

2 Then, create Control and Exposed groups

Using your email marketing platform, identify subscribers who were exposed to the campaign. The control group will be subscribers who were not provided a copy of that newsletter . It can be more difficult to do the same thing with traditional print media, but clearly it can be done using creative techniques like mobile phone tag readers or simple urls for people who were exposed. The other approach is to use a blind panel for the control group where you can filter out people who have had exposure via some simple survey techniques.

3 Next, prepare the evaluation survey

Our typical engagement will call for an initial survey to the exposed and control groups being deployed fairly soon after the deployment of the campaign. This is important as you do not want other factors influencing the decisions and answers that the respondents will provide. With the explosion of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter, this can raise additional hurdles but should clearly be incorporated into your approach.

For the initial survey we recommend that the survey be kept short and focused, you can always use triggers and recurring survey campaigns to send out requests for more information. The questions should clearly all be tied back to the objectives of the evaluation so if the campaign objective was to raise awareness of a new promotion, then you would measure awareness and purchase intent, whereas if it was for a new product announcement you probably would be asking about awareness and favorability.

Our objective for this sample research project was to measure the effectiveness on increasing sales. Then, depending on the time period of the promotion or campaign, you will send out a follow up survey asking about actual purchases. We typically see this follow up type survey sent out seven to fourteen days after the commencement of the campaign.

To see an example of this type of survey process, click on the link Example of a Brand Management Research Survey which will open a high level example of a sample survey. For this example, please select the product Energy Bars with Protein Plus to see the questions to measure favorability, purchase intent and certain brand attributes that were important to the brand manager. This is a hypothetical example and any resemblance to existing products is coincidental.

4 And finally, the Analysis and Evaluation

Assuming that you have properly defined your objectives, selected good groups and had a reasonable level of responses, you will want to perform a statistical significance test on your survey results. The following is an example of the type of report that helps decide if the objective was met:

The critical metric is the Lift Factor which measures the net result of the marketing campaign between the control and exposed groups. Just because the numbers are higher or lower do not by themselves speak the result, as we used a sample of the population. So we must employ a little science to verify the results. Thankfully SensorPro has built in Statistical Significance Testing to test our hypothesis of "is the difference in responses statistically significant?" When Statisticians say a result is "statistically significant" they don't mean it's important, just that it's "probably true". Ultimately we want to know if the difference in response happened by chance or not. If they did not happen by chance, then we are reasonably sure it was our campaign efforts that influenced the outcome.

Not a project but a process

But this should not be the end of the market research project. You have now opened a conversation with these prospects and customers. They have told you something about your campaigns, your products, your brands and your company. So use this data by integrating with your email subscribers and segment and target these people based on their responses. For example if someone said that a certain new product is not favorable to them, then exclude them from future campaigns that highlight that new product. Conversely if they tell you that they like something, use that information to expand your sales by cross selling and up selling, all traditional and proven techniques.

Do you what more information?

This is a market research technique that is being used by leading brands today to great effect. Contact us for your free evaluation on how you can benefit from this approach. Tell us in the comments below what else you are doing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns when you sell through indirect channels.

StrongMail Launches StrongSurvey via partnership with SensorPro

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:48:00 +0000

We are excited today to announce another new partnership, this time with StrongMail Systems, one of the the leading providers of commercial-grade solutions for marketing and transactional email.

StrongMail's new StrongSurvey tool will allow marketers to generate customer survey data that can be leveraged by StrongMail Message Studio to create highly targeted email marketing campaigns. Using StrongSurvey, marketers will be able to easily create fully branded surveys that capture customer preferences and satisfaction metrics. Featuring real-time reporting and analysis, StrongSurvey empowers marketers to drill down on individual questions or respondents to better understand and meet customer needs and expectations.

"StrongMail's innovative email marketing solutions are perfectly designed to take advantage of the wealth of data that can be collected by a well designed online survey," said Jon Erickson, general manager of North American operations for SensorPro. "As one of the established leaders in email marketing solutions, StrongMail enables SensorPro to extend the reach of its technology to an impressive and rapidly expanding customer base."

“StrongSurvey is a powerful tool for generating rich customer data that can be incorporated into targeted and relevant email marketing campaigns," said Ryan Deutsch, vice president of strategic services and market development at StrongMail Systems. “By partnering with SensorPro, we are able to offer our customers a world-class online survey tool that's easy to use and complete with all the features marketers need to better engage their customers."

This relationship is a continuation of our strategy to partner with all of the leading marketing and transactional email providers. However this relationship is the first to offer SensorPro both as a SaaS hosted solution and as an On-Premise solution, both of which will provide the data integration with the StrongMail Message Studio application. Thus our joint clients will have the option of hosting their market research solution either in the cloud or on their own premise, providing them with a multitude of options and benefits.

For more information regarding the StrongMail and SensorPro partnership, please contact sales@sensorpro.us.

Link to the press release: http://urlx.ie/strongmail/

Team SensorPro Cycles for LiveStrong Foundation and MS Society

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:10:00 +0000

At SensorPro we get great enjoyment in helping our clients with their market research projects, but we also have other interests, one of which is competitive and endurance cycling. We have formed Team SensorPro and will soon be starting the cycling season here in Northern California.

This year we decided to upgrade the look of our team jerseys and are excited about our new kit which we believe puts a whole new concept behind the “Powered by SensorPro” branding. What do you think of our new jerseys?

Wouldn’t you want to wear one of these jerseys on your next century or group ride? Read on and you can learn how you can get one and become a rider for Team SensorPro!

Our competitive and endurance race schedule will cover events ranging from Ojai Valley to Monterey to the Lost Coast in Northern California. It will include such great races as the Road Race at the Sea Otter Classic, The Tour of the Unknown Coast and our locally sponsored endurance ride the Wine Country Century here in Sonoma County. It is great fun to compete and to strengthen the relationships we have with other riders and teams.

But we also encourage Team SensorPro to give back to the community. This year we have selected two organizations to be the focus of our fund raising activities, Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong Foundation and the National MS Society. Both of these are internationally recognized organizations that are committed to helping solve and cope with some of the world’s most difficult health care issues. We are proud to always exceed our fund raising goals for the organizations we support and we want to continue this trend in 2009.

How to Donate

How can you help? First any donation that you can make to either of these organizations as part of our Team’s fund raising goals, no matter how large or small will help both of these organizations. Here are the links for you to go on-line to make a donation that will be credited to our Team's fund raising goals.

1. For LiveStrong please go to the following web site:

http://urlx.ie/TeamSensorProLiveStrong/ This will take you to my personal LiveStrong donation page.

2. For the National MS Society please go to the following web site:

http://urlx.ie/TeamSensorProMSSociety/ This will take you to my personal MS Society donation page.

3. If you do not want to make a donation on-line you can let me know that you want to donate via physical check. You can make the check out to either organization and send it to me at our office which is located at 7435 Poplar Drive, Forestville, CA 95436.

How to Join Team SensorPro

To make this more beneficial to you we are offering you a way to join Team SensorPro and get one of these cool cycling jerseys. Who would not want to wear one of these while racing around Manhattan or climbing the hills outside of Los Angeles? How do you get one? All you have to do is make a combined donation to either of our supported charities in an amount of $500 or more and you will get one of these hot Team SensorPro jerseys in your size.

So what’s holding you back? Get involved with Team SensorPro and help us support these great organizations. If you see one of our Team members riding around in our jerseys honk and wave. You will always get a smile back from us! Thank you for your support!

Follow Our Progress

We will be posting our racing and fund raising achievements throughout this summer’s racing season. You can follow our progress using the following:

Twitter; http://twitter.com/jonofsma (daily updates) or http://twitter.com/sensorpro_us (less frequent, but more company and industry focused)

Facebook: http://urlx.ie/jonofsmaFacebook/ Link to this post http://urlx.ie/TeamSensorPro/

Endurance cycling is similar to market research?

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:44:00 +0000

This past Saturday kicked off the cycling season for Team SensorPro when I joined the small group of riders who were going to ride the Santa Rosa Cycling Clubs ACP 200k brevet. Now this is not a race against anyone but yourself, but still you are there to compete against your prior times and to build your network of cycling friends.

So with 25 other riders I headed off from Healdsburg to Napa and then to return back to Healdsburg. There were riders from Oregon, Idaho and San Jose, so it looked like it was going to be fun. I was feeling very good and felt confident that I would beat my goal for the ride of finishing in less than 7 1/2 hours.

Everything was great until we were cruising down the descent into Calistoga. I was riding second in a pace line in the second group when the leader swerved to the right but I did not react. I hit a large pot hole at about 35 mph and about two seconds later I heard what sounded like broken glass. My first thought is that my iPhone had fallen out and broken. But then I had to take a sharp turn and I proceed to fall on my left side at about 25 mph (luckily I was slowing down to pick up the "pieces" of my iPhone).

Well I had two compression flats but not to be deterred, I started to change the tires (I did have two tubes), the first went without a hitch, but the second blew out just as the CO2 canister was finishing. I thought I must have pinched the tube (I was in a hurry to get back to the group as I was now being passed by the third and fourth groups). I had to call my wife to bring me another tube and luckily I got her before she headed out on her own ride.

When she finally got there, I was now 30 minutes behind my group, but I felt I could still catch them if I skipped lunch, but we put this tube on and double checked that it was not pinched and yes it went flat again.

So now I had to throw it in and go to the local bike shop where they looked at the tire and thought it looked fine. But guess what when they put the tube in and filled it, pop it goes. After a close look at the tire you can see that I had torn it right at the rim so now I had to replace the tire, to go along with my bruised ego and my road rash on the left arm and hip.

So how does this story relate to market research. There are several common but critical points.

First in both cycling and market research you need to have a plan for your research, an object of what you are trying to measure and a contingency plan for when things go wrong.

For example if you have a good plan for your research including what your objectives are, what will be considered a successful project (measurable objectives) and what are your contingency plans when things go wrong, then you are ready for what the market will throw at you. Remember you are dealing usually with consumers who will not always think the way you believe they should nor will they always react to the message that you are sending to them.

Second, you have to realize that there will be times to call in the experts from your agency when the preliminary results are significantly skewed from what your initial estimates were. Are the variances due to how the questions were framed, is the sample representative, could there be outside influences that are impacting the results? There can be many different reasons for the interim results varying from the initial estimates, so it is always good to get some outside help from your advisors.

Finally market research as well as endurance cycling is always subject to Murphy's Law. Sometimes you will have a great plan with measurable objectives, a great sample, well defined questions and an appropriate contingency plan. But guess what, s#*t happens and sometimes the research will just go astray. Here you need to be flexible to retain as much value and critical information you can obtain. Maybe the original hypothesis was too broad but can you gain some nuggets of knowledge from the project? Is it possible to evolve the project without compromising its integrity? Or maybe you just need to write this one off to the failure bin. But in all cases remember to be flexible, adaptive and listen to your respondents. They are always trying to tell you something.

Surveys, the other white meat

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Last week I spent three very cold and wet days in Scottsdale AZ at the DMA's Email Evolution Conference. It was a very informative and interesting conference that had numerous sessions on email and digital marketing. Some of the most interesting were presentations by outdoor sporting goods firm REI, Alaska Airlines, Dell Computers and Borders Books.

The one consistent point that was raised by all of these different presenters was the importance of testing and continuing to improve your creative, message, relevance and deliverability.

All of the sessions talked about the need for A/B testing, multi-variant testing, among others, but in all cases the test results were all based on web analytics and perceived behavioral results However in all of these testing methods, not one of the presenters suggested "ask your subscribers".

As a firm that provides on-line surveys and consulting services, I started to feel like the old advertising campaign "Pork - the Other White Meat". It seems that many of these people have become obsessed with web analytics, CTRs, CTORs, etc. that they are missing one of the most useful techniques - Asking and Listening.

Now I do not mean that it can be easy to prepare and analyze these survey results but to rely solely on statistics that can be interpreted in different ways by different people, I suggest that you combine your web analytics with other techniques such as surveys. These can also provide quick and focused results which provide you with an alternative testing method.

We have worked with many major brand management companies to compare creative images that will be used in print advertisements (yes people still do that), to assess the success of various digital campaigns in ways that can measure the conversion of subscriber awareness, favorably, purchase intent and actual purchases and to assess packaging and pricing alternatives.

Last year when we were at the annual DMA conference one of the presenters from a leading web analytics firm even said the same thing. For example when someone leaves a shopping cart to answer the front door, then forgets to complete the sale, that can be considered a problem with the campaign when in fact it is just normal human nature.

So as you are implementing some of these new best practices from the eec conference and a comprehensive testing program, don't forget the other white meat and use surveys to help improve your digital marketing campaigns. Link to this post: http://urlx.ie/eec09

The King of Madison Avenue by Kenneth Roman

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:11:00 +0000

The advertising bible for many, "Confessions of an Advertising Man" by David Ogilvy, is now complete thanks to Kenneth Roman's "The King of Madison Avenue". Kenneth, ex-CEO of Ogilvy, worked with David for many years and completes the picture with some authority. Oft-cited as the original "Mad Man", David passed-away in 1999, but he eschewed the Mad Men characticture and frowned on the drinking culture. This is timely -Series 2 of Mad Men airs on BBC4 Tuesday, 10 Feb at 10pm. Link to this post http://urlx.ie/ogilvy

We now we know that Ogilvy's mother was Irish from Co Kerry, that his elder brother Frank started Ogilvy in London and played a major role with his beginnings in the US. David worked for the British Secret Service in the US, one aim of which was to bring the US into WWII. We also learn that the saying "The Color Red Sells", sometimes attributed to Ogilvy, instead came about from his fondness for the red leather seating in the UK House of Lords.

Ogilvy was a researcher first and an advertiser second. His first job in the US was with George Gallup, the American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll. His early work with Gallup's Audience Research Institute (ARI) on nationwide surveys with cinema goers caused Hollywood to focus on the hitherto dismissed adolescent market. He was to later always ask copywriters "How do you know", when they were making an assumption on how consumers would react to an advert. His relentless focus on research was to change the game of advertising forever.

His mantra "Create advertising that sells" stems from his stint in England as an Aga cooker salesman. The Aga is a Swedish cooker adopted by the British that is as synonymous as Hoover is to Vacuum cleaner. It was this experience that led to his embrace of direct mail with the counting of coupons to verify advertising results. Ogilvy said that "direct response is my first love and my secret weapon"

Ogilvy was a fan of long copy and justified text but hated reverse type (eg white text on a red background) even though the cover of Confessions is just that. This probably stems from the intent to use the book to promote the Ogilvy brand but it quickly became the de-facto must-read for anyone in this business for many many years. But history will at least remember Ogilvy for his three "big ideas": The man in the Hathaway shirt (the model wore a black eye-patch), The Dove campaign "Dove is One-Quarter Cleansing Cream" and American Express "Don't Leave Home Without It". Each of which transformed their business several fold.

When we started our research and marketing business, we employed an ex-Ogilvy firm to instill their practitioner led approach into our software. Having read this, I am so glad that we did.

David Ogilvy on Video http://urlx.ie/47256/
Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/sensorpro
Our business www.sensorpro.net

Riverford Organic, finalist e-consultancy awards 2008

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:00:00 +0000

We entered our client, Riverford Organic, to the e-consultancy awards 2008 -which we are happy to report was shortlisted for the customer retention category. We thought we would share this wonderful case study with you. But first a little about Riverford Organic: Guy Watson began farming at Riverford in 1985 on three acres of land on the Watson family farm in South Devon. It is now a major organic food enterprise delivering thousands of boxes of organic food across the UK. Riverford were finalist in the Natural and Organic awards 2008 Best home delivery service. Earlier this year we were asked by Adrian Carey, Direct Marketing Manager at Riverford to help with a new customer feedback project. When this project was initiated Riverford were delivering 8 different types of Veg and Fruit & Veg boxes to customers regularly (weekly, fortnightly etc.) from 4 different brands, sourced primarily from their own regional farms and other local grower groups. Each box type had a fixed number of items (up to 12) each week but some or all of these items changed each week to reflect the seasonality of the produce. Riverford wanted to get customer feedback on every individual box, to be able to trace that feedback to the farms and to respond quickly to customer feedback. See the complete PDF case study: http://urlx.ie/riverfordcasestudy/ Link to this post: http://urlx.ie/57234/

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:35:00 +0000

Martin Lindstrom has a winner here. This is a "must read" for anyone in the business of promoting. According to Martin:

Health warnings on cigarette packs encourage smokers even more
That product placement only works when the product is an integral part of the story
Why consumers will opt for a $15 coupon right now vs a $20 coupon later
Our unconscious minds are a lot better at interpreting our behavior than our conscious mind and so are responsible for more buying decisions than we think.
If other adverts are dominating a TV episode/magazine issue yours will be lost.
Fragrance and sound are more important than Logo alone
How religion factors into buying decisions

Link to this post http://urlx.ie/buyology

Dynamic conference feedback -without the gizmos

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:33:00 +0000

For the Irish Internet Association (IIA) Word of Mouse conference, we needed a slick way to get attendee feedback. As a survey vendor, it's a simple task to deploy a survey with all the bells and whistles you would expect, like via email, popup, link, twitter post or embedded in a blog -but on this occasion we wanted something a little different. We wanted audience reaction in real-time without the expense and hassle of gizmos. So how about Bluetooth then? After all, many in the audience had a gizmo already –a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone (or cell phone, if you prefer!) Thanks to a snappy response from Shane at Mobanode we had our survey deployed on his Bluetooth box in minutes. As soon as we hit the "fire" button, the survey was deployed to 23 phones with just 1 rejection -not a shabby response rate! Irene from IIA was live twittering -so she had the twitter world peeking over her shoulder. Not only did this method garner dynamic feedback from the immediate audience -but also picked up twitter eavesdroppers with the browser link. If you want to try event feedback that is different, is relevant and a gizmo that actually works -then try this.

Thinking of doing business in China?

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:41:00 +0000

Largest pan-Asian internet conference to launch survey on the attitudes of firms looking at the east Asia opportunity.

Web2Asia has today launched the Going East on the expansion of Western Web 2.0, online gaming, mobile & eCommerce companies to East Asia: GoingEast.Asia (http://www.goingeast.asia/) It was announced on the occasion of the biggest pan-Asian Internet conference - the Open Web Asia '08 in Seoul/Korea. First key results will be presented on November 14th, during the China 2.0 Blogger Tour (http://www.china20.asia/) in Shanghai.

The Going Asian survey will reveal the most up-to-date information regarding the expansion status quo and the expansion plans to East Asia of western enterprises in the interactive media field. Hence, the survey aims to delve deeper into the opportunities and challenges start-ups and established companies face and anticipate when "going Asian".

The key results of the Going Asian survey will be presented during the China 2.0 Blogger Tour in Shanghai November 14, sponsored by Edelman Digital and featuring Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Sam Lawrence, Christine Lu and others.

Participating in the survey allows companies to reflect their experience or expectations on this topic. It also provides them with valuable insight into the expansion situation of western interactive media enterprises through the survey results which will be freely available to all participants.

Participants in the survey are eligible for attractive prizes in East Asia that include free hosting packages, .Asia domains, detailed market research reports, local search engine optimisation or PR packages.

Supported by tech-partners Jimdo (http://www.jimdo.com/) and SensorPro (http://www.sensorpro.net/) and will be accessible at http://www.goingeast.asia/ until October 28th, 2008.

SensorPro for ExactTarget

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:48:00 +0000

A critical part of our corporate strategy is to expand our market share in the on-line survey and lead acquisition space primarily through relationships with eMail Solution providers. In this regard, we announced this past week another new partnership relationship this time with ExactTarget.

We are excited about our future growth with ExactTarget especially as both ExactTarget and SensorPro are certified applications in the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

So not only does this relationship benefit our joint clients with ExactTarget, but it also gives these clients the ability to share their survey and lead acquisition data with their Salesforce.com CRM solution.

The following is a copy of the recent press release regarding the new relationship. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please send me an email at jon@sensorpro.net.

ExactTarget adds SensorPro to portfolio

Limerick, Ireland and Indianapolis, Ind. -- March 14, 2008 – ExactTarget, a leading provider of on-demand email and one-to-one marketing solutions, and Narragansett Technologies, the developer of the award winning on-demand survey and lead acquisition solution called SensorPro, announced that they have partnered to integrate SensorPro’s survey and lead acquisition solution with ExactTarget’s on-demand solutions.

“SensorPro offers marketers a tool which easily measures consumer opinions and behaviors,” said, Scott Thomas, Director of Partnerships. “ExactTarget’s email solution, combined with SensorPro, allows marketers to take their message and strategy to the next level.”

“Email remains the number one deployment mechanism for online surveys”, said Chris Byrne founder and CEO, “and we are delighted to be working with ExactTarget. An integrated solution provides more actionable and meaningful results for customers who look to incorporate feedback mechanisms to their email marketing and advertising campaigns”

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget, Inc. is a leading provider of on-demand email marketing software solutions. The company’s suite of on-demand one-to-one marketing applications enable clients to send business-critical and event triggered communications to increase sales, optimize marketing investments and strengthen customer relationships. ExactTarget offers four editions of its on-demand software application along with integrated solutions such as ExactTarget for AppExchange and ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. ExactTarget offers a range of optimization services including support, implementation and training, integration, deliverability, account management, design and deployment and strategic consulting. ExactTarget’s software powers permission-based email communications for thousands of organizations including Careerbuilder.com, Expedia.com, Florida Power & Light, Gannett Co., Inc/USA TODAY, the Indianapolis Colts, The Home Depot, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Liberty Mutual Group, Papa John’s and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, please visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

About SensorPro

SensorPro, is the award winning on line enterprise survey, lead acquisition, sample fulfillment and promotion management solution used by global companies such as Coty, Pepsi, Northwest Airlines and Procter & Gamble. Using SensorPro clients can create a survey or lead acquisition form and on web pages, landing pages, microsites, Adobe Flash containers, embedded in emails, or on mobile devices. Built from the ground up on the Microsoft .NET platform, utilizing C# and Web Services technologies, the products can be deployed as a licensed, on-premise or on-demand hosted application.

Distributed worldwide and under OEM agreement by Epicor (NASDAQ:EPIC www.epicor.com), ExactTarget (www.exacttarget.com), Salesforce (www.salesforce.com), Epsilon (www.epsilon.com) and others.

It's the day after Christmas and do you know how your customer satisfaction is with returns?

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:39:00 +0000

Given all of the dire news lately regarding the success or lack there of during this holiday sales season, many retailers are having to bet their success on the out come of the post Christmas sales and how their customers satisfaction is handled during the processing of returns and exchanges. If you are the marketing or merchandising manager for a large retailer, how are you going to gain insight in this area at such a critical time for your campaign's success, especially on a real time basis.

Sure you could be on the floor observing what is happening, but that will give you only a coverage sample of one store a day. Not very good coverage and hard to gauge what is truly happening. Or you could wait until the results are in a pray for the best.

However, you do have one option that you can employ and that is to establish a digital survey that is deployed using mobile devices. Let's say after each return you ask the customer if they have a mobile device that can send text messages. If they do, have them send a message to your short code with a special code and the survey will be delivered to them immediately. You can ask them about the processing of the returns, the available of alternative products, the reasons for the returns, basically what ever you want. Remember these are mobile devices so keep the survey short and don't expect a lot of textual comments. These results can be linked to your loyalty program and your email marketing database for future segmentation, but also you can set up triggers to have predefined actions occur if certain responses are received.

Also one other line of questioning that you may want to consider is to address some of the multichannel retailing issues. In a research report issued by Forrester Research, Inc. early this year, they raised as a potential best practice for a multi-channel retailer to consider the use of surveys. Here is a copy of the relevant text from the research report "Best Practices in Multichannel Retailing".

Use surveys to gather additional insight. Many of the retailers that we spoke with use a combination of online surveys, intercept surveys, and post-sale surveys conducted online or through a toll-free number. Firms should integrate multichannel topics into these existing measurement efforts. They should ask questions like whether the customer researched the product online before coming into the store to buy it and whether they had ever bought a product from the retailer’s Web site. This customer feedback helps retailers gauge the volume of cross-channel shoppers, gain insights into the categories that matter most to these customers,
and their current satisfaction level.

As always, should you have any questions or comments regarding this post please contact me at jon@sensorpro.net.

More on Mobile Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:02:00 +0000

Following on to my post from last week regarding using mobile surveys as a customer acquisition tool, there is a great article on eMarketing regarding the growth of marketing on mobile devices. You can read the article here (no subscription required for a short period of time).

The article gives some input on the potential growth in both total and advertising related revenues from mobile devices over the next five years.

However it also highlights one of the key issues facing marketers who are looking to penetrate this medium and that relates to who pays for the network delivery charges.

This is an exciting and quickly evolving medium and is one that no marketer, large or small, can ignore.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction at POS

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:36:00 +0000

Happy day after Thanksgiving, or more importantly we should say, we hope you have a successful Black Friday. This is one of the largest retail sales days of the year and how many of you really know what your company's customer satisfaction on this important day?

We talk to many clients who want to know things like:

did the consumer find what they expected,
was the merchandise presented well,
was the sales staff helpful,
was the pricing reasonable, and even
was there sufficient parking.

Do you have any method to capture customer satisfaction at the point of sale and would you find this information useful? For most companies the answer to the first question is no and the answer to the second is absolutely yes.

So how can you implement such a system, well it is easy using Mobile Surveys and Score Carding. Using the SensorPro Mobile Surveys you will set up a short survey that asks a limited number of questions that you want to capture at the point of sale. This should include capturing their email address, name, possibly zip code and of course you will want to include a Opt-In checkbox. Remember these are surveys deployed on mobile devices so keep the survey short and concise.

Next you will work with a SMS aggregator to have a short code established and linked to the SensorPro Survey application. At this point you are ready to deploy the survey and start capturing these opinions and demographic data.

So how do you deploy such a mobile survey, there are numerous methods. For example if you are a large department store, you can add to the bottom of the cash register receipt "Please tell us how we are doing just text 12345 with the keyword Help" or you can have the sales associate ask the customer if they would complete a short survey on their mobile phone. If you are a CPG company, you could put on your display at a retail store a note "Please tell us how you like our product and receive a free sample (or a coupon)". In this case you are also creating a follow up opportunity as you would be sending by postal mail a free sample or by email a coupon for a promotion. Deployment is easy, you just need to think of the possibilities.

The final step of the implementation is to define your Survey Score Card so you can easily evaluate the responses. In a typical implementation you will rate the various questions and you will give points to the various responses. Then when someone completes the survey a final score will be calculated and based on the total score or individual scores, triggered responses will be generated. For example, let's say that you decide that if someone responds that the sales associates were not helpful, then a SMS message is sent to the department manager for that specific store notifying them of the problem. Or if the response says that they could not find what they were looking for, you could email them with other locations or have them check out your on-line store. Again once you define the desired results and tolerance levels for the mobile survey, you can map out any number of potential responses.

Also I always recommend that when ever someone completes a mobile survey, you need to send to their email address a thank you follow up message. You want to let them know that you value their input and that the message is tailored to how they responded to your survey.

So what are the benefits of using Mobile Surveys and Score Carding. First you are getting almost real time feedback when the consumer is in the moment and not trying to remember what the quality of the experience was. Second, this is a great opportunity to capture additional email list contacts so that your digital marketing population is greatly expanded. Finally, you are showing that you care about your customers and their shopping experience. So what are you waiting for.

If you have any questions please leave a comment below or send me an email at jon@sensorpro.net.

del.icio.us Tags: survey , emarketing , email , mobile

When Customers Leave Your Site

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:07:00 +0000

There is a very interesting article from Shane Atchison on the ClickZ Network today. The article discusses the reasons that marketers need to know where and why customers leave their web site. The article also talks about some strategies that marketers can implement to get better information as to where and why customers "walk out the door".

One of the key strategies is to implement pop up surveys or after-the-fact email surveys so the marketer can learn more about the customer's behaviors. I would also add that it would be useful to offer some type of promotion for getting the customer to respond to the survey, including earning loyalty points that can be used for further purchases.

This is just another of the recent stream of articles and conferences that are raising the issue of using surveys in better understand your customer's behaviors and desires.

To read the article you can click here. If you have any questions please leave a comment below or send me an email at jon@sensorpro.net.

del.icio.us Tags: survey , emarketing , email

Why Use On-Line Surveys with Email Marketing Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (Jon of SMA) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:46:00 +0000

Recently I read a new research report from MarketingSherpa called "5 Reasons to Survey Customers with Email". The report had some very interesting observations that I wanted to summarize below:

Reason 1 - Email is a budget's best friend. Sure the cost of surveys delivered on-line are cheaper, but more importantly you have quicker turnaround time, better tracking of responses and real time reporting.

Reason 2 - Show customers that you care. The use of surveys can help create loyalty with your customers.

Reason 3 - You can contact customers in a timely fashion. It is always good to get customer feedback, but you need to consider the timing of the survey when you are engaging new customers.

Reason 4 - Re-engage infrequent customers. This can be an invaluable technique to show infrequent customers that you care and to offer them a discount to come back.

Reason 5 - Gather testimonials and constructive criticism.

The report also gives some average response rates to anticipate for a well-presented survey:

For prospects a click to completion rate between 1 and 5%
For customers a click to completion rate between 20 and 55%
For consumer marketers, open rates should be above 15% and click to completion rates of 25%
For B2B marketers, these rates should be even higher.

To read the entire report just click here (MarketingSherpa subscription required).

In our future postings on this site, we will be covering a far ranging set of topics, from using surveys as a lead and subscriber acquisition technique, building your subscriber list and loyalty programs using surveys, embedding surveys in rich media advertisements and using surveys with mobile devices, just to name a few. So subscribe to our feed or just check back often. Please feel free to leave a comment in response to this posting or send me an email at jon@sensorpro.net.

SKY Credit card

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:25:00 +0000

I just received an email newsletter from Sky offering me their Sky credit card from Barclays. I am one of Sky’s 300,000 customers in Ireland. They know this because it says so on my online profile. When I click on the offer it states, very clearly, that to be eligible I must live in the UK. They have my demographics so why didn’t they bother to segment properly? The net effect is brand damage for Sky and Barclays. Getting your customer preferences and demographic is one thing but using them properly is another. See http://url.ie/2p5

Listen, Don't Talk

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:24:00 +0000

It’s old news by now but users of gmail will have noticed that a delete button has been added to the email programme. Well, finally ! As one of the very first users of adwords and then gmail the lack of a delete feature annoyed me most. After playing around with adwords for a few weeks I wanted to get rid of my “experiments” –but it wouldn’t let me- Their version of delete was “Hide deleted items” but I wanted them gone and gone forever! It was one of my very first suggestions to Google on how to improve their product. Looking through some of the documents penned by the “Don’t be evil” technocrati I could see why they never want us to delete stuff. They have (or had?) a very trenchant view indeed. And a worrying lack of interest in customer feedback… I have no idea if they ever got my feedback –they certainly never responded- But this latest news shows that perhaps the folks at “Search, Don’t Sort” are starting to take heed of the folks at “Listen, Don’t Talk”

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:17:00 +0000

Last week Yahoo announced a new ad tracking service by partnering with Aegis PLC’s research unit MMA. The new service is based on econometric analysis that uses statistics to create a mathematical model of marketing situations. Microsoft’s approach is to utilize the demographic information provided by MSN. Google’s new analytic service has also caused a stir amongst analytic vendors such as Webtrends and Clicktracks. I’ve been reading a lot of the material coming from these announcements and the thrust of many is advert effectiveness, which some of these developments go some way towards answering. But are they simple?

There is nothing like working with clients directly to understand what the concerns are as of “right now”. And right now most of them are concerned about which of the adverts brought the customers they actually have. They are concerned with why, really, did you chose our product over the competition. They want to know which color you liked most and was the shape of the product important? Thinking about your next purchase should we make a red one or a blue one? Should it be this shape or that shape? Good things to know. Changing these aspects of a product -be it software, cosmetics, training shoes or a Digital camera- have a major impact down the line. Engineering don’t want guessing, they want precision. What better way to get precision than to ask the Customer? And better yet why not always provide the facility for the customer to provide feedback 24/7? And integrate it with the business processes? Focus groups and manual methods of marketing are increasingly expensive and take a long time to execute -sometimes longer to analyze-. That’s what is concerning our customers, right now.

Case in point. In the last few months, one of our major cosmetic customers were launching a new fragrance. Before they decided on a new bottle shape they employed a new type of focus group: Customers using SensorPro! The results were outstanding. 80% of respondents chose one shape and color over the other. So the product arrived on the market (for Christmas) with the knowledge that most people liked the look of it already and were able to avail of a sample too.

In the same campaign the initial “focus” group were a demographically targeted, segmented group of some 10,000 users of our customers products. Using the “Tell a Friend” feature of the email campaign, some 850,000 new subscribers opted-in. Wow! A lot of people ask “how do I increase my opt-in subscriber list in a responsible way?” Ask the Customer, I say.

So, Yes, Getting the answers sometimes requires the maths and the modeling but as this case proves, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”-Leonardo da Vinci-

Surveys are mainstream.

noreply@blogger.com (onlinemarketing) — Sun, 01 May 2005 09:00:00 +0000

it would seem that one of the staple tools of the market researcher, Surveys, is gone mainstream. Amongst the first to discover the benefits of web-based surveys -market researchers- they started to eliminate that big drawback of surveys: time consuming and costly.

They are now getting results in a more timely fashion so that they can be used meaningfully by their clients. One such market researcher from Ogilvy, who worked with us on the design of our SensorPro product, cited a project they had just completed for a major Bank “After launching the new savings product nationwide and collecting data from the call center and websites it took more than 3 months to collate the data. In fact we had to send in a small army of people with laptops to speed up the process. We would have changed several important aspects of the campaign if we had access to early feedback from customers”

This was not too long ago and was one of the major drivers behind the SensorPro survey product: design, deployment and metrics had to be fast and changeable so that campaigns could be fine tuned as they went along.Precious Asset.

Market researchers have cottoned on to this new way of doing things but they are not the only ones. Smart marketers in companies of all sizes know that loyal customers contribute to the bottom line and according to a recent Bain study "A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits upwards of 25%”.But we don’t need a study to tell us that losing customers due to a lack of knowledge about that customer will affect the bottom line. What we really know is that it’s just plain poor management of a company’s most precious asset: The Customer.

So what are the Smart marketers doing? Well, Coty for one, are building a Customer preference center so that they can learn more about their customers preferences and opinions. The first thing they are doing is asking questions so that when they communicate they know it’s a woman they are talking to and not a man. They know she likes Celine Dion but not Shania Twain. They also know that she drives a Volkswagen Toureg and not a Pickup truck. Even better, her name is Sue Baker, in her 30s, and she has told Coty this herself. To Coty, it might be a Customer preference center but to us, it’s just smart marketing.