There is also a mini-case study that highlights just how effective email is as a research medium.

Why E-Mail for Research

Cost
A second-class stamp costs 20p, a telemarketer around £7 per hour and a data entry worker around £5.50 an hour. This excludes costs such as envelopes, printing, telemarketing database design and training of staff.

While e-mail is certainly not a free medium it is significantly cheaper than others. Specialists will be required to design the email, survey pages and develop the database to collect the results; the cost of this for any reasonable size campaign will pale into insignificance compared to the cost of either a telemarketer or someone to manually input the results.

Speed
Not only is email fast to send but the results are also collected in shorter time frames. Waiting for postal surveys to come back can take weeks and a telemarketer would take time to call your nominated sample. By using e-mail the majority of your surveys will be completed and available for analysis in less than 48 hours.

Easier to respond

E-Mail makes it easier for your customers to respond because:

• Your customer does not have to visit the post box
• They don’t have to spend time on the phone at an inconvenient time

Data Collection / Validity

Something that frustrates marketers are those customers that are willing to respond to your survey but either tick three boxes when asked to tick one or misinterpret questions asked by the telemarketer.

Email allows you to set-up rules on each question so if they are asked to tick one box then only one box can be ticked. This reduces the amount of spoiled data that is collected.

Reminders

Your survey is probably not the highest priority for your customers. If your telemarketer calls during a busy moment then they are likely to be told never to call again while your postal survey can easily get binned.

By using email you can send reminders so even if they decide not to or forget to complete it on the first email, additional reminder emails can be sent only to those that have not responded.

Tips for improving response

1) Embed short surveys into the Email

If you only have a few questions in your survey consider embedding the survey into the email. This will show your customers that only a short period of their time is required.

2) Personalise every aspect of the email message

Where you can personalise the email message. A recent survey we carried out for a travel company stated their name, the date the customer booked their holiday and the hotel they are due to stay in. Immediately this increases the relevance of the survey to the customer.

3) Pre-populate parts of the survey

Another way of reducing the work on behalf of the customer is to pre-populate survey fields. For example you should already know some details such as their name and address. Therefore there is no need for you to ask them again and increase the length of the survey. However by making this information viewable it gives them the opportunity to correct any information that is wrong.

4) Provide an Incentive

Everyone gets too many emails, phone calls and items of post every day. In order for your survey to get responded to you need to make it worthwhile for your customers to spend their precious time on answering your questions.

Incentives that work well for consumer email surveys include entries to a competition or prize draw, money off vouchers or a discount on their next order.

In business surveys this does not work as well – try using a donation to charity or the provision of information such as a specialist white paper.

5) Send reminders

As stated earlier people will forget about your survey. Create up to 3 reminder emails. You can then send these to only those that have responded and not unsubscribed. You can even increase the incentive in later emails to persuade more people to take part.

As a guideline for what you can expect from your reminder emails we generally find that the initial email we will generate 60-70% of the completed surveys. However we have seen cases where the response from reminder emails is higher then the initial email message.