Return On Email Subscriber

You’ve all been told how you need to start segmenting your lists and sending more relevant emails to yoru subscribers. Here is an out-of-the-box example from HornyToad.com (who just opened the very cool Lizard Lounge store in PDX).

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How they will determine what to send me from this, who knows.

But I found this to be a fun excerise and break from the same old routine. Think of ways you can get creative to engage your customers this year.

Today I spoke at the Houston AMA on market research and one of the questions that came up is how much should you research your opt-in list compared to going to an external list and qualifying them. Some of the discussion surrounded the purity of market research and how you should focus on blind surveying, “who” should ask for the survey (you or the MR firm), and if you should even consider using your own list.

I worked at Gartner for 5 years managing custom primary research projects for clients like Dell, Microsoft and HP. During that time I did not think even consider in-house lists because of th the “biased” nature of the list. Now running marketing campaigns for similar companies I have found that in-house lists are comprised of those people with interest in your company, so wouldn’t you want to get their feedback first? So why is there such a polarizing effect between marketing and market research? Why can’t they work together? Isn’t the end goal to craft messaging and products to sell more? Aren’t both pieces of information important?