About a month ago, it was announced that I have taken on the new role of GM and SVP of Lyris Asia Pacific. I’m very excited to be joining Team Lyris. As an agency customer working with Lyris for the past 5 years, we’ve been leading market research and direct marketing companies on how to improve engagement with consumer audiences to find out more about them. As a specialist agency, we were often the focal point in developing market research style questionnaires and populating the panels to participate.

As a best practice in Australia, it is common for external agencies and publishers that have the same objectives to collaborate in attracting the right panel participants for market research and direct marketing campaigns.

We never buy lists. This is a major no, no! In essence we have two sets of customers, our end users and the market researchers or direct marketers who want to reach this audience. For this reason, partnering with other publishers is the norm. Collaboration with multiple publishers and media types enables you to grow your audience in a meaningful way, attract a more diverse range of audience and to deepen the insights about your overall audience.

Have you considered the opportunities that may arise from partnering with aligned publishers or networks?

We have spent years focusing on and developing opt-in programs and database designs that suit both the advertiser and consumer needs. Realizing that consumers have a very low tolerance for questions that are not relevant to them, and will very quickly exit a questionnaire midstream, it’s important to have a questioning methodology that makes the interaction meaningful. For example, employing conditional logic to produce an elegant opt-in design.

How does design strategy and methodology in opt-in methodology result in better engagement?

First, there is a need to understand who your audience is. Who do you think you are talking to? Designing a survey or market research questionnaire in a way that embraces relevant information upfront is critical for success. We speak with many consumers and marketers and the common feedback, is, “the survey was so in depth and completely off the mark, I exited midstream- even though I was originally interested in participating.”

How can you develop a survey or questionnaire that engages users?

Segmentation is the Key to Hitting the Right Audience
Understanding the goals and purpose of your research is critical. Once you understand what you are trying to achieve you can then focus on who your target is. The only way that you can accurately match a brief from an agency or research-marketing house is to have the data to meaningfully segment your audience.

Elegant Opt-In Design
Design the opt-in or empanelling questionnaire to flow in such a way that occurs to the end user as natural and conversational. Don’t spend 20 questions asking someone about their place of work when they have indicated that they are retired or in school.

Use Conditional Logic
Just like a math exam or any other kind of qualitative test, conditional logic is, if this, then that. Simply put, in opt-in and database design it means that we can show questions that become relevant based on previous answers. So if someone says they have four kids at home we can open up a set of questions about the children in the house. If they indicate they are a 21 year old student we can hide those questions.

Engage with Attitudinal Questions
Asking questions that immediately engage and provide insight into how your audience feels about something, provides you with key behavioral data. For example, two questions can produce very different results:

I typically go along with the rules and do what I’m told”, versus, “I do not like following rules”

By developing the questions to engage you will receive a better result through honest response. How the consumer answers attitudinal questions can provide you insight into many areas such as their likelihood to engage with a particular brand or message.

Ask Only the Relevant Questions
While this may seem obvious, here lies the most missed opportunity from survey start. If you are targeting women, that have indicated already they are not interested in sports, and you ask them to rank their top five sports and then further question from there, they will exit the survey.

Producing Insight
The results, as we’ve experienced, can be quite stunning. We have a higher level of engagement of the end user because the end user is much more receptive of the message, and consequently the ISP’s are happy to receive mails from our address. Think about this as being no different than what you would do with search engine optimization. Simply put, in SEO, the more relevant you are, the higher you rank.

With elegant opt-in, conditional logic, engagement and relevancy you can provide market research and direct marketing communication that engages consumer audiences and results in finding out more data about your audience and be able to use it for many purposes as you continue to develop your relationship. With segmentation, you will be able to slice and dice the data and define further, the perfect communication.

Now that I’m a part of Team Lyris, I’ll be posting on this blog regularly so be sure to follow @Lyris and stay connected!

Register for this week’s Webinar: Email Deliverability 2011: Defined, Deconstructed and Debunked

Thursday, July 21, 2011 10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern