Today’s Market Research Is Fast, Affordable, and User Friendly

Ruby Tuesday Pick of the Week: Zoomerang
Why It’s a Gem: Traditional methods of market research get tossed out the browser window as the Internet offers cheaper, faster methods

Not so long ago, businesses had to shuck out tens of thousands of dollars to learn what their customers thought of their product or new idea. Not only that, but it could take months – even years – before they saw results.

In recent Ruby Tuesdays, we’ve seen how the Internet is making the marketplace a level playing field by introducing technologies that are affordable to businesses of all sizes. From legal documents to customer service, businesses have a wide array of options to replace the antiquated methods of the past. This week, we see how one company has helped revolutionize the way businesses do market research.(This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Lynda Resnick: In this week’s Ruby Tuesday, we are speaking with Dave Deasy, General Manager of Zoomerang, one of my favorite companies in the whole World Wide Web. Dave, for our readers, can you describe your business model?

Dave Deasy: Simply put, we are in the business of selling online survey products. Zoomerang has been around for ten years, and in fact, this coming September is our ten-year anniversary.

LR: Happy anniversary! How many people visit your site every month?

DD: We get, in a typical month, a million and a half visitors. The [majority] are people using the product, but a significant subset of them are people coming to check [out] and order the product. We have well over a million register users, and that includes both the free version of the product and the paid version.

LR: Can you describe what the free version offers?

Dave Deasy, General Manager of Zoomerang

DD: Sure. Today we have three versions of the product: the free version, which we call Zoomerang Basic, and two pay versions, one that we call Zoomerang Pro and one we call Zoomerang Premium. All three products fundamentally do the same thing. They are all designed to enable you to quickly and easily create online surveys that you can use to collect feedback on virtually any topic you can think of. All of the products are designed for you to quickly and easily create and deploy your surveys and analyze the results.

The difference between the free version and the paid versions, as you can guess, [is that there are] additional features in the pay versions of the products, which allow you to do more advanced analysis and reporting. Most of the people who use the free version of the product fall into one of two camps. They are either people who are using the product for personal use – a book club or soccer team or some kind of activity like that – or [they are] people who want to kick the tires and determine whether or not an online survey product is going to be right for them.

LR: Years ago when I first started in business, in order to do a survey, you had to start with a focus group. You would then move on to a survey by telephone or by mail, or in person. By the time you got the results, they were so old and so expensive. It [cost] thousands and thousands of dollars to do a decent survey on an important product, [as much as] $60-$150 thousand dollars. In the end, you didn’t even know if the information was still relevant, because it took so long to get it together. [Speed of information] is one of the greatest things that technology has given businesses in the 21st century. Did you invent this concept of an online research company?

DD: Yes. Zoomerang was the pioneer in this space, and when we launched back in 1999, we were the first product in the marketplace that [offered] online surveys.

LR: Do you help customers write the surveys?

DD: We do. We do that in a couple of ways. We actually provide a range of templates that are available with the product – everything from customer-satisfaction topics to employee-feedback topics. There are also times when people may need additional help, so for an additional fee, we can actually get involved with helping someone write a survey. We have another part of the parent company, MarketTools, that actually does market research for companies, so we [also offer] full-service market research. We actually have market researchers on staff that we can tap into to provide guidelines, so the templates we provide are actually backed up by professional market researchers.

LR: Do any large companies use your service?

DD: They do. We don’t necessarily reveal the names of the company users, primarily for confidentiality reasons, but we have about 70-plus percent of the Fortune 500 that use our product. [If] you pick an industry, I can guarantee you three out of every four players in that industry are going to use us, [whether that be] financial services, high-tech, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, etc.

At the same time, even though we have a very large penetration in big companies, we [have an] equally large penetration in small business. One of the beauties about a product like Zoomerang is that it is equally appropriate for the one-person consulting firm as it is for a Fortune 500 company.

LR: At Teleflora, we are doing research every day. I’m wondering what you could offer [a business like mine]. For instance, we test bouquets with florists and consumers. If I said I wanted to conduct a survey with women 35-55 with a median income of $75 thousand a year who have bought flowers once in the last year, could you deliver that to me?

DD: We actually can. We are unique in that we not only have the self-serve tool, Zoomerang, but we also have one of the world’s largest online panels, which is exactly what you described. We have almost three million, opted-in, highly qualified [survey members]. If you are doing a customer-satisfaction survey, you know who you need to survey: It’s your customer list. But when you are talking about new product ideas, you often need to identify a list of individuals that meet specific criteria. We have an offering we call the Zoom Panel that does exactly that. We have over 500 different attributes we profile the people on.

LR: Wonderful! What would it cost me to test with a statistically significant sample to find out if an idea resonated with consumers?

DD: A lot depends on the exact attributes that you define. As you can imagine, the more specific or more obscure the client you are trying to reach, the [more] cost goes up. [If you are] targeting the general population, as we like to call it, you’re [in] the low end, [roughly] $5-$10 range per complete sample [i.e., a fully completed survey, as opposed to an unfinished survey]. From there, it depends on how statistically significant you [want] to get. I think most of our clients probably start off looking at [a minimum of] 200 completes, [so] you’d be looking at something that could be as low as $2,000.

LR: So, for $2,000, you could find out if your idea resonated with the marketplace.

DD: Exactly. And the pricing will go up from there based on if you needed additional completes or if you were looking for more of a niche audience.

LR: What can you get for free? Let’s talk about the free services.

DD: You actually get quite a bit for nothing! In the Zoomerang Basic product, [you have access to online tools] that let you create surveys, deploy the surveys, and start analyzing [real-time] results, all in a matter of minutes. So, literally within a couple of hours, people [can start seeing] real results.

We let you have up to 30 questions, which is a pretty good-length survey. We do limit you to 100 completes, [which usually isn’t enough for] a more detailed market-research project. We don’t provide some of the robust reporting capabilities, and we don’t provide some of the robust analytic capabilities that come with the paid version of the product, but I [like to say that] a hundred respondents is way better than zero. If you are trying to make a decision about a multi-million-dollar product launch, you probably don’t want to rely on the free version of the product. The beauty of the paid versions is, even though there’s a cost involved, it’s still incredibly cost effective. Zoomerang Professional is $200 a year – less than a dollar a day.

LR: Do you get unlimited research for that?

DD: Yes, unlimited surveys and unlimited responses. [For] half the cost of your latte, you can have actual reports.

LR: Wow! Tell me what social media has done for your business. My companies use it constantly as a research tool. Through Twitter, we’ve discovered that FIJI Water has a cult following. I don’t think we ever realized how much the product means to our customers. Are you doing anything in the social media realm?

DD: Absolutely. It impacts our business in two ways. First and foremost, we are embracing social media as a way of further propagating the Zoomerang brand. We have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, we have a blog, and we are using all of those as ways of establishing new channels to reach out to our customers, as a way of communicating information to them. But it’s also becoming a powerful way of communicating back to us. [In the past, customers would] either pick up the phone or send us an email. Now, by allowing people to communicate with us the way they want, we are finding that we are getting a lot more rich and robust feedback. It’s opening up whole new communication channels for us.

The other way [social media is] starting to impact us is [dissemination methods]. Historically, online surveys were predominantly distributed by email, or [through a link on a website]. We are finding that LinkedIn and Facebook are becoming the places where people go to communicate with their friends and colleagues. So, we are looking at how to evolve our products [beyond email] and to survey people through social networks. A couple months ago, we launched a polling application on Facebook. Now, for free, Facebook members can poll other individuals within their network on any topic or question. That’s the initial foray into extending Zoomerang into the social media space, and we are going to build upon that.

LR: That’s fabulous. How have your sales gone with the recession?

DD: Overall sales have been very good. Year to date, we are actually running in double-digit growth over 2008, which is great. Now more than ever it’s important to make the right business decision. You can’t afford to guess and get it wrong. What business can’t afford one dollar a day for our full product?

LR: Exactly! It’s an investment.

DD: Not enough people understand the power of a survey tool like Zoomerang, and [they] don’t quite know Zoomerang exists. How do we get the other 90% of the population to become aware of the power of these types of tools and what it can do for them?

LR: You have to get out there. You have to hit the road. You should try to get on Larry King. I also think you guys should write a book and start doing podcasts and things like that to get your name out there, because people are afraid of market research. It isn’t that they don’t think it’s important. They are intimidated. They don’t realize that you will take their hand and walk them through it. Try and get on whatever kind of broadcast you can, do the talk shows, get your name out there. Broadcast still works. You can’t send a press release and expect anyone to do anything with it; they throw it in the trashcan.

It was lovely talking to you.

DD: Thank you.