Research, Rethought.

Customer Research, Rethought

Heinrich Responder Lab makes market research more actionable — on a much faster turn.

Right audience, right message, and right offer. Achieving the holy trinity of marketing success doesn’t just happen. If only you had some surveys or results from a focus group or a versioned test…RIGHT.

Customer research can reveal the access codes to the marketing land of plenty, but the mere mention of the word “research” conjures images of such massive quantities of time, money and resulting (confounding) data, it’s pie in the sky for many campaigns and marketing decision makers.

Heinrich customer research director John Schlagel says the way through that forest of data is through the Web.

Schlagel spearheads Heinrich Responder Lab; a Web-based customer research solution built for testing offers, creative, incentives and other variables — without printing versions, deploying versioned emails or holding focus groups.

“The beauty is you can see, before you mail a thing, not only what will get the response, but what ROI you’ll get,” says Schlagel. “It can also help you find the target audience you’re going after.”

“Responder Lab transforms customer research from a six-month ‘initiative’ to a streamlined, easy, fast, economical solution you can actually use,” agrees Heinrich Senior Vice President Sandi McCann. “It connects the data out there with what to do about it — how to use those stats to make informed marketing decisions.”

How Responder Lab cuts research down to size

Let’s say it’s banking and we’re looking for checking prospects. We’ll help identify demographics we’re targeting; then we recruit consumers to participate in an online survey to respond to different stimuli such as offer, product, creative, copy, messaging. They can view different options and respond to what’s relevant to them and what motivates them.

It is a very cost effective way to do a quantifiable test.  

Numbers don’t lie

“Typically a test that would cost $25K in-market for one option can be tested with more like seven options in Responder Lab for roughly the same amount of money,” says Schlagel. It’s a no-brainer, he points out, because “quantity drives so much of the cost in print direct mail.”

When one financial services client wanted to know which incentive to go with for a new-account acquisition campaign, “We were able to test gift cards vs. cash rebates vs. merchandise and other options,” says Schlagel. “We could not only see what got the best response/preference, but also what the overall ROI would be. This client had been almost set to go into market with one of these merchandise offers, and that incentive turned out to be the lowest performer.”

Here’s the slam-dunk: All this can be done on a fast-track by leveraging the quick-publish capabilities and Web forms that let you customize your questions, answers and formats, as well as include digital images of versioned creative, merchandise or other visuals. “It’s cost effective, quick-turn and highly flexible,” says Schlagel.

“Heinrich came up with this tool as a way to provide more value to our clients,” he adds. “We feel strongly about learning as much as we can about the target audience and their drivers. We saw that we could do that in an online environment and get insight not only into response, but also into ROI.”

But why didn’t $100 in cash inspire them to open an account?

Numbers may not lie, but they don’t always give you a complete picture either. “Sometimes you need to get into your customer’s head to really understand their purchase drivers,” notes Schlagel, who leads initiatives with Heinrich partners like Stratcom on qualitative customer research, such as in-depth interviews.

“Qualitative research helps fine-tune data results with behavioral insights — the whys and what-ifs behind consumers’ answers to more quantitative surveys,” says Schlagel. “We can even do a combination of qualitative and quantitative research using Responder Lab. For example, a researcher observes as people in a room answer the online survey using Responder Lab, and then interacts with them on how or why they answered a certain way. Or the researcher may pull some of them into a focus group afterward. This flexibility can really help you make informed decisions about what to take into market.”

Heinrich’s agile approach to customer research can also help your marketing team maximize resources with on-the-fly learnings and tweaks to your research projects. “Say you’re going to do four focus groups in different cities. Some might do them back to back in quick sequence,” Schlagel explains. “We may take learnings from round one and apply those to the next round to really fine-tune it. If 12 of 12 felt this way, I can clearly say it’s working or not working, so let’s not rehash that but instead put something else in front of them based on our learnings.”

Schlagel notes that Stratcom’s team is well aligned with Heinrich in terms of an international, high profile client list including Pepsi and MasterCard. “They can conduct your research in up to 24 different languages,” he says, “so multinational launches are easily accommodated.”

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