NEWS15 September 2009
US— Beta testing is underway for an online, on-demand survey tool called AskYourTargetMarket.com that allows users to quiz its consumer panel for as little as $29.95.
The firm claims that its new service is the “web’s first self-service market research tool” – different from such DIY survey tools as SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang in that it also provides sample.
Users are able to submit their own questions and choose which demographics take part in the survey, splitting them by age, salary, location and sex.
Respondents are sourced from a panel built through sister website InstantCashSweepstakes.com, which has around 40,000 registered users, 10,000 of which use the site regularly and are invited to take part in surveys.
Reminder emails are sent to respondents who do not reply to initial invitations, and depending on the package purchased, some questions will be repeated within a few hours to check that respondents give the same answers.
David Handel, AskYourTargetMarket’s managing director and co-founder, said: “We set out to create a service that heretofore didn’t exist. There are web applications offering self-service affordable email marketing, on-demand printing and online advertising. But none that provide the same inexpensive self-service on-demand benefits to target market research.”
Update – 16.09.09
An AskYourTargetMarket spokesman has come back to us to clarify some points following our discussions with them yesterday and the publication of the above report.
“Respondents are sourced from a panel built through sister website InstantCashSweepstakes.com, which has around 40,000 registered users, 10,000 of which use the site regularly and are invited to take part in surveys.”
We have an average of tens of thousands of users in our consumer panel, average of 40-50k unique visitors to ICS site per month and 2.3 million completed surveys so far.
“Reminder emails are sent to respondents who do not reply to initial invitations…”
On InstantCashSweepstakes.com, we allow users to answer five [surveys]. After they wait 3 hours, they can begin taking surveys again. We do this because users accumulate ‘lottery tickets’ by answering surveys that go into a drawing for cash. So we let them answer five at a time, then we send the reminder email to them that they can come back and answer surveys again. So users come to InstantCashSweepstakes.com of their own volition, we do not as of yet send out emails about available surveys but we are working on other ways to approach and engage them when they are away from their computers.
“…and depending on the package purchased, some questions will be repeated within a few hours to check that respondents give the same answers.”
This is correct, referring to the Doublecheckd feature on AskYourTargetMarket.com, but is completely unrelated to sending out emails to people on ICS to let them know they can come and answer surveys again. Also, users of ICS specifically request to be sent reminder emails of when they can play again.