Here's another (cheaper, although possibly less realistic) approach to this: I recently did some market research using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and added a lead collection form as a bonus.
I put up a simple survey asking users about relevant background information and their experience with the problem my application is trying to solve. Included in this survey was a field to collect the user's email address. This field was very clearly marked as optional (it even appeared after the confirmation code that allowed turkers to complete the "HIT") and the label included something like "Your answers to this survey will help us to evolve the website to better meet your needs. If you'd like to be notified when the new site launches, please enter your email address here." along with an indication that users would receive exactly one email from us due to this form.
I was pretty pleased with the results of the survey--I received a lot of actionable information very quickly and cheaply (at about $0.10 per response) and I was pleasantly surprised that a little more than 10% of the respondants entered what looks like a valid email address.
I don't expect many of those 10% to convert (and lead generation wasn't the point of the excercise anyway) but I was very happy with the ROI on this survey.
Seeing who clicks on ads (and at with what copy) and later "soft" converts may be a more realistic test, but the MTurk approach is an order of magnitude less expensive.
I put up a simple survey asking users about relevant background information and their experience with the problem my application is trying to solve. Included in this survey was a field to collect the user's email address. This field was very clearly marked as optional (it even appeared after the confirmation code that allowed turkers to complete the "HIT") and the label included something like "Your answers to this survey will help us to evolve the website to better meet your needs. If you'd like to be notified when the new site launches, please enter your email address here." along with an indication that users would receive exactly one email from us due to this form.
I was pretty pleased with the results of the survey--I received a lot of actionable information very quickly and cheaply (at about $0.10 per response) and I was pleasantly surprised that a little more than 10% of the respondants entered what looks like a valid email address.
I don't expect many of those 10% to convert (and lead generation wasn't the point of the excercise anyway) but I was very happy with the ROI on this survey.
Seeing who clicks on ads (and at with what copy) and later "soft" converts may be a more realistic test, but the MTurk approach is an order of magnitude less expensive.