Online and postal data collection methods: a comparative study

Computer-mediated marketing research has been enthusiastically embraced by marketing organisations and those servicing them, for many reasons. While researchers using the Internet (Net) and World Wide Web (Web) in its early years reported benefits such as high response levels, there are now issues in this regard. This paper reports on the outcomes of a probabilistic study involving football club members (subscribers) involving both postal and online (e-mail invitation and HTML Web form) data collection methods. The paper reports differences in both the response pattern and demographic profile of respondents between the groups such as to warrant further examination of the methods used in online marketing research, and to suggest the need for further study.