How to do research on a company?

How should I prepare a research based internship report wherein my internship, my sole job, was to pitch e-mails to CEO's of South African IT companies about services offered by my company (lead generation, website design etc.)?

• I have the e-mail list of CEO's of small to mid size IT companies... My point is how can I mold this information into a research, what would be the research methodology, design, problem definition and all the essential elements of a Market research?

• Answer:

  This looks like a very interesting internship. Your research can produce valuable insights for many lead generation aspects. I am trying to list down few of them. You can pick one or many and figure of methodology, problem definition etc. 1. Email Provider related statistics - You can provide information about few email providers which you should have researched before sending those bulk emails. You can provide details about ease of use, blacklisting of servers etc. 2. Email statistics & parameters - Based on analytics of emails like delivered, opened etc. you can provide insights about what kind of emails are opened most. I assume that you should use multiple version of emails and send those emails in batches to understand behaviour of recipients. You can publish this data and it can provide great insights to marketers. 3. Effects of personalisation on Email results - You can try some personalisation based on attributes of prospects e.g. You can greet them with name and add "Hope <location_of_prospect> have great weather today" and see how many people respond on those emails. You can publish data against it. 4. Top concerns of CEOs with Lead generation/Website agencies - You can also include a link for surveying those ceos and ask them very limited set of questions like Top concerns they have with lead generation/website agencies. It can provide great insights to your company about how to overcome those concerns and win more customers in that geography.