When it comes to gathering customer feedback via surveys, email is one of the best channels on the market. However, most businesses miss out on gathering as much feedback as they should, simply because they don’t know how to optimize their surveys. By learning how you can gain an advantage over the competition.
In this resource article, we speak to leading email marketing experts from Klean Leads, a tool that helps you find and extract emails. In this day and age of multiple digital marketing strategies, email marketing continues to offer the highest ROIs. If you want to build your email marketing teams and benefit from precisely executed campaigns, read this article till the very end.
Get Better Email Survey Results With These 5 Tips
Surveys are highly effective customer research tools. They allow you to go straight to your customers and gather real-time, firsthand data. You can do this via any number of channels, but email tends to generate superior results (when compared to other options like social media).
Here are some ways to get more out of your email surveys:
1. Write Better Email Subject Lines
Most surveys get deleted from a customer’s inbox before the message is even opened. And this typically has to do with the subject line.
Whether it’s a survey or not, the email subject line is usually the determining factor in whether or not someone opens a message. Generic, vague, and predictable subject lines do not move the needle. This includes ones like:
- Please take our survey
- Fill out our survey
- Customer satisfaction survey
- We’re collecting feedback
- Let us know what you think
If you want someone to open an email, you have to evoke curiosity, play to their emotions, and make them see the value in clicking. Better options would include:
- Quick favor?
- Can you do me a solid, George?
- Quick survey = 20% off
- Are you happy or disappointed?
- We want to hear from you, Mary…
These are just a few examples – but do you see how much better they are than the original ideas? Getting people to open your email surveys is half the battle. If you’re successful with this part, you’ll have a much better chance of getting people to actually fill out the survey.
2. Personalize Your Email
When building an email list, it’s important that you also collect each customer’s first name. This allows you to personalize your emails and make them feel more relevant to the recipient.
When someone sees or hears their name, research shows that it grabs their attention and compels the brain to focus on the message. With that being said, always use the customer’s first name somewhere within the greeting or first sentence of the email. Any major email marketing platform can do this automatically using something known as a “tag.”
3. Get Straight to the Point
Don’t waste time or space set up the surveyor creating a bunch of contexts. The sooner you get to the survey, the better results you’ll get. Try a quick one- or two-sentence introduction followed by the survey.
4. Reduce Friction
As you know from your own online experiences, people are quick to jump ship when they encounter friction. If you want to get better engagement and more responses from your email surveys, you have to be proactive about reducing and eliminating unnecessary points of friction.
For example, think about the number of clicks involved in the process. The typical process requires someone to open their email inbox, click on the email, and click on a “take survey” button (which opens a new page in their internet browser and requires several more clicks to complete the survey). A better alternative would be to embed surveys into your emails, which limits the number of clicks required and increases response rates.
5. Offer an Incentive
Customers are always asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” And while a survey might seem like a pretty simple task, most customers aren’t going to respond if they don’t feel like there’s some tangible benefit for them. This is where incentives come into play.
Incentives can be powerful motivators, but they should be properly optimized and aligned with the survey. Short surveys, for example, might not warrant much more than a 10 percent off coupon. Long surveys, on the other hand, could command a much steeper discount, reward, or free offer.
Adding It All Up
Before sending out an email survey, picture yourself as the customer. If you were to receive this survey in your inbox, would you fill it out? Would you even open it?
It’s easy to become attached to your survey, but you have to remember that you’re blinded by bias. Nobody else cares about your business as much as you do. If you don’t make your surveys ultra-compelling, you’ll fail to get the feedback needed to produce meaningful data that generates actionable insights.
Implement the insights above and get serious about crafting better surveys.
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