Surveys can provide your business with invaluable insights into how you’re performing, what customers like, and what they want in future products and services. But before you send out an email survey, make sure you understand how to get the most out of your efforts.
The Power of Email Surveys
Surveys can be deployed in a number of ways – including via social media, your website, snail mail, or phone. So what makes email surveys the preferred choice? Well, it comes down to a few reasons:
- Simple. It doesn’t get much simpler than an email survey. Within a matter of clicks, you can send your survey out to hundreds or thousands of people and begin gathering data. Trying to collect this much information via social media or your website requires far more time and resources.
- Cost-effective. The cost of sending an email is almost nothing. Compare that to the cost of driving paid traffic to a landing page or paying a team of people to all your customer list and the choice is obvious.
- Scalability. The beauty of an email is that it’s scalable. Whether you have 100 people on your list or 100,000, sending out a survey is just as simple. There’s no need to complicate things!
- Transparency. People are much more likely to answer questions truthfully when they know their responses are being recorded anonymously via software (versus having to provide a verbal answer to someone over the phone).
When you add all of these factors together, it becomes clear that email surveys are the way to go. But in order to maximize your ROI, you’ll need to get a few things right.
4 Email Survey Tips
Simply sending an email survey isn’t enough to guarantee results. You’ll need to execute with precision. Here are a few helpful tips:
1. Write Better Subject Lines
Do you know what the goal of the email subject line is? It’s to get people to open the email. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many marketers and business owners neglect the subject line until it’s time to hit “send.”
The average person receives dozens of emails every single day – they aren’t anxiously awaiting yours to arrive in their inbox. If your subject line doesn’t give the recipient a reason to open the email, they’ll ignore it. (Which means they’ll also ignore your survey.)
Good email subject lines are unique, urgent, useful, and ultra-specific. The more you can include these variables, the better your open rates will be.
2. Embed the Survey in the Email
Friction is the enemy of conversions. The more steps you require a person to take in order to fill out your survey, the lower your response rate will be. This includes asking someone to click a link in order to visit a web page with a survey. A better option is to embed the survey. There are a few platforms that make this possible, like Delighted.
Delighted surveys can be directly embedded into the body of the email without requiring any extra clicks. This improves survey results by reducing the amount of friction a customer must go through to actually fill out the survey.
3. Structure Questions Properly
Be smart about how you structure questions in a survey. The goal is to get the customer or prospect to answer as many questions as possible, which helps provide robust data. With that being said, lead with simple questions that are easy to answer (ideally using multiple choice or rating scales). Wait until the end to include optional free-response questions.
4. Incentivize Results
Sometimes people need a kick in the pants to fill out a survey. If you find this to be true, consider incentivizing the survey with a small reward. Discount codes and free samples work really well for most businesses.
Winning With Email Surveys
Email surveys provide an excellent avenue for customer feedback. But if you want to make the most out of these surveys, you’ll need a plan for putting these insights into action. Take the time to meet with your team over the next week or so and develop a survey response strategy, so that you’re ready to move when the time is right. It won’t always be easy or effortless, but it will be worth it.
