Five easy steps to improve your next customer survey
Emailing an online survey is a very cost-effective way to get useful, and timely, feedback from customers. However, it is easy to concentrate on getting the perfect questionnaire and assume your list of customer emails will simply deliver. So before you hit [Send] to email invitations for your next customer survey, read through Surveylab's five pointers below.
1. Prepare your customers to take part!
Setting the expectations of your respondents is very important (you should be doing this anyway when the customer gives their email address and "opts-in" to receive communications). Inform your customers that you are conducting a customer survey, so if they receive an email asking for their views - they are expecting it.
Similarly, you might include information about the survey on customers' order confirmation emails, or promoted on the website or in a newsletter. If calling Customer Services, ask if they would be prepared to take part and record their email address.
Once customers know they might be asked to take part in a survey, ensure emails are sent in a timely manner. In the same way that customers look out for the order confirmation email soon after making a purchase, they are more likely to identify the survey email and click through, than ignore/delete the message or treat it as spam.
2. Send a personalised and dedicated email invitation
In this day and age of opted in newsletters and e-commerce sites welcoming back repeat visitors, there is no excuse for sending an email to your customers starting Dear Sir/Madam/Customer/Valued Customer...
A personalised email, even if it only contains Dear Name on the first line, gets a better response than emails that start Dear Customer (or worse, Dear Valued Customer!).
Likewise, a dedicated email about "our customer satisfaction survey" and nothing else means there is only one single call to action. Focus attention into the invitation rather than 'piggy back' on other marketing communications.
Avoid tagging the survey link as a story in your monthly newsletter because while it might generate a fair response, it is rarely as effective as a single message in a dedicated email.
3. Get customer feedback soon after the event, not 11 months later
If you are fielding an annual survey, don't pull customer contact details from almost a year ago.
As email lists grow older, the number of 'bad' addresses increase (20% is not uncommon). This can have an impact on deliverability to the 'good' addresses, but it also raises what exactly will the customers recall and how relevant is this experience to the organisation today?
4. Make your email stand out - use your brand!
Your email must compete with a lot of other messages landing in the customer's mailbox. If the customer has just made a purchase, they are more likely to open messages from your organisation. Follow your organisation's communications tactics and use the same format for sending your survey invite.
If the display name in the 'From' field reads ACME products, don't send an email from
Betty Jones, Customer Experience Director
- use something like
ACME products, Betty Jones or ACME products (Feedback).
5. Exceed Expectations
For every few hundred emails we send for a client's customer survey, we get one hand-written reply mailed back to us; perhaps describing their experience, why they won't fill in the survey, asking for support or a follow-up, or simply to say good job and thank you.
If you can respond to these emails and not let them vanish into the ether, you are showing your customers that you are human and their feedback really is important. They might just tell their family and friends, and now your survey may also being helping to build customer loyalty, rather than just measure it!
Managing email invites is a crucial stage of conducting a customer survey online. Plan this task from the beginning when you are designing the survey and deciding on questions, not as an afterthought at the end! With a little planning and know-how, your next survey could have a far greater level of response.
Read more resources for online surveys here.
Learn about Surveylab