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Surveys And Informal Questioning

email survey best practicesProspects and existing customers within your database can be great for a lot more than just one-to-one selling opportunities. In addition to building your community, up-selling and turning new customers into brand advocates, asking your followers targeted questions can provide you with tons of great insights. With effective surveys you can delve into their behaviors including where they hang out, who they talk to and in general how they buy products or services in your industry. That type of insight can help you determine why a specific line is not selling as well or even plan new lines that you know customers are willing and ready to buy today!

 

Creating A Survey:

If you’re looking for ideas and guidelines for how to build a super effective survey, I’d recommend visiting Survey Monkey’s 101 Course and spending the next few hours brushing up and testing out your research skills. They also have some great sample questions readily available in the survey builder that are Survey Monkey Approved. In fact, a few of the questions in our short survey below were pulled almost word for word from their question bank!

Fill out our survey here: Fungi Marketing Survey

 

Survey Automation Techniques:

So now that you’ve built your survey, you need to drive people to it. Often times if your survey might be about an upcoming new product launch, service or event, you will likely be sending out a time-sensitive email blast to your segmented audiences. However, creating a quality rolling survey or drip surveys can help you to benchmark and evaluate your customers’ impressions of you over time. Our survey above is an example of a simple performance and benchmarking questionnaire that allows us to keep track of changes in marketing interests, price importance, brand value, advocacy and more!

 

  1. Incorporating your survey as a part of a newsletter welcome drip campaign (ex: Be A Part Of Our Next Product Line – Quick Survey) is a great way to get prospects’ impressions of your business and ideas on how to turn them into customers.
  2. Using a survey email after a customer purchases (ex: Dear John, How Are We Doing?) can provide you with valuable insight into many aspects of their experience, from customer service to website ease of use or even why they bought from you versus a competitor.

 

As for the content in the body of your email, less is more. Because you are already asking them to dedicate some time to filling out your survey, we recommend you include a simple summary text and then a strong call to action button or link. Example:

 

Hi John!

As our valued customer, we want to make sure we’re doing the best job possible serving you. Please take 5 minutes to complete the satisfaction survey listed below.

Fill Out Survey Here!

Sincerely,

Fungi Marketing

 

Informal Questioning:

Informal questioning emails can be a great asset in gathering qualitative feedback from your subscribers in a way that is way more manageable for them. However, depending on the size of your organization or the complexity of your data collection this could be either relatively harmless or overwhelming on your end. The idea of informal questioning is to remove the steps and time it takes users to complete a task like filling out a survey and let them answer just one or two questions in their own words. In this instance, you would also provide a reply-to email address that was designated to field these responses (ex: customerfeedback@yourcompany.com). Below are some sample email subjects and body text suggestions:

  • Subject: 10% Off Coupon For Your Thoughts?
  • Body: Hi John, we were wondering if you’d mentioned us to any of your friends lately? Tell us about your conversion by replying to this email and we’ll send  back a special coupon just for you!

 

  • Subject: The Most Amazing Widget You Can Imagine
  • Body: Hi John, we are looking for the next big thing for our widget line. What are the top 3 features you’d love to see? Reply to this message with your thoughts.

 

We could go on and on with recommendations for informal questioning, but every business is different. One of the easiest ways to test this strategy out (versus full blown surveys) would be to grab one or two of your survey questions and turn them into a simple email request as shown above. Finally, test them out to see which variations have the best open and click thru rates as well as the best responses!

 

Interested in having our team put together a survey drip or other automated email program for you? Give us a ring at (919) 636-9835 or visit our contact page to fill out a quick quote form.