Elevate Your Business with Effective Survey Emails

6 Reasons Survey Emails Are a Must for Every Company

Survey emails hold the key to a treasure of business intelligence and here’s why you should start using survey emails now (if you haven’t done it yet):

1. Customer engagement. Survey emails open a dialogue with customers, showing them that their opinion is valuable. This is an opportunity to engage customers directly and build relationships by asking for their thoughts, suggestions, and criticisms. Such emails foster loyalty, leading to a higher customer retention rate and greater lifetime value.
2. Data-driven decisions. The responses garnered from survey emails can be leveraged to make informed business decisions, be it refining a product, improving service, or aligning marketing efforts more closely with customer needs. 
3. Product improvement. The feedback you receive can give you key insights into what customers think about your product or service. It can illuminate areas of excellence as well as highlight areas that may require improvement. This enables you to refine your offerings based on real customer feedback, ensuring your products or services remain competitive and aligned with customer needs.
4. Benchmarking performance. Survey emails can be utilized as a benchmarking tool, allowing you to measure your company’s performance against competitors or industry standards. This can highlight competitive gaps and reveal opportunities to enhance unique selling propositions.
5. Predicting customer behavior. If you ask the right questions, you’re likely to get insights into customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns. This can help you predict future customer behavior and tailor your offers and marketing efforts accordingly.
6. Building brand advocates. When customers feel their opinion is valued and their feedback has a tangible impact, they are more likely to champion the brand to others, promoting organic growth and strengthening your company’s reputation.

What to Ask About in Your Survey Email?

Survey emails can be designed to explore various facets of customer experience. To make a decent survey, start with identifying the problem your survey should solve.

When you identified the problem, it’s time to formulate a hypothesis. At this stage, you should come up with some ideas that will help you solve the problem. Compare the two variants:

• “Delivery time is important for clients”
• “Delivery time is more important for customers than free shipping X times”

Which of them will give you a better understanding of the situation? Make sure that your hypothesis isn’t too obvious. Your hypothesis should be measurable: this way, after conducting the research, you’ll understand what is vital for your clients and what type of services you should pay attention to.

When the hypothesis is ready, you should select the target audience. For example, instead of sending your survey email to all of your subscribers, you may send it only to the ones who purchased from your brand. At this stage, you need to make sure that the problem and the hypothesis are chosen for this exact segment. 

After that, you’re ready to formulate the questions you’ll incorporate into the survey email. We’ve gathered 4 types of questions that may help you make up your mind:

1. Customer Satisfaction: This is one of the most common purposes for a survey email. Ask how satisfied the customer is with your product or service, and what could be improved.
2. Product Feedback: Ask specific questions about your product or service. What features do they love? What could be improved or added? The best way to use this type of question in your survey emails is to send after-purchase emails. In this case, the customers will be more likely to leave feedback no matter whether they liked the purchase or not (people are even more likely to share their thoughts if they didn’t like something about the product). 
3. Brand Perception: Understand how customers perceive your brand. Do they view your brand positively or negatively? How does your brand compare to competitors? Although comparing your company to other companies in the industry can be useful, you may also give users some alternatives to your own products. Think about whether this information is vital before implementing it into your survey emails. 
4. Net Promoter Score (NPS): The NPS is a simple question asking the customer how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend or colleague. This single question can provide a wealth of insight into customer loyalty. Besides, when you don’t overwhelm subscribers with too many questions, they’re much more likely to answer. To those respondents who say that they would be happy to recommend your products or services to a friend, you may send referral emails offering this opportunity.

Of course, this list is not exhaustive. Analyze your audience, choose the right KPIs, and formulate the questions that will allow you to measure these KPIs: this way, your survey emails will give you a lot of food for thought.

How to Make Your Survey Perfect: 6 Tips

Creating the perfect survey email can seem daunting, but fear not. Here are six tried and tested tips to guide you through this process:

1. Perfect timing. Timing is everything. Analyze the behavioral patterns of your subscribers and send survey emails at a time when your audience is most likely to respond.
2. Audience segmentation. One size does not fit all. Segment your audience and tailor your surveys to meet the unique needs of each group.
3. Test your survey. Before you send out your survey to thousands of customers, test it with a smaller group first. Make sure the questions are clear and that the survey works properly.
4. Clear objective. Each survey should have a clear goal. Keep this in mind when drafting your questions.
5. Feedback loop. Show respondents how their feedback has led to tangible changes. This will encourage participation in future surveys. Besides, companies rarely show the results of the surveys, keeping the audience unaware: this may let you stand out from the rest.
6. Keep it anonymous. Anonymity can encourage honesty. Let your recipients know their responses will be anonymous if applicable (especially if you want subscribers to describe what they don’t like about your company or ask questions that could make them feel insecure).

With these tips in mind, you’re bound to create a top-notch survey for your survey email template.

How to Embed a Survey in an HTML Email Template

There are several ways to embed a survey into your email, and the best method depends on the length of your survey and your audience’s preferences. Here’s what you can do:

1. Hyperlink to an online survey platform. You can include a hyperlink in your email that directs recipients to an online survey platform such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Typeform. To encourage the subscribers to take part in your survey, add a brief description with a CTA button to your survey email.
2. Embed inline survey questions. Using HTML forms, you can embed short surveys directly within the email itself. This is especially useful for simple surveys like NPS, where only one question is asked. Use radio buttons, checkboxes, or dropdown menus to allow recipients to select their responses.
3. Use a feedback rating system. Instead of a traditional survey, you can include a rating system in your email template. Utilize star ratings, smiley faces, or thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons to gather feedback.

How to Embed a Survey in an Email with Blocks

With Blocks, our no-code drag-n-drop email builder, embedding surveys into email templates is just a matter of a few clicks. 

If you want to embed a one-question survey right within the template, here’s what you should do:

1. Go to the “Blocks” section on the right, click on the “Select type” button, and find “Polls”.