Enabler provide best practice advice around utilising email surveys within your B2B and B2C email marketing communications.

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Do you want to learn more about your audience and enhance the quality of your data? Surveys are a great tool to gather valuable insights and information, allowing you to collect enriched data in both a formal and informal fashion.. Capturing data from your customers allows you to really personalise your email campaigns, allowing you to  target your customers with more relevant marketing content. Ultimately,  this should improve your overall open rates and engagement level.

But beware, when it comes to email surveys there are some common mistakes that are easy to make…

 

Here are seven helpful pointers that will help you on your way to pulling off a great email survey.

1. Write Concise Questions To Get Accurate Answers

Make your questions easy to understand by being to the point and use simple, everyday language.  The goal is to ensure your readers provide you with clear, accurate answers, so write short, simple questions and keep your tone informal without cramming too many things into one question.

Here’s an example of a badly worded survey question:

“How would you rate the delivery time and packaging of your recent order?”

This is an example of a double-barrelled question.  By asking the customer to answer about both the delivery time and the packaging,  you can end up confusing the customer and forcing them to answer two questions in one.  This could lead to the customer answering inaccurately to one part of the question or not answering the question properly at all.

In this instance, we would split the question into two, for example;

“How would you rate the delivery time of your recent order?”
“How would you rate the packaging of your recent order?”

Options: Excellent | Good | Fair | Poor

Making your questions concise and to the point will give you the best response rate as it makes it easier for the customer to complete the survey accurately.

2. Use Words With Clear Meanings

Try to avoid using words and phrases which could be left to the user’s interpretation (or misinterpretation). You want to include phrases and words which are commonly understood.
For example words like numerous and several are too vague in their meaning and open to interpretation. You want to use words that are more commonly understood and provide more accurate information, such as almost all, a majority of or almost none provide customers with a more accurate, clear interpretation of the questions meaning.

Using common and simple phrases will ensure your customers can easily answer the questions without having to think too hard about the answer they are selecting.

3. Offer An “Out” for Questions That Don’t Apply

Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to or want to answer every question. Give the reader an ‘out’ option. This will minimise the chance of people leaving the survey before completing it. It will also remove the chances of getting incorrect data. However, if you’re certain the reader can answer every question you do not need to do this.

4. Expand On Your Answers

Where you can, change your ‘Yes/No’ and multiple choice questions to interval questions. Make a statement, and ask people to answer it on a 1-5 or, ‘Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree’. This will improve the quality of your results massively and give you more accurate information in return.

5. Make Sure Your Survey Works Across Devices

Almost everyone has multiple devices, mobile phones, tablets and laptops. Make sure your survey is compatible across all devices to ensure it’s easy to access for everyone.

6. Personalise Questions Based on Customer Responses

Using a process called “Branching” you can personalise your survey to guide customers into following a more suitable line of questions based on their previous answers. This allows you to capture more relevant/personalised data.

For example, you could ask the customer “How many children do you have?”. Depending on this response you could then direct the customer down a different line of questions. For instance if the customer has children, you could go onto ask parenting questions, if they don’t have children you could ask for the customers opinion on families and parenting.

Using branching allows you to receive more relevant information about your customers and again allowing you to send more personalised and relevant content to them allows for more accurate answers.

7. A Final Tip Before You Begin

Pre-testing will help identify unclear questions or badly-worded responses before you send your survey out to your readers, giving you a chance to improve your survey and its chances of generating accurate, actionable feedback.

Hopefully these tips will help you create a fantastic survey with great results! Using our system, Enabler, you can create integrated marketing campaigns, and use tools such as surveys to enhance your campaigns and strategy.

Imagine the situation: you’re trying to come up with a campaign to send birthday emails to customers on your database. Rather than just sending an email that says ‘Happy Birthday!’ you want to give them something more – something to remember your brand by. This experience is common to email marketers and it doesn’t just apply to birthday campaigns. Essentially, we’re all asking the same question, ‘what will engage my audience’. Sometimes just writing a message in an email isn’t enough; you need something more to keep them keen. So, what are your options?

1. Games and competitions

The appetite for games is huge at the moment. Using this sort of viral content in your emails can really help increase everything from open rates, click thru rates and email interaction, to brand awareness and overall engagement. It’s also an excellent opportunity to enrich your data. I’ve seen a few companies really nail this concept recently.

The first was Watergate Bay Hotel who ran a winter-themed Christmas campaign over 24 days in December. It was a competition to win prizes by ‘shaking’ a snow globe. The email communication was clean and engaging – you knew exactly what it was when you opened, the call to action was clear and it emphasised the benefits to the customer. Additionally, they were very clever about using the correct social links to promote the game. Often I’ve seen brands throw a load of social media links at the bottom of an email, with no actual consideration of why people would share their email on Tumblr. But Watergate Bay have deliberately picked the social media icons their subscribers are most likely to use; Facebook and Twitter. They’ve also attempted to make the game viral by including a ‘forward to a friend’ option – which incidentally is exactly how I came across this game!

Once you clicked through the email to their website, the engagement continued. Firstly, they used the game as a data capture opportunity. With any form of integration, make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity for enriching your data. The Watergate Bay campaign is a great example of this because they set their data capture form to open before you can play the game. This means that not only will they get returning business, they’ll also have a really strong 24 days for data acquisition.

Another great aspect of their data capture was its simplicity. The fields required were the basic first name, last name, postcode and email, plus they asked you to create a password so you could log in in the future. It took under a minute to fill out and there was no way I was exiting the page before playing the game. One mistake I’ve seen a lot of brands make is trying to capture too much data at once. Two pages of mandatory fields might seem like a great idea – for you, because you get all the data. For your users, having to complete so many fields is unappealing and increases the drop off rate on the page.

The actual game was great for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s interactive – you’re shaking a digital snow globe, the snow actually moves and it makes a jingly noise. Very pleasing. Secondly, they only gave you three attempts a day to win. Part of my concern with this game was that people would play it once, find it time consuming and not come back to play again. But the limit on shakes prevented this and I went back every day, shaking that snow globe. The altering daily prizes also ensured ongoing interest, with something different to win every day. The prizes were relevant to both their target audience and the local area, so they were likely to appeal to their customers – another good way to maintain attention.

Lastly, even if you didn’t win, you were given a discount code for their online store at the end of the game. This is great value-add from the game as the customer feels they’ve won something even if they haven’t actually won the main prize, and hey… there’s always tomorrow to shake again! It’s also a great device to drive people from the game and into the online store in a seamless transition: ‘ok people you’ve seen the show, now into the gift shop…’

Since customers were interested enough in the prizes to give their data, the discount code will almost certainly make them feel like Watergate Bay values their time and is rewarding them for their attentions. This is a great two-way interaction.

2. Survey and re-group

With any email marketing campaign, it’s important to find out what your customers want and what they thought of your engagement with them. One type of integration you can use to do this is a survey tool. Sainsbury’s do this really well. Every few months I get an email which encourages me to fill out a survey and receive Nectar points. It’s heavily personalised; it tells me how many Nectar points I have left and what that equates to in real money. The email tells me how long the survey takes to fill out and that I’m guaranteed the Nectar points on completion. This works well for Sainsbury’s, who are offering something tangible in exchange for your time. But what if you’re a brand who doesn’t have the mystical wonder that is Nectar points?

Alternative methods are to encourage people to complete a survey using competitions, games or by phrasing the content incentive in such a way that makes your customers realise the value of providing you with feedback. I’ve seen a few brands use surveys as a tool to further capture data from subscribers. They do this by initially presenting a first page of a survey which asks for first name, last name and email address (which they probably already have) and then after this warm-up, they slyly ask for a few more bits of information, for example gender, age, or postcode. Clever brands.

3. Polls

One brand I’ve seen sends out weekly funny polls for their users to complete and then uses the information to create a blog post encouraging users onto their website. This is a win-win for them, as they have found a way to produce user generated content, plus keep their customers engaged with their brand. They could then go on to use this content in future campaigns and articles.

When to integrate

Now you have the tools to integrate, you need to consider when and why you would use them in a campaign. One of the main mistakes brands make is trying to put too many of these things into an email. Your campaign needs to have a focused call to action, or it won’t be clear how you want users to interact with your emails. Here’s a handy check list to take a look at before you integrate:

  • Make sure you’re clear about what you’re trying to achieve – once you know this, picking your methods and tools will be easy.

  • Have a focal point to your campaign. If it’s a survey you want completed, make sure the call to action points to it.

  • Don’t overcrowd the email – keep your message clean, clear and clever. Putting too much information in the email can put users off.

  • Make sure your integrated content is interesting – seems simple, but often gets forgotten.

  • Always capture more data where you can, but put a limit on so you don’t turn your customers off.

  • Use the data once you’ve collected it. Don’t let it sit in your system twiddling its thumbs.

  • Make sure the user experience is a good one – try the journey out yourself, from receiving the email, right the way through to the follow up email.

Happy integrating!