Best Practices for Surveying your Own Customers
Acquiring sample for online quantitative research projects is one of the most important aspects of ensuring you receive high quality, valid data. Depending on your goals for research, sample can come from a number of different places, including online sample, traditional research panels, social media, or even your own customer email lists. For the purpose of this blog post, we’ll be talking about best practices when it comes to using an email list to survey your customers.
Ensure the list is fresh and up-to-date
There’s nothing more frustrating than writing a quality survey, getting it programmed and emailed to your customer email list, only to be inundated with bounce-backs and email addresses that are no longer valid. Avoid this fate by regularly sending emails to your list and scrubbing it of bounce-backs or invalid addresses. From our experience, the completion rate of emailed surveys can range from 2% - 25%, and success is highly correlated with the quality of the list.
Have your team send heads-up email to your list
If your research company or a third-party is distributing the survey via email, we highly recommend first sending an email to the list telling the recipients to be on the lookout for the survey on a certain day.
Offer an incentive / reward
People respond to surveys for a number of reasons – loyalty to the brand/company or they want their voices to be heard. However one of the most tangible reasons is that they want to earn something for their time. Offering a quality incentive to everyone, or a sweepstakes for a larger item, are efficient ways to increase the completion rate of the surveys. Also, have flexibility with incentives. You can start out at a lower amount to see if that level drives engagement. If not, you can increase the incentive to see if that helps to increase completion rates.
Send enough reminders
Depending on the open / completion rates of your initial sends, you will probably need to send out reminder emails to help prod non-responders to answer the survey. We recommend sending up to three reminder emails, spaced two to three days apart. If the recipient hasn’t responded after receiving four emails, it’s likely they won’t respond at all.
Test out different subject lines
The subject line is the first thing the recipient will see when they receive the email survey invite. You want to make the subject line motivating to the recipient by clearly stating the goal. We’ve found that including the incentive also helps improve open rates. Especially when it comes to reminders, call out ‘Last Reminder’ or ‘Final Chance’ to help increase engagement.
Send the emails yourself
While it’s always nice to have someone else take care of survey distribution via email lists, it’s almost guaranteed there will be better open and completion rates if the brand/company that owns the email list actually sends it. Recipients are more inclined to open emails from companies they are familiar with, especially if they have already received emails from that company.
Sending surveys via your company’s own email list is a very efficient and cost-effective way to get feedback from your actual customers. But like all research, there are many pitfalls you will need to avoid to ensure quality data and good completion rates.
