Many online businesses collect email addresses for future marketing campaigns, but beyond promoting new products and services, they aren’t certain what to do with the email list. Email satisfaction surveys are one way to maximize the return on an email list, and can be used effectively to give your customers a voice.

Why Do I Need to Send Email Surveys?

Email surveys can serve a variety of purposes. They can be used to provide a solution to a customer’s problem, and your follow-up emails will always contain this solution.

For example, perhaps you’re sending out a survey about a business’s problems with online marketing. You can ask them questions about whether they have time to market, which methods they use (social media, advertising, print advertising), and how often they do it. Chances are that once you receive responses back that you’ll see how you can assist them with their marketing practices.

How Does an Email Survey Work?

You first begin by composing an engaging email survey. It shouldn’t ask for so many personal details that the receiver will be cautious, and should also say that it’ll only take a minute to complete.

You then need to not only have the email delivered to your recipients, but to have it appear in their IN folder, and not their SPAM folder. You then need them to be interested enough to open up the email survey without immediately trashing it. Finally, you need your customers to actually feel compelled to immediately do the survey.

How Can I Get People to Respond to a Survey?

Once you’ve reached the hurdle of the email survey getting past the spam folder, and the customer has opened it up, you need to entice them to complete it. This means that you need the copy of your email to convert. The body text of your email has three purposes here: One is that it needs to be read by the customer, and the second is that it needs to convince the customer to click on the survey link. The third is that the customer must be convinced to complete the survey. There could also be a fourth purpose, and that is to have the customer complete the survey to the end.

You must pay attention to each step in this funnel. You’ll need to write a subject line that will get your email survey message opened.

Personalization is important in order to capture the attention of the receiver, as well as a captivating subject line that is non-spammy. Keep it short, clear, and succinct. Phrases that include Thank You, Announcement, or Invitation tend to do better. Urgent and Important is extremely overused by spammers, so think up something unique.

Be sure to include info in the FROM line too. Include your first and last name, and a company name. Don’t leave this field with ambiguous senders.

Finally, test it, and test it again. If you don’t succeed the first time you can always craft a better email survey the next time round. Make note of your successes and do those techniques again. The goal here is to maximize the return on email surveys, which will eventually give you the information you need to serve your customers.