So many companies spend a huge amount of time researching the best ways to communicate with their customer, without actually asking the customer themselves! Are you guilty of this too? Email provides you with the ideal opportunity to communicate with your customer and to garner feedback from them about your company’s products, services and essentially the email programme itself. According to Google, more than 167 million surveys were conducted in 2007 and this volume is set to increase over 2010.
It’s really important to think about clever and interesting ways to incorporate the use of a survey within your communications, as old traditional models with long lists of questions simply won’t work. People are too busy nowadays, so it is important to keep your questions clear, concise and to the point. Rather than running one survey with a multitude of questions, why not think about running a series of shorter surveys over a period of a few months? Not only will this make it more attractive for the customer to complete, but it will also make it easier for your marketing teams when analysing the responses. A survey can be embedded within an email, or can be reached via a simple link within the email that will take the customer to a landing page. The option that you choose to use will be influenced by the amount of questions you wish to ask, as well as the responsiveness of your current database.
When designing a survey, it’s crucial to determine the end objective of the survey – is it product based; are you using it to find out what customers think of the products you have to offer? Or is it service based; do you want to find out how the customer views your offering in general, both online and offline? Alternatively you could be using the survey for competitor analysis; ask the customer which products they purchase from you, but at the same time list other products that you have to offer and find out if they are buying these from your competitors. Finally it could be centered around spending habits and frequencies; ask the customer what their average spend online is and depending on what you are promoting (apparel, homewares, electronics, cosmetics..) find out how often the customer makes these purchases and are they making them online. As previously mentioned, rather than include all the various scenarios in one email, think of them as being part of one campaign, but with the questions changing on a bi-monthly basis, where you are effectively promoting a series of different data capture pages to gain more of an insight into your customer base. This information can then be used to enhance your targeting and segmentation programs, as well as supporting the customer lifecycle model.
Finally, it is important to think about where you position the survey and what you can do to maximise the responses. Incorporating a survey as part of your transactional messaging is a really effective way to further engage an already engaged customer. Open rates are consistently high for transactional messages, as the customer has just been through the purchase cycle and will open the confirmation/dispatch emails following their purchase: see graph below for details.
Simply asking for feedback within the ‘thank you for placing your order’ message goes towards optimising the interaction with the customer. Alternatively you can consider effective incentivised models that can be used within the regular newsletter program. Allocate a content block within your creative with a clear call to action such as ‘we want to know more about you’ and incentivise this with vouchers, a competition, or free gift and you will see a significant volume of customers responding to this type of communication.
In summary, if you are not already using feedback surveys add them to your plans for 2010. Decide what the objective of the survey is, keep the questions and the length of them clear and concise and ensure you are providing the best experience possible to your customer, as this will improve the response rate and increase the likelihood of your customer wanting to take part in future surveys.
There are a lot of ‘groundhog day’ questions within the email world, none more so than “when’s best to send an email?” – day and time. There are of course a number of opinions and suggestions, mainly depending on whether your audience is B2B or B2C. For example, for a B2B audience, apparently Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the prime emailing days, based on the fact that people are recovering from the weekends on Mondays, winding down on Fridays and clearly out of the office on Saturdays and Sundays. Then you should obviously avoid sending on bank holidays, school holidays, Easter, over Christmas and New Year, and so on. For B2C email marketing, the advice is very different, as people tend to be checking personal emails in the evenings, on weekends or during their lunch breaks and of course over seasonal holidays if the offers are relevant. It really is a bit of a lottery and totally depends on the nature of your business.
Barney Willis
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