Providing your customers with the best experience possible is the key to success. However, this requires absolute knowledge of what the customers in your target markets and industry are looking for.
One of the best ways to find out this information for yourself is to distribute email marketing surveys, which allow your customers to provide you with vital feedback about your email survey, your business, your website, or anything else for that matter.
However, as Dr Lanning once said in the 2004 blockbuster “I, Robot,” “You must ask the right questions.” So today, we’re going to find out how to do just that.
How To Improve Your Email Marketing Surveys
Keep Your Language Simple
My first tip is rather self-explanatory. When you’re writing your survey questions, you want to minimize the risk of misunderstanding. Otherwise, it will affect your results. Keep the language simple, so everybody understands it, and you’ll get truthful actionable results.
Keep Your Questions Direct
Firstly, nobody is going to answer a survey out of choice if each question is several sentences long. Additionally, you’re not going to want long, complicated questions since you’ll receive long, complicated answers. Keep to one point per question.
Keep Your Questions Balanced
If you’re writing biased questions, you’re going to affect the outcome of the answers, and you’ll have false results. Let’s say you’re a blog that posts a lot of content on the subject of online businesses and how to improve.
In this example, stating “Would you like to see more eCommerce content?” is an average question and unless you’re carrying out a content-based survey, you won’t get any actionable answers. Instead, this can be balanced by saying “What kind of content would you like to see more of?” and then allow the reader to write or select from a list.
Refine Your Options
Hand in hand with the consideration above, you also need to be aware of how to limit the options that you’re providing your customers. If you have 10 options per question and you have ten people select one each, you’re no better off than where you started.
“As a rule of thumb, if you’re going to include a box in your survey where the user can type their responses, leave at the end for further comments. The rest of the survey should have a selection of answers to choose from” – explains Hector Gibson, an Email Marketer at Australian Help and Huffington Post contributor.
Evade Obfuscation
When you’re writing your questions, make sure to include context in the question. For example, saying something like “How is our business’s delivery service?” is too vague for an answer. Are you talking about their experience, the whole delivery service your business runs, the delivery times, the service provided or anything in between?
Include a Wrap-Up Question
Briefly mentioned above, at the end of your survey it’s important to include a wrap-up question and a section for your participants to leave feedback of their own or provide extra comments. Melody Williams, a PR Manager at Bigassignments comments: “This can help you see what your customers and website users really think of your website and your overall experience.”
Of course, if you find any common comments throughout your survey, these are things that are going to need to be addressed. Additionally, after the end of your survey, be sure to thank your respondents for taking part in the survey.
How to Improve Your Survey
One question that a lot of businesses leave out of their email surveys is how to improve your survey next time you carry it out. “If you’ve written your survey and the questions, layout, or overall formatting is something that many participants can’t use properly, this is their chance to let you know so you can do it better next time,” says Stuart Mitchell, a Customer Support Manager at Assignment Help.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many things you can and use to make sure your upcoming email surveys are perfect. Be sure to invest a suitable amount of time creating and testing your survey, and you can ensure that you’ll get the most actionable results.
Gloria Kopp is a recruiting consultant at Paper Fellows. She is a writer and editor at Revieweal writing blog for students and writers. Gloria is an expert contributor at Microsoft, Engadget and Essayroo.
