Email Survey

What is an Email Survey?

Email, to this day, stands tall as one of the most enduring and effective communication channels. It’s akin to a digital postman, delivering messages swiftly and efficiently with just the click of a button. All one needs is a reliable internet connection and an email address to begin this exchange. One of the powerful tools that utilize this channel is the email survey.

An email survey can be best described as a systematic method of gathering information by reaching out to a specified audience through their inboxes. At its core, it is a set of structured questions or prompts delivered directly to potential respondents via email. Its primary objective? To capture feedback, opinions, and insights.

For example, imagine an e-commerce company that has just introduced a new product. To gauge customer satisfaction, they send out an email survey to recent buyers. This survey, crafted with precision, includes questions about the product’s quality, functionality, and overall value. Customers can quickly rate their experience and provide feedback. Through this concise approach, the company not only values its customers’ opinions but also garners actionable insights to refine their offerings. Essentially, this acts as a direct channel for customer-driven improvement.

Steps to send your first email survey

If you’re curious about how to send a survey via email, you’re in luck

1. Sign Up/Log In: If you’re new to SurveySparrow, sign up for an account. If you’re an existing user, log in.
2. Create a New Survey: Navigate to the dashboard and select the “Create New” option. Choose the type of survey you want, such as a questionnaire or feedback form.
3. Design Your Survey: Use the drag-and-drop interface to add questions, customize question types, and design the survey to match your brand with themes, fonts, and colors.
4. Add Logic: If needed, implement skip logic or branching to ensure respondents see relevant questions based on their previous answers.
5. Test Your Survey: Before sending it out, send a test email to yourself or a colleague to check the flow and functionality of the survey.
6. Set Up Email Distribution: Navigate to the “Distribute” section and select the “Email” option. Enter or upload the email addresses of your recipients. Customize your email subject, content, and sender details.
7. Schedule or Send: Decide if you want to send your survey immediately or schedule it for a future date and time.
8. Monitor Responses: Once your survey is sent, you can track open rates, response rates, and view individual responses from the “Reports” section.
9. Analyze & Implement: Evaluate the feedback, identify trends, and take actionable steps based on the collected data.

While social media is still a great way to reach your customers, the open rates for an email are very high, making email surveys a viable and cost-effective means of collecting feedback.

In other words, the users who have subscribed to your email newsletter are much more inclined to fill a survey than someone who follows you on a social media platform. Thus despite the umpteen data collection tools, an email survey is one of the most result-oriented ways amongst those.

SurveySparrow as your Email Survey Platform

There are many online survey software available in the market today to fulfill your data collection needs. However, the best survey makers of them will have multiple survey share options, and an email survey is one of them.

SurveySparrow has an in-built module that’ll help you get data and feedback from a mass audience in one go. Here are some of the best features SurveySparrow offers as your email survey tool.

SurveySparrow as your email survey tool: It’s best features

White-labeling

Brand your email surveys and share them. Configure every aspect of your email, including the subject and body, and add the logo of your brand.

Personalize the survey by using contact params, which you can use with audience management. Share emails from a custom email address of your choice.

This builds trust with your customers—no hint of SurveySparrow. Maintain your brand’s identity.

Automate with Recurring feature

Automate your periodic email surveys using the recurring survey feature. Configure the time, day, and frequency of sharing the email surveys. Set it once and forget about it.

SurveySparrow’s email survey platform takes care of the rest. For instance, this comes in handy while measuring quarterly employee pulse and customer satisfaction.

Import contacts & manage audience

Import contacts easily to your email survey platform. The import can be using CSV, Excel, or any applications like Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Contacts, Intercom.

Create custom lists to group your audience, for instance, team-wise, and add Custom Fields for them. These Custome Field properties help you group contacts and filter responses.

Create engaging surveys

Create conversational email surveys that help you bring quality responses. Add personalization features like contact params, custom params, and question piping for higher user engagement.

Include logic branching like Skip Logic & Display Logic for posing only relevant questions and skipping the rest.

Embed the first survey question

Embed the first question of your survey to get higher response rates. The criteria for this feature is to set the first question of your email survey as the Opinion Scale Type.

This feature comes handy while sharing NPS surveys to your customers and measure employee engagement in your organization.

Share reminder emails

Configure and automate reminder emails for your respondents to increase the response rates. You can configure reminder emails for partial responders and non-responders.

Add the subject and email body the way you want, and decide the interval after which you wish to share the reminders: a day or two, or a week.

Schedule survey reports to your inbox.

Schedule the reports of your email survey to your inbox at any preferred time. You do not need to log in to your platform to check the reports and analyze the data.

SurveySparrow captures the data in real-time, helps you analyze with Advanced Reports Filters, cross-tabulate with the Compare feature, and exports data in PDF, Excel, and SPSS formats for offline analysis.

Best Email Survey Strategies

The more you understand about your objectives and the needs of the end consumer, the better you will be able to create the desired email survey.

Here are some strategies you would find extremely useful.

Email Survey Strategy #1: Know Your Audience

The first step in any marketing outreach campaign is to know your target audience. Without identifying the user persona, your marketing campaign will be akin to shooting a dart in the dark. Don’t spam.

Email Survey Strategy #2: Email Content

Once you identify your target audience, the next step is to determine the survey objective. Draft relevant questions based on the survey goal and keep it clean and crisp. Create personalized content and brand your emails to build trust with the audience.

Email Survey Strategy #3: Time to Share Email Surveys

You’ll notice that some days bring excellent open rates while some others, like a Friday, are dull. Round-in on the best date and, more importantly, the time of sharing the email.

Run a couple of tests, and then you’ll be able to trace a pattern and make it work. We’ve found Tuesdays to be ideal for sharing email surveys.

Email Survey Strategy #4: When to Send Surveys

Timing is essential when you send an email survey to your customers. Sending an email as soon as a customer interacts with you will elicit higher response rates than when you send the email survey at a later time.

Keep in mind to send it based on your customers’ preferences.

Email Survey Strategy #5: Offer Incentives

Offer your audience incentives that will make them spend those 2 minutes taking your email survey. Think of the entire process as an exercise in Marketing and therefore warranting a budget for it as well.

Offer a small discount to customers who finish the email survey. We’ve Rybbon Integration to incentivize your surveys easily. You can choose rewards from a wide range.

Email Survey Strategy #6: Clickbait Subject Lines

The decision to open an email has a lot to do with the subject. Therefore, prepare a catchy subject line that propels your audience to open the email and gets you high CTRs.

Subject lines like “Customer Satisfaction Survey,” “Please fill out this survey,” and “Spend 2 minutes to fill this survey” are a big ‘No-No.’ Here are a few that works like a charm:

Did you like the experience with us? Please take this survey

We would love to pick your brain

Here is a 20% offer on your next purchase with us if you fill this survey

Email Survey Strategy #7: Attractive Design

The multitude of emails arriving in an inbox every day means that you need to make your email survey as attractive as possible. The email survey you draft must instill a sense of curiosity in the end consumer.

This is when you get high open rates and survey completion rates. When you spend a considerable amount of time drafting the email content, it is only wise to invest a little more time in embellishing it with a great design.

Email Survey Strategy #8: Embed Questions

Being redirected to a website from their email inboxes might not be something that many customers would prefer.

Why not remove the problem by embedding the survey questions in the email survey you send?

It is not possible to include the entire survey within the email, but adding the first question or two can provide a higher click-through-rate.

Email Survey Strategy #9: The Unsubscribe Button

Although it might seem counterproductive, providing the unsubscribe button in the email survey gives a sense of freedom and flexibility to your audience.

In this manner, they can be sure that the company respects their wishes and privacy.

Email Survey Strategy #10: A/B Test Your Survey

You never know what your audience would love, so be open to trying out variations in building your survey and the entire approach for feedback collection.

A/B test your email surveys and round in on a strategy that has given you the best results. Don’t play out the traditional guess-games & gut-driven strategies and hoping they’ll pan out for good.

What are the benefits of Email Surveys?

Email services today come with a plethora of functions that make it a handy form of a communication channel. The ability to combine multiple types of content makes an email survey a handy data collection tool.

Let’s see why email survey supersedes the alternatives like telephone, in-person interviews, focus groups, postal mails, and so on.

Capture responses in real-time

The best email survey platforms come with a reporting module that captures the data in real-time and creates insightful reports instantly. You don’t have to spend time in cross-tabulating the data.

The platform breaks down the data into meaningful information.

Support multiple content formats

One of the most significant advantages of using an email survey is the ability to add multiple content formats. External clickable links, audios, images, call-to-action buttons; the list is endless, and so are the possibilities.

Make the surveys more entertaining and informative by educating the respondent about your products.

Easy on the pocket

The cost of conducting an email survey is meager compared to other methods. All that it requires is an account, an email service provider, and an active internet connection.

On the other hand, postal mails need spending on marketing collaterals; in-person interviews require substantial investment regarding both money & time and, phone calls burn a hole through your wallet!

Ease of use and execution speed

The simplicity and speed of email surveys are impressive. While postal surveys take ages to get a response in hand, these responses arrive as soon as the respondent hits the submit button.

Using an email is no rocket science, either. Couple the two, and you have a very proficient form of feedback collection right at your fingertip.

Where should you use Email Surveys?

Here are some of the popular use cases where you can employ email surveys.

Relational NPS Surveys: Sending NPS surveys quarterly or bi-annually to gauge how happy customers are with your product/services.

Transactional NPS Surveys: Share NPS surveys after purchase or interaction to measure support effectiveness.

Find Product-Market Fit: To understand the position of your product in the market.

Know your Customers: Study the market and learn how they use your product.

Improve User Engagement: Share personalized surveys to engage with users and build long-lasting relationships.