Seven tips for writing great email surveys

Do you want to learn more about your audience and enhance the quality of your data? Surveys are a great tool to gather valuable insights and information, allowing you to collect enriched data in both a formal and informal fashion.. Capturing data from your customers allows you to really personalise your email campaigns, allowing you to  target your customers with more relevant marketing content. Ultimately,  this should improve your overall open rates and engagement level.

But beware, when it comes to email surveys there are some common mistakes that are easy to make…

Here are seven helpful pointers that will help you on your way to pulling off a great email survey.

1. Write Concise Questions To Get Accurate Answers

Make your questions easy to understand by being to the point and use simple, everyday language.  The goal is to ensure your readers provide you with clear, accurate answers, so write short, simple questions and keep your tone informal without cramming too many things into one question.

Here’s an example of a badly worded survey question:

“How would you rate the delivery time and packaging of your recent order?”

This is an example of a double-barrelled question.  By asking the customer to answer about both the delivery time and the packaging,  you can end up confusing the customer and forcing them to answer two questions in one.  This could lead to the customer answering inaccurately to one part of the question or not answering the question properly at all.

In this instance, we would split the question into two, for example;

“How would you rate the delivery time of your recent order?”
“How would you rate the packaging of your recent order?”

Options: Excellent | Good | Fair | Poor

Making your questions concise and to the point will give you the best response rate as it makes it easier for the customer to complete the survey accurately.

2. Use Words With Clear Meanings

Try to avoid using words and phrases which could be left to the user’s interpretation (or misinterpretation). You want to include phrases and words which are commonly understood.
For example words like numerous and several are too vague in their meaning and open to interpretation. You want to use words that are more commonly understood and provide more accurate information, such as almost all, a majority of or almost none provide customers with a more accurate, clear interpretation of the questions meaning.

Using common and simple phrases will ensure your customers can easily answer the questions without having to think too hard about the answer they are selecting.

3. Offer An “Out” for Questions That Don’t Apply

Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to or want to answer every question. Give the reader an ‘out’ option. This will minimise the chance of people leaving the survey before completing it. It will also remove the chances of getting incorrect data. However, if you’re certain the reader can answer every question you do not need to do this.

4. Expand On Your Answers

Where you can, change your ‘Yes/No’ and multiple choice questions to interval questions. Make a statement, and ask people to answer it on a 1-5 or, ‘Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree’. This will improve the quality of your results massively and give you more accurate information in return.

5. Make Sure Your Survey Works Across Devices

Almost everyone has multiple devices, mobile phones, tablets and laptops. Make sure your survey is compatible across all devices to ensure it’s easy to access for everyone.

6. Personalise Questions Based on Customer Responses

Using a process called “Branching” you can personalise your survey to guide customers into following a more suitable line of questions based on their previous answers. This allows you to capture more relevant/personalised data.

For example, you could ask the customer “How many children do you have?”. Depending on this response you could then direct the customer down a different line of questions. For instance if the customer has children, you could go onto ask parenting questions, if they don’t have children you could ask for the customers opinion on families and parenting.

Using branching allows you to receive more relevant information about your customers and again allowing you to send more personalised and relevant content to them allows for more accurate answers.

7. A Final Tip Before You Begin

Pre-testing will help identify unclear questions or badly-worded responses before you send your survey out to your readers, giving you a chance to improve your survey and its chances of generating accurate, actionable feedback.

Hopefully these tips will help you create a fantastic survey with great results! Using our system, Enabler, you can create integrated marketing campaigns, and use tools such as surveys to enhance your campaigns and strategy.