Do you read all the emails that strike your inbox? Well, if you do, that's good but let's be honest, most people do not go through each and every email that they receive in their inbox. And the fact is that people have a tendency to ignore Customer Feedback survey emails. Even if they read the email, many of them do not respond or take the survey.

Customer Feedback - Why it is important?

Customer Feedback is an important piece of information received from the customers regarding their views, perceptions and their overall experience with an organization and Customer Survey is a method to obtain Customer Feedback by asking certain questions from the customers through different channels like email, SMS, kiosks, online and offline surveys.

The success of an organization depends on Customer Feedback to a large extent and for obtaining feedback, surveys are necessary and the success of a survey depends on the response rate of the survey.

In order to have a good response rate from the customers, it is necessary not only to create the surveys effectively which you can do through a good Customer Feedback Software; but it is also mandatory that the surveys are sent through right channels and in the right way following the best practices.

Sending Email Surveys

When we talk about sending surveys online, email survey is the most common and popular method of seeking the customers for their feedback. Email survey is a good way to reach numerous customers easily and asking them for Customer Feedback. But it can only prove to be useful for you when you present your email in an effective way and follow the best practices so that the customers realize the importance of your email and you get a good response rate.

Lets review how following these best practices can help you to maximize responses on your surveys.

1. Use an engaging subject line

Subject line is a very important part of an email. It is the first thing which a reader views when he receives an email. It would be fair to say that the reader's decision of opening the email majorly depends on the subject line.

You should use strategies to create an effective subject line. The subject line should be short and simple, easy to understand and must be written in an engaging way. To make it interesting and more engaging, you should add a question in your subject line so that the customer knows that this is something where he can give his feedback.

2. Embed the question if possible

Along with making the subject line engaging, you can also embed some basic survey questions in the email itself followed by a survey link to answer those questions. This is a very effective method to make your survey email more effective to maximize responses. This directly tells the customers what is in the link even before going to the link.

3. Send it post transaction or on a regular basis, but have a specific reason

You should always take care of the pattern in which you are sending a survey email to your customers. You can choose two ways for this. You can send survey email on regular basis like on monthly basis, quarterly basis or on annual basis. Following a well defined pattern will enhance the importance of the survey in the customers' views.

Secondly, you can send survey emails post transactions. For instance, you have a shopping retail store and the customers come and shop at your store. You can send a survey email post each billing by the customers asking about their shopping experience.

Whereas, if you keep on sending survey emails without any regular pattern or any transaction by the customer, this will only reduce the significance of the survey in the customers' perception. This can even lead to the customer marking your email ID as spam. So, avoid sending survey emails without any reason or a regular pattern.

4. Specify purpose and time for completion

When you send an email to seek the customers for feedback, it is important to specify the purpose of the survey. You should convey the importance of the survey to the customer by giving them confidence that their feedback matters to you and you will make your business decisions as per the Customers' Feedback which they will provide through the survey and this will be beneficial for them as well because you will work to improve their Customer Experience.

Moreover, you must specify an estimated time to complete the survey. You can simply write a one liner in the email like "Complete this 2 minutes survey" or a motivating line like "Giving just 3 minutes of your time to complete this survey will help us to serve your better".

This is a very good practice to make up the customers' mind to spend a small amount of specified time because if a survey takes more time to complete than a customer expects, it is a common tendency of the people to leave the survey in between which has a very bad impact on the response rate of the survey. Whereas, specifying an estimated time will encourage the customers to spend that small amount of time to provide feedback through the survey.

5. Don’t ask questions you already know

Questions are the core part of every survey and deciding what exactly to ask in the survey is an extremely important decision to be made which you must make wisely. Always try to create the survey in such a way that you ask minimum number of questions extracting maximum amount of feedback data from the customers. This will enable you to get real customer insights without consuming much of the precious time of your customers.

For this, strongly avoid asking those questions from your customers which you already know like - "Do you use online payment?" or "How frequently you visit our retail store?".

Moreover, avoid asking repetitive questions. For instance, you started the survey with the question "How was your experience today" and in the end you ask, "How was your overall experience?". This can irritate the customer and creates a bad impression of your brand.

6. Make sure your surveys are optimized for mobile

Nowadays, everybody is using mobile phones and smart phones enable you to do all the stuff for which you require a desktop or a laptop. Same is with the surveys. All the efficient Customer Feedback Survey tools have Customer Feedback App designed to be used on mobile because most people prefer to use their mobile phones for reading emails, and doing almost all that stuff for which they required a computer system once.

Therefore, always make sure that the surveys you create must be optimized to be taken through mobile phones without requiring any laptop or desktop to be used. This enables the customers to quickly take the survey whenever they get time.