In an earlier post I mentioned that email marketing can be a very effective tool that can be adopted very easily. And I mentioned the different types of emails that you should be sending.
- Welcome
- Conversion
- Sales Growth
- Customer Retention
But there is another type of email that can prove to be extremely valuable to your long-term growth. It’s the email survey. You’d probably be surprised at the information you can gather from your customers by sending a simple survey. Of course you might have to offer some sort of incentive to get them to fill it out, let’s say… a coupon code or chance to win a product if they fill out the survey. The real beauty of an email survey is that you can really begin to understand who your customers are by asking questions that are tailored to your specific goals, and the information collected can be beneficial to offline marketing as well as online strategies. For example, I recently discovered that most visitors to one of my affiliate websites discovered it through search engines. You may think of this as no surprise but I actually thought most visitors discovered my site through offline ads and then performed the search on Google to actually visit the site, but those visitors turned out to be minimal. In response to this revelation I scaled back on the magazine advertising and increased the search and social media marketing.
The first step in getting started is to decide what information will be most useful to your business, but keep the survey short. Some people actually like to fill out surveys but most don’t so keep it to no more than five or six questions. Ask questions that will delve into your customers shopping habits, determine their satisfaction and help your business grow. But be careful not to insult anyone. Questions regarding age, occupation, income, specific family questions, and gender can be offensive to some people.
Examples
- How did you find our website? Search Engine, Blog or other website.
- If you did not purchase how soon do you intend to make a purchase?
- How soon do you intend to use our product?
- Have you used our product in the past?
- Do you recommend our products to friends?
- Are you male or female?
- Age bracket?
- Income bracket? (make the ranges wide so not to offend customers)
…and so on. You get the point.
Allow additional comments or suggestions.
A decent email program will give you the option to request additional information or suggestions through a text box. I say take total advantage of this feature and allow your customers to tell you exactly how they feel about your business. Using this feature could result in your most valuable information because customers will use it, and like it or not they will tell you exactly how they feel about your products or services. The response you get could confirm what you already suspected or enlighten you on issues you thought you had nailed down. You can then create action plans based on this feedback. If you’re doing a good job servicing your customers you will get mostly positive feedback although you can always expect a few negative comments.
Whatever you do, be sure to conduct the email survey in a professional manner. The email tools listed below are low cost hosted solutions great for getting started and they will allow you to send email surveys customized to you preference.
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