Email Invite Critique: Boost Response Rates with Email Marketing Know-How

Yesterday, we ran across a very interesting and valuable blog for anyone conducting surveys with email invitations.

It was written by Alex Leverington, a consumer aghast at the bad email practices he’s found recently in several survey invitations. His blog post provides an insight into the mind of the folks receiving your emails and answering your surveys.

The post, called Survey, DNS, and Your Branding (he’s a web developer – don’t let the title scare you), describes his reaction and thoughts. In particular he notes three large problems that anyone sending B2C email should be aware of:

1. With the exception of two, he did not opt-in to receive the survey invitations
2. None of the surveys were sent from an email address he recognized
3. None of the email messages had links to a domain he recognized (or at least that he recognized as related to the brand)

These three key points will affect your click-through rate (and thus your survey completion rate) significantly. For anyone who works in email marketing you’ll likely note that these have been well discussed issues in the industry for the the last 5 years.

However, these ideas may be new to researchers. So, let’s look at these issues one-by-one and address how to solve them.

Issue #1: Did not opt-in to receive the survey invitations

What’s interesting here is the person sending the invite likely had “permission” to email him according to organizational policy. After all, it’s not spam if you have an established business relationship. Right?

No! Legal, perhaps, but spam is about perception more than law. As you can see from Alex’s reaction the perception on the receiving end is what really matters. If your respondents are expecting the survey, then your click through (and take rate) will increase. You’ll also annoy fewer of your valued customers.

At the very least if you can’t do a true opt-in, then send a warm-up email. We’ve seen this technique work very well. In the email, explain why you need the feedback, and what reward (if any) will be offered. Do this 1-3 days before the survey and give your customers a chance to opt-out at that time.

SurveyGizmo Users:
You can do this through our email invite tool, or through our integrated email service providers.

Issue #2: None of the surveys were sent from an email address he recognized

This one is a little silly, and likely a technical limitation when they sent the email invitation. If your email invitation tool does not let you at the very least set the email From Name — don’t use it.

Studies show that a person’s in-box is perceived as a very personal possession — unwanted email from unknown addresses are perceived as a violation of the person’s personal space. This is not the feeling that you want to instill while asking for unbiased feedback in a survey!

SurveyGizmo Users:
You can set the From Name and Address to whatever you want. By default, your From address and name is set to the account user. If you are going to change this for an email invite, please do so carefully and with an eye towards receiver perception.

Email Deliverability Note:
Our email invite tool sends emails on your behalf. We maintain good deliverability — however for the best results please have your IT department add our SPF include (include:sgizmo.com) to your SPF record. Otherwise the receiving mail servers may give this email a higher spam score. Luckily, this is a one time, very quick setup — copy & paste in fact.

Issue #3: None of the email messages had links to a domain he recognized

So, another technology issue. Most other survey software tools don’t allow you to use your own website ‘domain’ (acme.com for example) as the survey link. For maximum trust in your email message this is vital and we HIGHLY recommend it. Which is why we made it part of our software.

Survey links to customers should be short and relevant to your brand. In some cases that’s not ideal, like when you are doing unbiased market analysis you would want to use an anonymous link. However, if you are surveying your customers for goodness sake — use a web address they recognize and trust.

SurveyGizmo Users:
This is the reason we found Alex’s blog. He mentions we are the only vendor that he could find that does this. We allow Enterprise customers to setup a domain of your website and point it to our service. From then on, all your survey links will use that private domain. This can be a full domain (acme.com) or a sub-domain of your existing website (surveys.acme.com).

If you don’t have an Enterprise account, at the Pro level we offer another solution. Branded sub-domains (http://acmeco.feedbacksurvey.sgizmo.com). These are almost as good and require no IT department to setup. Just go to your account page in SurveyGizmo and reserve your brand name. It then becomes a publishing option for your surveys.

Another Issue: Branding

The one other issue he mentioned was branding. Which although not an email invitation issue, it’s very important when you are surveying your customers. It builds trust and increases engagement due to the psychological implication they are having a more personal conversation with the brand/company.

SurveyGizmo Users:
We encourage all our customers to spend some time creating a brand-specific HTML/CSS theme for their surveys (one theme can be applied over and over).

Using our survey tool you can make your surveys appear identical to your own website and brand (or just embed your surveys inside your website directly). Version 2 will introduce a new theme design tool that doesn’t require any HTML or CSS knowledge (WYSISYG). In the mean time, if you need help please contact us. Our Professional Services staff can help.

Conclusion

The way you invite your customers to take surveys has a direct impact on their mindset at the start of a survey. They receive lots of surveys over the course of a year and will compare them to each other. This impacts not only responses but also the perception of your brand. Make sure to use your survey tool to its fullest ability and your customer’s perception will improve as will your response rates.

If you are looking for more information about click-thru rates, subject line crafting, and email marketing best practices I suggest these sites:

• MarketingSherpa
• MarketingProfs

Best of luck in all your research!

-Christian

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