Email surveys

Today, we’re talking about email surveys—a critical strategy to understand what your prospects and customers want.

The best part?

They’re super simple to set up.

Here’s how it works:

1. Set up the survey in Google Forms (or whichever tool you prefer)
2. Segment your prospects, customers, and churn (optional)
3. Email the survey

It’s that simple!

The feedback you receive is priceless because it comes directly from your prospects and customers. They are explicitly saying what you should do more of (and what you should avoid).

By the end of the lesson, you’ll know:

• The importance of segmenting your audience
• How to incentivize people to complete the survey
• The key questions to ask to get the best feedback

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Video:

Next steps:

1. Set up your survey

• Use Google Forms to set up your survey (or any tool you prefer)
• Add your questions (see the notes section for a list of questions)

2. Email your survey

• Use your email software to email your survey
• IMPORTANT: Send a test email to ensure everything is working properly!

3. Get responses

• The responses will come in gradually
• Check periodically to ensure the responses are coming in

We’ll show you how to analyze the responses in an upcoming lesson, so you can add it to your research document.

Stay tuned. 😊

Notes:

People send email surveys to better understand their audience.

The feedback helps them build better products, increase brand loyalty, and increase sales.

How it works:

1. Segment your prospects, customers, and churn.
   1. Prospects: people who haven’t purchased yet
   2. Customers: people who have purchased
   3. Churn: people who have purchased, but canceled
2. Email them:
   1. An incentive (e.g. a chance to win an Amazon gift card)
   2. A link to the survey (that will capture responses in a spreadsheet)

Questions to ask:

• Where did you first hear about us?
• Did you look at any other solutions? If so, which ones? And what made you choose us over them?
• What’s the one thing that almost stopped you from buying?
• What information is missing or would make your decision to buy easier?
• What is your biggest fear or concern about buying?
• What other products/services would you like to see us offer?
• What stopped you from continuing after your free trial?
• What are your 3 favorite things about our product?
• What are 3 things we should improve?
• What’s the one thing our product is missing?
• What’s the one feature we could add to make this invaluable to you?
• What is the main reason you’re canceling today?
• How satisfied are you with our support?
• What results have you seen with our product? What was life like before you started using it?
• Let’s play a game: you’re describing our solution to a friend. What would you say?

Comments:

Video transcript:

Introduction to Email Surveys

Email surveys. Now, chances are you’ve gotten emails like this. How did our customer service specialist do? Or this one. Got two minutes? Tell us about your recent experience for a chance to win a thousand dollar gift card. Or how about this one? How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, relative, or colleague? Or how about this one? Fill out this 10 minute survey to be eligible to win a 500 Amazon gift card.

So why do companies send all of these well to better understand their audience and they want to use those insights both from their prospects and their customers to build better products to increase their brand loyalty and ultimately help them increase their sales.

Email surveys are one of the most powerful ways that you can understand your audience and structure better products and services around them.

Here’s how the process works.

Segmenting Your Audience

First, you want to segment your prospects, your customers, and churn. Churn are people who have become a customer, but then ultimately cancelled.

Also, if you offer a free trial and people go through that process, but then they don’t sign up, you want to segment that as well. So you may have two segments, your prospects and your customers.

You may have three, your prospects, your customers, and people who have canceled, or you may also have four, your prospects, your customers, people who have canceled and people who sign up for a free trial, but never purchased.

By segmenting that data, it’s going to make it that much easier for you to understand these different groups.

Why some of them decided to buy, why some of them didn’t decide to buy and why some bought, but then ultimately canceled.

Creating an Effective Incentive

Once you have your segments in place, you can then send them an email with an incentive, for example, a 25 Amazon gift card, not your own product. You might be wondering, well, why, why wouldn’t I just offer my own product? Remember, these are people that you want honest feedback about your product or your service. And. And if somebody has already said they didn’t want your product, they’re not going to be interested in filling out a survey to get more of your product.

So you’re not going to be able to target those customers that have already canceled or those people that decided not to buy.

Secondly, it’s also a way to introduce some bias. If you’re giving somebody a product for free, then they’re already starting to value it a bit more and they’re going to be less likely to give you the honest truth.

And this is super important because you want that brutal honesty, the type that brings a tear to your eyes. So make sure that the incentive is something different and it could be a gift card or any other type of product that isn’t related to yours.

You’ll also want to include a link to the survey. And that’s going to capture the responses into a spreadsheet.

Designing Your Survey

To create the survey, you can use whatever tool you want. Here’s an example of one in Google Forms. But if you prefer to use something like Typeform or even Airtable, you certainly can. Whatever works for you.

So how does an email survey work?

Here’s some common questions that we had over the years when we were consultants.

Common Questions about Email Surveys

How many responses do I need?

Well, ideally you would have two to three hundred responses, but even if you have like five responses, that’s still going to be incredibly valuable feedback. But I would set the ceiling at 300. Once you get over 300 responses, it’s basically diminishing returns. You’ve learned everything that you can. So if you have a huge database, just aim for 300 responses.

You may also be wondering, should I require a name and email for these responses? That’s entirely up to you. If you wanted to follow up with people directly based on their feedback, then by all means, ask for the email address. Or if you prefer to keep it anonymous, you can do that too.

Of course, remember that in this case, if you are getting the name and the email address, you’re getting people’s personal info. So you want to be very careful what you do with that.

Another one is how many questions can I ask? We’d suggest anywhere from 10 to 15 questions. That’s enough to that people can get through it, but it’s also gives you a wide variety of questions that you can ask.

Here are a bunch of questions that can help you in your email survey. You don’t have to include them all in your survey. In fact, we’d recommend not doing that, but some of them will be much more relevant to you based on your, but some of them will be much more relevant to you based on your offer.

Suggested Questions to Include in Your Survey

Some great questions to ask include:

Where did you first hear about us?

Did you look at any other solutions? If so, which ones, and what made you choose us over them?

What’s the one thing that almost stopped you from buying?

What information is missing or would make your decision to buy easier?

What’s your biggest fear or concern about buying? What other products or services would you like to see us offer, which is a great way to start building new products and services to increase your lifetime value.

What stopped you from continuing after your free trial? This is a great way for you to target people who signed up but ultimately didn’t buy.

And I hope you can see now why we would want to segment the surveys by prospects, customers, people on free trials, and people who ultimately canceled. You can start to ask questions like this to really understand each pain point along the way.

You also want to ask:

What are your three favorite things about our product or service?

What are three things that we should improve?

What’s the one thing that our product is missing? Or what’s the one feature we could add to make this invaluable to you?

What’s the main reason that you’re canceling today?

And how satisfied are you with our support?

What results have you seen with our products?

What was life like before you started? And what was it like afterwards? And lastly, let’s play a game. You’re describing our solution to a friend. What would you say? Now, this is a dynamite one because it tells you the entire thought process that somebody has. These people are basically acting like your sales people, your sales team.

Now what you can do with these last two questions is you can turn them into testimonials and put them onto your site. Which is a good reason to ask for people’s names and email. You can follow up and ask them if they’re okay with you presenting this information.

Implementing and Analyzing Your Email Survey

So to quickly recap, the way an email survey works is you want to agree on what segments you’re going to survey. Again, we’ve covered four of them. Depending on your business, you may only have one or two, but those are prospects, customers, people who purchased and then canceled and people who signed up for a free trial, but never paid.

Once you have your segments in place, you want to agree on an incentive that you could send to each of them.

Once you’ve chosen your incentive, you can then send an email out to these various segments asking them to take the survey and that they would be entered into a drawing where a winner would be chosen. That’s a key thing to point out here, that the incentive that you’ve agreed on, you only have to pick a winner for that incentive.

So if it’s a $100 Amazon gift card, only one winner would get that. So you’d only have to spend $100 on the gift card. You don’t have to give everybody 100 for filling out the survey.

The email survey goes out, and then usually it takes about a week for all of those people to get the email, click the email, and then go ahead and enter their information. After that week is over, you can go ahead and send out the incentive to the winner, which you can just choose at random.

After this week, you’re going to have a ton of information from those survey responses, and we’re going to show you how to analyze all of that in an upcoming lesson, so you can add it to your research document.

But for now, just think about the segments that you have, think about the questions you want to ask them and think about the incentive that you want to offer.

You can put all of that together, send out the email with a link to the survey so people can fill it out. And then once you’ve sent that email, you can watch the results start to come in.