The ultimate source of information about your customers is from your customers…

Surprised?

We’ve heard every excuse why businesses do not survey customers ranging from:

• We don’t know what to ask them (have a real good think)
• We don’t want to bother them (you have bigger problems than insight)
• They won’t like it (even if it makes the service better?)
• They never complete surveys (because you don’t provide value or make it worth their while)
• What’s the point? (Get back to Farmville, I can hear your pigs squealing)

Knowing more about your customers helps you understand their biggest issues, pains and problems. Knowing this you can create magnetic value for them by listening and providing common sense content back to them.

Surveys help us to know more, easily created using BrandMail’s email marketing software. This gathers more information over time and not all at once.

7 Secrets to Email Marketing Surveys

1. What’s in it for them? We know this is for you, but why should they do this? Get clear on the value for them. It’s all they are interested in.
2. Be clear on its purpose. Are you getting what you want to know? Don’t gather information you’re not going to action.
3. Keep it simple and short. The higher the prize the more questions you can ask. Is it easy to understand the questions? No buzz words, cultural cliches or complex questions. The confused mind says “No”!
4. Keep demographics last. Less crucial information should be kept at the end otherwise they’ll lose interest.
5. Be specific. Open ended questions make it difficult to normalise the data, so keep it to yes/no or multiple choice.
6. Do a test. Always test it internally or with friendly clients or contacts. Get any embarrassing mistakes out of your content and email marketing software in house first before you release it to your customers.
7. Entice and remind. Do they have a good reason to complete it or are you just asking for a favour? Set a deadline and remind them.

If you follow the above, you’ll get a better result especially if you can record the results against a customers profile. Uncovering what they love, is almost as important as why they love it.

Using your email marketing software build the forms and promotes the survey by email marketing or sms marketing, that could go something like this:

• Promote the survey, pitch the value for them
• Re-promote if they haven’t opened within 2 days (automated in BrandMail)
• Re-promote if opened, but not clicked within 2 days (automated in BrandMail)
• Thank you email, deliver value
• Ask for more information “we were interested in your answer, could you expand on xxx, just reply to this email”

If you want to get really tricky with this, you can send specific follow ups based on the answers provided. But let’s keep the slick automation stuff for another time!

The most direct and straight forward way to generate profit from a campaign like this is to call your customers and work the opportunity it gives your business to make contact.

Take BrandMail for a test drive today and see why Australia loves our email marketing software.