Email surveys are used primarily to take the temperature of your audience. By the information you get back, you can be clued in to issues as broad ranging as customer service to the quality of your goods and services – and in many cases, if you actually pay attention to the data you collect, you could get some great ideas on expanding your business. But sending a survey to your bulk email marketing list won’t always guarantee they’ll participate.
In order to get as many people to participate as possible, you’ll have to strike a delicate balance in the creation of your survey that eliminates the likelihood that your respondents will get bored and decide not do something better with their time. Although there are many effective ways to accomplish this – not asking too many open-ended questions, asking compelling questions that they’ll want to answer – no better way exists than to offer a reward.
You can do this in a variety of ways, but the one thing you should strive for is a reward that matches (if not exceeds) that investment of time the customer put in to answering your email survey. Try it out. Send a link to the survey in a bulk email marketing message and offer your customers a coupon for completing it. You might be surprised at the high number of responses you get.