Email Marketing: Speak Softly and Use your Big Sticks Wisely

Surveys are a form of structured communication. In a sense they are a “marketing campaign” just the same as an outbound email designed to solicit a sale, acquire a new customer or re-engage a lost customer. Our “sale” is a completed survey, our currency or profit if you will is information.

With this in mind, if you are part of a larger marketing organization then you may want to coordinate your outbound communications with your colleagues who are tasked with engaging customers and prospects. This minimizes over use of your house files. Some organizations place business rules around the number of contacts or touches a customer or prospect can receive over a given period of time. These rules are present across industries and may have an impact upon you regardless of whether or not you are involved in consumer or B2B marketing research. If you are deriving consumer insights from panels that you manage then this becomes less of an issue.

When deploying an online survey, there are several types of communications at your disposal. Each touch should be clearly written and as engaging as possible following your organization’s guidelines for customer communications.

Your initial invitation is your first and best shot for inspiring prospects to take the plunge and complete your survey. Online survey tools, such as Cvent, allow you either set a time for release or launch your campaign manually. If your focus is B2B then best times to release your invitation vary, but Tuesday through Thursday are good options. Consumer researchers have more flexibility. It is strongly recommended that you test various release days and times to see if there is an impact to initial response rates.

Survey reminders are a separate communication are designed to gently nudge prospects. Limit these to no more than two, unless you wish to raise the ire of your prospects. I generally release my first reminder within two days of my initial invitation, with the second reminder coming a few days after. Again this is a good area for experimentation.

Other communication levers include messages aimed at partial responders. This message is designed to encourage responders to complete their survey and will direct them to the place where they left off. Lastly, the survey completion message offers a nice way to close the circle by thanking respondents for their time. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, “speak softly and use your big sticks wisely.”

Catch up on some survey email invitation and reminder tips from past articles:

1. Best Practices: Effective Emailing
2. 3 Keys to a Compelling Email Survey Invitation Subject Line
3. Send Personalized Survey Invitations: A Case Study
4. Body Copy for your Survey Invitation
5. 5 Email Marketing Tips To Increase Online Survey Responses
6. Tips For Writing An Email Survey Invitations
7. Personalizing the Survey Invitation
8. The Importance of Getting Personal in Survey Invitation
9. The Test Your Survey Invitation Must Pass
10. Best Practices for Email Marketing Design
11. Make Your Email Survey Invitation Stand Out
12. Survey Invitation Tip: Example Customer Market Research Email Invitation
13. Tips For Reminder Survey Invitations
14. Survey Invitations and Reminders
15. After the Invitation - Effective Email Marketing