You might think you’re doing a good job with your marketing campaigns or products, but your customers might feel differently. It might be especially challenging to figure out when your metrics look good.
You can never assume, and you’ll never know exactly what your customers are thinking unless you ask.
How do you ask for feedback in an email?
There are many methods you can use to gauge customer reaction, from mailed letters to phone calls. The most effective way to learn how well you’re really doing is to ask for feedback in an email. However, you need to make sure you do it correctly to get enough responses.
Explain why you are asking for feedback.
First things first, you need to tell your customers why you’re asking them for their opinions.
Source: Really Good Emails
This email from Unsplash is short and sweet and does a great job explaining why they’re asking for feedback. In this case, they want to learn what customers are interested in so they can prioritize new products based on needs.
Surveys are a great method to ask for feedback in an email.
Even after explaining why you’re asking for feedback, you still have several options for how to collect your customers’ responses. Surveys are probably the most popular and effective.
According to GetFeedback, your survey should be less than 10 questions or take less than five minutes to complete. If you optimize your survey correctly, you can expect to receive an average response rate of about 33%.
How to measure the success of an email asking for feedback
The main metric to measure in an email asking for feedback is the feedback itself. The more feedback you receive, the better informed you’ll be about how your customers truly feel.
You need to remember that the average email open rate is between 20-30%, so roughly 4 out of 5 people you send to won’t even see your email. If you notice your open rates are above average and you still aren’t receiving quality responses, consider changing your copy to be more relevant to your audience.
You could also benefit from offering some sort of incentive, like a promotional deal or gift cards, to entice your customers to respond.
Feedback email response rates increase by 30% if you offer an incentive.
Does it really matter?
Good brands know the importance of customer service and keeping their existing consumers happy. In fact, customer experience is expected to overtake price, products, and service as a key differentiator by 2020. To keep giving your customers the best possible service, you need to have a keen understanding of how they feel about your products and services and, more importantly, the areas you need to improve.
What now?
You should now have a basic idea of why asking for feedback from your customers is essential, as well as the best ways to implement it in your emails.
Your next step should be to consider using a feedback email template and develop a strategy to learn from this information. First, you need to think about what you want to ask and then determine the most effective way to collect your feedback. From there, you can make marketing decisions based on customer needs. Then, you need to make changes and adjust, based on what you learn.
While you’re at it, you might also want to use this feedback to create a specific marketing segment for unhappy customers to send them more personalized re-engagement and retention messages.