One of the less used aspects of professional email marketing campaigns is customer surveys. They're very low cost, fast and are a proven way to gain valuable data about your subscribers and target market. We're going to review some of the best practices of email surveys.

How To Develop Email Newsletter Surveys
1. Listen to customer opinions on products and services
Many customers won't tell you the truth to your face or even over the phone because they don't want to be rude or be viewed as being too mean. However, you need the information that these people have in order to better your business. The best way to get accurate opinions about your product or service is with an anonymous email survey.

2. Find complimentary products that your customers want you to sell
This is helpful especially if you run an ecommerce store. Most popular ecommerce stores present complimentary products to customers either on the product level or inside the shopping cart. Brick and mortar stores do this too, except they use physical product placement and checkout merchandising to get your last minute impulse buys. Use a poll to figure out what products your customers are most likely to buy on impulse and implement the results in your stores.

3. Listen to how you can improve your sales process
Do you have salespeople? Do you use a sales funnel on your website? If so, one of the easiest ways to improve this process is by emailing customers a short survey asking them to rate you. Surveys are easy to implement and can often uncover hidden website errors or time consuming checkout processes that could be resulting in high abandonment rates.

4. Performance benchmarking
Many times, there doesn't even have to be a special reason for sending out an email survey besides gauging overall customer satisfaction over time. This can be a great benchmarking tool, and will allow you to literally quantify customer satisfaction. You can't improve what you can't measure, so measure your customer satisfaction with email surveys.

Tips for a Successful Email Survey
Generally, happy customers will be receptive to email surveys from time to time. However, you owe it to your subscribers to make sure you poll follows the following common best practices:

1. Keep it small
Nobody wants to spend 10 minutes filling out a survey. Honestly, even 3 minutes is too much time. If you make your poll too long then people won't respond to future requests later on. Respect your customer's time and make your email survey brief.

2. Don't lie about time
We've all taken the "5 to 10 minute" survey that actually took 15 minutes to fill out. Be honest about the amount of time your survey is going to take to fill out, otherwise you'll see an underwhelming response to future survey requests. Moreover, besides simply stating the amount of time it will take, make sure you let them know how many questions they're in for so that they can keep track as they move along.

3. Paragraph question
Obviously, the majority of your survey is going to be in the form of multiple choice or true and false questions. However, some customers might feel the need to expand on their answers in paragraph form, and you should most certainly accommodate this if you truly want actionable survey results. Make sure to include a box at the end of the survey that asks the subscriber if they have any other comments, and make sure it's optional too.

Email marketing campaigns are immensely important for many reasons, and surveys are definitely one of them. Utilize email polling from time to time and boost your business' success with actionable data and suggestions.