To build a successful email list, you need to know what your subscribers are interested in. Where do you start?
Create a simple email survey. Armed with the answers, you can improve your content, products, and marketing strategy to serve subscribers better.
Dave from Typeform will share 7 tips with you. He is a freelance digital producer and strategist and looks after customer lifecycle email for Typeform.
The amount of time and effort subscribers are prepared to spend on your survey will depend on their existing engagement with your brand, and their interest in the topic.
The general rule is to keep surveys as short as you
Only ask questions you can act on, otherwise, you’re wasting their time, and yours.
As with any kind of email campaign, you’ll get higher click-through rates when you segment subscribers and tailor your copy. It’s the same story if you tailor your survey questions for each segment.
If you’re using Typeform, pass merge tags from your email list (like a segment name or signup source) with Hidden Fields and use Logic Jump to skip or display different questions. This will make your survey more relevant to each respondent.
Do you find it frustrating when someone asks you for details you’ve already given them? Since you’re linking to your survey from an email list, you already have some data about respondents that you can use for
Whatever you do, don’t ask for this information again – it’s annoying and unnecessary. If you’re going to collect personal data, use it to make people’s experience better, then watch your results improve like magic.
A survey is really just a way to ask people about themselves. You do this all the time in your day-to-day conversations, and it feels natural. Somehow that experience doesn’t carry over to most surveys, which is why they can seem cold and lifeless.
This is part of Typeform’s secret sauce: respondents are presented with one question at a time, so it feels more like a natural conversation. Write questions as if you were asking them at a cocktail party or customer meeting, making each one flow smoothly into the next. Read them out loud, and always remember: if a question would sound weird in a real life, it’ll sound weird on the internet too.
You don’t want the transition from email to survey to feel jarring.
Using a subscriber’s responses to produce content they’ll enjoy is the holy grail of email list surveys. They get more targeted and relevant emails, and you get happy readers. If you design your survey with personalization in mind, you’ll create better-performing emails that subscribers look forward to receiving.
Here’s how to set up a
Once the survey is submitted, your first job is done—but don’t stop there. Consider one of these options for your “thank you” page.
Hopefully, these ideas will help improve your email survey technique straight away. If you always put user experience first, good things will happen.
If you’d like help setting up any of the workflows outlined here, get in touch with Dave.