Bronto Blog

Including a survey in an email can be very valuable as it’s a great way to better understand your recipients. However, surveys can also be tricky. Forms, which are the basic components of a web survey, are often unreliable in email. In many common email clients forms aren’t visible or if they are visible they aren’t functional. Update -11/06: For those who asked, Forms don’t function in Hotmail,
Outlook 2007, and AOL among others - hence my aversion to using them directly in emails.

So how do you reconcile this issue? Well there’s an easy way to get direct responses without having to use forms. The answer is easy, you use it in every email already; any guesses?

The answer is links!

Because you are already tracking the links that are clicked on within your messages, you can easily see how many people have clicked through. Here is an example: Of course this limits the number of questions you can ask, but you can easily link to a separate survey outside of your email if you’d like to gather more info. Aside from an external survey you can link people to a simple thank you page, your home page, or better yet, a page that is tailored to the response they gave you.A lot can be gleaned from inserting a quick one-question survey into your emails. This method requires less incentives, since you’re asking much less from your recipient. Of course adding incentives into the mix will increase your response rates. Your response rate is also nearly guaranteed to increase as recipients are much more likely to answer 1-3 short questions than follow a link to a longer survey.

The best way to increase response rates, however, is to show that survey responses have an impact. There is nothing more disheartening for me than responding to a survey and then feeling that my responses weren’t “heard.” I’ve taken my time to give feedback and if my responses weren’t heard…well, it’s now very unlikely that I’ll give feedback again. So, be sure to ask actionable questions and incorporate the results immediately - whether means a change to the email format or just posting peoples’ favorite in the next mailing.

Update 11/7: Kevin asked for some examples found in the wild, here is one I dug up from my email archives. Tivo ran a poll this summer of which cartoons or comic books people would like to see next in the movie theater. The links all led to the same landing page, shown below. The results were given in the next month’s newsletter.

In case you are wondering, The Jetsons won for TV Shows and Wonder Woman took the Comic Books category.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto