How to ask someone to take a survey via email

Surveys can be valuable additions to your marketing campaigns, and surveying your audience can help you better tailor your social media and email marketing so it’s more effective. When you survey existing customers, you can also gather important information about customer satisfaction and the customer experience your business provides.

While there are many ways to share surveys with your audience, one of the best options is to contact them through email. This type of request takes some perfecting, but when you do it well, email requests can increase your survey response rates and help you to gather important information from your respondents.

When you send someone a survey request through email, it’s important to carefully plan out every step of the process to maximize your response rates. Here are some tips to set you up for success.

Start with segmentation

It might seem easiest to send one broad survey and email message to your entire email database, but this approach risks alienating most of your audience with a message that doesn’t apply to them. Instead, take the time to segment your email lists so you can reach your audience with customized, tailored messaging that they’ll engage with.

Email list segmentation is valuable for any marketing campaign, and once you’ve segmented your lists, you can easily tailor your emails for each recipient group.

Perfect your messaging

Whether you’re looking for customer feedback or other input, it’s important to create clear, concise messaging. That starts with your subject line.

When writing subject lines, you’ll need to quickly identify the purpose of the email and give your audience a reason to open it. If you’re offering a discount or entry into a contest in exchange for completing the survey, that can be a compelling bit of information to include in your subject line.

You’ll also need to write email copy that’s brief and to the point, yet also engaging. Make sure that it’s clear why you’re asking the recipients to complete the survey, and make it easy for them to access it.

You can use A/B testing to evaluate your email subject lines and email body copy. Test these elements of your survey invitation email and then rework the copy to improve the email’s performance and open rates.

Make the survey easily accessible

The easier it is for respondents to access the survey, the greater the chances they’ll take the time to complete it. You might decide to embed the survey in the email or provide a survey link.

If you’re including a link to the survey, consider embedding a large, eye-catching button that will take recipients directly to it.

Keep the survey brief and simple

How you design your survey can also affect how many recipients complete it. Carefully think about the survey questions that you include, and select question types that are quick and easy to complete, like multiple choice questions. Providing a short survey that takes just a few minutes to complete can encourage recipients to answer all of the questions, rather than abandoning the survey after the first question or two.

Provide incentives

Providing an incentive is another way to encourage your audience to complete your online survey. Consider offering a discount, access to special gated content, entry into a contest, or some other reward. Highlight the incentive early on in your email text, and make sure that you provide clear information about how respondents will receive the incentive.

Use Jotform to streamline the process

With Jotform, you can assign forms to make the process of sharing surveys easier and allow for improved tracking. With this feature, you can share a link to the form or send an email inviting people to fill it out. You can choose to send a single email to an individual address or upload a CSV list of contacts to send the survey to many people at once.

Jotform’s assign feature gives you excellent control over the form submission process. You can set an expiration date and time for each form, and you can require assignees to sign in using an email address and password so your form is protected against unwanted access and submissions. It’s even possible to restrict access to the form to your company’s email domain, so only your employees will be able to access it.

Assignees can save their submissions as drafts and then return to them later, and they can access their form submissions in their Jotform account under Assigned Forms.

It’s also possible to set up email reminders for any assignees who haven’t completed the survey yet. Once people complete the survey, you’ll be able to track those submissions easily in Jotform Tables.

Successfully asking your contacts to take a survey via email requires planning and attention to detail, but it’s a valuable way to connect with your leads or customers. With tools like Jotform, you can make the most of every emailed survey — and you may learn important information about customer satisfaction, your product pricing, and more as a result.